Vence Museum has an extensive first exhibition on the work of Franta, painter and sculptor of the human condition, who has lived and worked in the town for almost 50 years.
“Observing people is central to my work,” states František Mertl, known as Franta, who, having been born in Czechoslovakia in 1930, experienced the upheavals of the Second World War then the Communist dictatorship. After studying at Prague’s School of Decorative Arts and
Academy of Fine Arts, he fled his country for France, where he married Jacqueline and together
they settled in Vence in 1958. The exhibition at Vence Museum until 21 May spotlights the creative freedom of an artist initially tagged an expressionist neorealist. An initiation through some 50 drawings, paintings and sculptures displayed in the Château de Villeneuve galleries.
Rebellion and joie de vivre
Over the 1960s-70s Franta portrayed human beings losing substance in a mechanised world terrifying in its precision. Then travels in Black Africa marked a turning point in his oeuvre, his contact with the Masai engendering a celebration of the intense relationship between nature and land, albeit imbued with a latent disquiet. “I then went to the United States, where the Africans who had been torn from their continent were transplanted into another world,” explains the artist, who worked in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn, confronting the reality there with that of his previous period. And today: “I’m still trying to understand human beings, for I continue to have difficulties with them, especially in the context of today’s violence.” The exhibition features one of his most recent large canvases, on the theme of flight and migration.
« Franta : Le Temps d’une œuvre »To 21 May
Musée de Vence-Fondation
Émile Hugues, place du Frêne – Tél. 04 93 58 15 78
21 March to 21 May :
Chapelle des Pénitents-Blancs
place Frédéric Mistral – Tél. 09 77 72 85 19
www.vence.fr
Côteweb 2021, création de site Internet sur Nice