The Garden of Eden pays tribute to the many tools that have shaped Jim Dine’s life. Created through assemblage, this sculpture takes the form of a folding screen, consisting of five panels connected with hinges. It features life-sized bronze castings of a series of tools, welded together and painted in vivid colors that evoke the gestural world of Abstract Expressionism.

In 1937, Nicolas Ghika began a series of landscapes inspired by the island of Hydra, where he had spent his childhood, combining, in a unique style, Byzantine and Greek elements from his cultural heritage with influences from early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde movements. Landscape, Crete, painted later in his career, portrays a garden fragmented into different coloured zones, set upon a flexible geometric structure. Vegetal motifs bring rhythm to this composition, evoking the feel of a mosaic in refined colours.

By 1919, Lajos Tihanyi was already a recognized painter in the Hungarian art scene, known for his distinctive synthesis of Fauvism, Cézanne, and the 16th- to 17th-century Spanish painter El Greco. After being forced into exile, he settled permanently in Paris in 1925. This work depicts the rooftops of a Parisian building in a dynamic, geometric composition. A cluster of chimneys leans to the left, while the red arches of the elevated metro line stand out against flat areas of colour, creating strong visual contrasts.

This landscape, with its Cubist accents, marks the transition between László Moholy-Nagy’s early naturalistic works and his abstract geometric production. The work recalls both the pared-down volumes of the landscapes painted by Pablo Picasso in Spain in 1909, with which the Hungarian artist was well acquainted, and the aerial views of battlefields that were widely published in newspapers during the First World War (1914-1918).

Through its title, (Unwinding) Corridor evokes the idea of architecture in motion and aims to change the perception of the exhibition space. The space is thus perceived as an expansive landscape from which shapes and colours have been removed. Playing with the idea of disorientation, Vincent Lamouroux gives the work a shifting morphology that changes according to the movements of the viewer, who is struck by the contrast between blinding light and immersive darkness.

This architectural form results from a collaboration between the French artist Daniel Buren and one of his former students, Xavier Veilhan. It is part of a series of “exploded cabins” that Buren began in the mid-1970s. The open structure of this aedicula offers a variety of perspectives. Inside, Veilhan’s enigmatic Paysages Fantômes [Ghost Landscapes] interact symmetrically with the vertical stripes emblematic of Buren’s work. The landscape of the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris is presented in a dematerialised form, with the figurative dimension of the photographs only reappearing when the viewer physically moves away. 

In the early 2000s, French artist Pierre Moignard made his first trip to the American West Coast. On Venice Beach, a sprawling beach on the Pacific populated by muscular swimmers, he noticed the homeless people wrapped in shapeless, colourful sleeping bags, who became almost the sole motifs in his Californian landscapes. The silhouette of a lifeguard’s hut and a few simple rubbish bins structure this ghostly painting, symbolising the quiet decay of contemporary America.

This painting by the Russian-born painter Leopold Survage depicts a small town in the south of France where he had just settled. Set against a verdant landscape in soft colours and framed by two semicircles representing the sky and the sea, the town occupies the centre of the painting. In the Cubist tradition, the artist opted for a simultaneity of perspectives. Inside and outside merge, with the flowerpot on the corner of the table on the same plane as the surrounding fruit trees.

This urban landscape, inspired by Cubism, of which Valensi was a leading exponent before 1914, is part of a series dedicated to the Algerian city of Bou-Saâda. Blurred by various visual effects, the motif, a narrow alleyway seen from a central perspective, is difficult to recognise at first glance. At the height of the roof terraces of the buildings that line the street, almost translucent arcades intersect with the sun’s rays. In this painting, the concepts of space and time are embodied by the alternation and division of light and shadow.

The Italian painter Alberto Magnelli, had close ties with both the Cubist and Futurist circles. He was on the verge of making the transition to abstraction when he painted L’Homme à la charrette [Man with a Cart]. While its spatial organisation, with its fragmented forms, is reminiscent of Cubist landscapes, this village scene is constructed and rhythmed by a contrasting play of vivid colours. The motif of the wheel symbolises the dynamism of the composition.