UN COUP DE PEIGNE ASTRAL: ETIENNE BERTRAND WEILL

  • “Étienne Bertrand Weill invents “abstract” images by making mobiles and putting them into motion in front of his camera, resulting in beautiful imaginary volumes, with bodies of light and skins of shadow.”

    Jean-Claude Lemagny 

    Historian of photography
  • On the occasion of the Month of Photography 2022, and in collaboration with the Estate of Etienne Bertrand Weill, Galerie Maria Wettergren is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition of Etienne Bertrand Weill’s work, featuring over twenty original silver gelatin and cibachrome prints from the 1960s and 1970s.
    ‘Sculpting light’ [Sculpter la lumière] is the title behind E. B. Weill’s project, who in the 1950s began his kinetic work based on light in motion. Inventor of his own tools and creative processes conceived specifically to produce these families of images, it was in around 1957 that he began to build mobiles made from simple materials (wood, glass, Plexiglas, wire...) that he then subjected to light and various movements. E. B. Weill imagined an art where the film would not have “even enough time to seize the contours of the object. What remains of the object’s form is a new transient appearance”. This momentary appearance, he would name “Metaform” [Métaforme].
    In a dedicatory poem written in 1963 entitled “ Un commerce de lumières forgées avec le surnaturel ” (A Trade of Forged Lights with the Supernatural), Jean Arp echoes his admiration for E. B. Weill’s “Metaforms”, which he likened to “an astral combing... ropes of stars... from real stars to dreamy companions... hourglass wonders... vibrations and waves of flowers.” A book project is later born in 1964, imagined as a ‘naked’ dialogue between Arp’s poem and 12 of E. B. Weill’s “Metaforms”. It would nevertheless remain in the state of a preprint model. Galerie Maria Wettergren is delighted to publish, for the first time, a limited edition of this unseen art book, based on the original model. The publication is scheduled for the start of 2023.
     
  • Artworks

  • About the artist

    Estelle Yomeda, trained in art history and with a degree in visual arts, is a French-Togolese designer and artist based in Paris, France. Yomeda began her career in the Studio Chaussure of Yves Saint-Laurent after studying visual arts at the University of Strasbourg, and artistic crafts within from the Costume Workshops of the Opéra du Rhin. Afropean, Yomeda takes a transversal and generous look at design and freely combines multicultural traditions and innovations, materials and colors.

     

    Estelle Yomeda materialized her first collection of furniture in 2021, inspired by Togolese craftsmanship and the long tradition of French decorative arts.

     

    Estelle Yomeda will take part in the group exhibition Design in West Africa-Unity in Multiplicity at the Palais de Lomé in Togo, running from November 28 2025 through March 2026.
  • E. B. Weill’s pioneering work remains avant-garde even today. The 2012 retrospective at the BnF, Vertige du Corps, testifies to...
    E. B. Weill’s pioneering work remains avant-garde even today. The 2012 retrospective at the BnF, Vertige du Corps, testifies to this and was preceded by a large number of solo and group exhibitions, as well as screenings of “ Music for the Eyes.” E. B. Weill’s work can be found in private collections and museums in France including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée Reattu, Arles; and the BnF, Paris. His works can equally be found in collections in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel.

  • Exhibition catalogue

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