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“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
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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.
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Artworks
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About the artist
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Exhibition catalogue
UN COUP DE PEIGNE ASTRAL: ETIENNE BERTRAND WEILL
Past exhibition
