Sam Szafran. Obsessions of a painter

Three years after the artist's death, this major show at the Musée de l'Orangerie is the first exhibition dedicated to Sam Szafran organised by a French museum in two decades. 

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Julia Drost, Director of Research at the DFK German Center for Art History Paris and Sophie Eloy, Head of documentation, library, archives and research at the Musée de l'Orangerie. 

Claire Bernardi Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie writes: 

“In the privacy of his studio, Sam Szafran single-mindedly pursued the obsessions which inhabit his work. After the traumatic experience of losing family members in World War II and having his world turned upside down, art rooted him in reality. Spurning the vicissitudes and debates of the day, he developed a taste for precision in forms, but allowed them to evolve freely in labyrinthine spiral staircases, studios overrun by vegetation, and boxes of pastels transformed by effects of perspective. 

In 2018, when Cécile Debray, the Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie at that time, informed the artist that she was keen to organise an exhibition, he was particularly enthusiastic. Not only he felt an affinity with the museum’s collections which to revive figurative art, but also his own personal history shaped by his predecessors in the Paris School. The painter’s death in 2019 has slightly changed the focus of this exhibition, which is the first posthumous reading of his complete body of work. This work is extremely seducing, but also challenging: it is neither photographic, nor conceptual, nor realist; it is a work of the mind. Szafran’s staircases and studios – spaces from which we certainly do not emerge unaffected – instil a ‘worrying strangeness’.”