Centre d’art et château d’Aubenas (07) : Summer 2025 exhibition

View of the entrance to the Château d'Aubenas, with panels from the "Living in the World" exhibition

Centre for Contemporary Art
du Patrimoine en Ardèche

Summer visit to the exhibition
Living in the World

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

EXHIBITION AT THE CHÂTEAU

01.05 – 21.09.2025

AUBENAS, ARDÈCHE

AUVERGNE-RHÔNE-ALPES

FRANCE

Aubenas, Ardèche

Sabine Moritz

Corentin Grossmann

Ella Walker

Gilbert Garcin

From May 2025, the Château d’Aubenas will be hosting a new artistic season, with a focus on multiple viewpoints and rich expression. As a centre for contemporary art and an emblematic heritage site in the Ardèche, this year the Château d’Aubenas welcomes the contrasting worlds of
Sabine Moritz, Corentin Grossmann, Ella Walker and Gilbert Garcin.

Four artists with singular trajectories, brought together in an exhibition that explores memory, dreams, female identities and the fables of existence, through a diversity of means of expression and approaches.

An invitation to explore the sensitive paths of contemporary creation in an exceptional architectural setting steeped in history.

VOJTECH KOVARIK

THE SKIES

This is the first time that Sabine Moritz, a German artist born during the GDR period*, has been presented with a monograph in France.

Her exhibition entitled Les cieux (The Heavens) brings together a dense body of abstract paintings produced in recent years, enriched by a number of earlier works. Long known for her autobiographical drawings inspired by her childhood in Lobeda*, since 2015 she has been moving towards expressive abstraction, in which pictorial gestures replace narratives.

Her canvases, imbued with a gentle melancholy, conjure up layers of memories without freezing them, bringing out diffuse sensations rather than precise images. The pictorial material, dense and vibrant, becomes the medium for a meditation on the passage of time, erasure and resurgence.

Looking at these compositions, the visitor is invited to an inner experience: that of an emotional world where individual memory joins collective memory in a constant echoing movement.

The Artist

Corentin Grossmann

LINES OF DESIRE

Corentin Grossmann’s universe unfolds like a playful, abundant exploration, somewhere between visual utopia and controlled chaos.

Born in Metz in 1980 and now based in Brussels, the artist constructs a world populated by hybrid figures, imaginary settings, fragments of humanity and absurd objects. Lignes de désir” presents a collection of meticulous drawings and ceramic sculptures that evoke medieval miniatures, comic strips, science fiction and fantastic bestiaries.

With Grossmann, the eye moves endlessly. Nothing stands still, everything is transformed. He plays with scale, inverts relationships of size, superimposes references in a logic of joyful saturation.

Each image is a territory where anxiety and visual pleasure, irony and contemplation coexist. This abundance invites the viewer to abandon his or her landmarks and let him or herself be guided by the familiar strangeness of a world which, despite its apparent eccentricity, speaks acutely of today.

The Artist

Ella Walker

IDÔLATRIE

The Château d’Aubenas is offering a rare opportunity to discover the first French exhibition by Ella Walker, a young British painter born in 1993.

Entitled Idolatry, this series of works draws on the history of art and its codes, and turns them on their head. Somewhere between Elizabethan theatre, Renaissance drapery and the dreamlike atmospheres of Italian cinema, Walker breathes a resolutely contemporary air into his compositions.

In her paintings, the female figures stand out for their ambivalence: sometimes vulnerable, sometimes sovereign, they defy the gaze. The brushstrokes are lively and sometimes deliberately imperfect, revealing an aesthetic of the unfinished that reflects a desire to open up narratives rather than close them up. Ella Walker does not seek to produce ideal images, but to suggest complex emotions through free and assertive pictorial gestures.

The result is a deeply sensitive work that questions the construction of identities and representations of the female body through the prism of memory and play.

The Exhibition

Gilbert Garcin

Life ahead

Gilbert Garcin, who died in 2020, left behind a singular and precious body of photographic work, begun at a late stage after a professional career in lighting.

His exhibition, entitled La vie devant soi, pays tribute to this self-taught artist whose images, often in black and white, take the form of little theatrical scenes. On these miniature stages that he makes himself, Garcin stages a recurring character: himself, disguised as Mr Everyman, a silhouette in costume in absurd, touching or meditative situations.

These deceptively simple photographs strike a chord with their accuracy and depth. With discreet humour, they tackle the big questions of life: the passage of time, isolation, hardship, the search for meaning. They are also striking in their universality: everyone can recognise themselves in this character who faces mountains of paper, wonders about infinity or tries to balance his or her life on a tightrope.

Garcin’s detached yet empathetic approach offers a gentle reflection on the human condition, at the crossroads of poetry and burlesque.

The Artist