LA PREMIÈRE PÉRIODE DE MA PEINTURE C'EST L'AMOUR...: MAURICE DENIS

Opening Thursday, September 10th, 6PM | 8:30PM

« The first period of my painting is love… ». This statement by Maurice Denis serves as the guiding principle of the exhibition that Pavec gallery is dedicating him from September 11 to November 14, 2026, marking the gallery’s first monographic exhibition devoted to the artist.

The result of several months of research conducted in close collaboration with members of Maurice Denis’s family and leading specialists of his work, this exhibition opens a new chapter in the gallery’s scholarly programming. Continuing the research it has pursued for several years on women artists of modernity, the gallery now intends to apply the same level of scholarly rigor to major figures in art history. For the history of art is renewed not only through the rediscovery of artists who have long been overlooked; it is also enriched through a fresh reading of works that were once considered among the most familiar. Through coherent or previously unpublished bodies of work, neglected periods, or little-explored questions, each exhibition thus seeks to deepen our understanding of the major figures of modernity.

Bringing together works created between 1892 and 1915, the exhibition focuses on an exceptionally coherent body of work devoted to the artist’s domestic sphere: Marthe Meurier, his wife, their children, gardens, interiors, and scenes from everyday life. Far from being a mere collection of intimate scenes, this ensemble reveals a deeply modern Maurice Denis, developing a pictorial universe in which the domestic sphere became both the laboratory and the subject of his art.

Around this founding principle of love, Maurice Denis gradually constructs a true cosmology, governed by its own formal balances, where color, the rhythm of shapes, and the organization of the surface take precedence over the mere description of reality. The home thus becomes a space of continuous pictorial experimentation, where lived experience is transformed into a visual language. Behind the apparent gentleness of these domestic scenes lies a conception of painting in which everyday life ceases to be a simple subject and becomes the very substance of a reflection on painting itself.

The exhibition thus offers a new perspective on Maurice Denis, for whom love is not merely a theme, but the organizing principle of an oeuvre that stands among the most distinctive contributions to French modernity.