The work in question is a plaster figure depicting a woman with upraised arms, and can be viewed through January 7, 2024, at the institution’s Parisian headquarters as part of the “Les Aliénés du Mobilier National” exhibition.
Pierre Yermia: Figure with raised arms, 2023. Plaster sculpture, 150 x 30 x 30 cm. Photo courtesy of Isabelle Bideau
It might have been entitled “This was a lamppost base”. However, this sculpture by Pierre Yermia was registered with the Mobilier National collection under the name “Figure with raised arms”. The artist, who is represented by Artistics, was selected by Yves Badetz, the curator of this second edition of “Les Aliénés du Mobilier National”.
The successor to the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne (renamed Garde-Meuble des Consuls, then Mobilier Impérial), Mobilier National is responsible for the conservation, restoration and maintenance of some 130,000 furniture and textile creations used to furnish presidential residences and official palaces. The status of these inalienable pieces may change when they lose their designation as works of national heritage. They are then destroyed, sold or dismantled so their parts can be reused.
Under the heading “Les Aliénés du Mobilier National”, the institution offers an alternative destiny to such pieces, as part of an innovative and eco-friendly initiative. The program gave carte blanche to 34 visual artists to reinvent this furniture of limited historic value, so that it could be reintegrated into the collection of Mobilier National.
This is how Pierre Yermia was entrusted with a gilded metal lamppost base from around 1950, consisting of a vertical axis and three curved feet in wrought iron. The artist chose to separate the various components and put them back together to form the framing for a plaster figure portraying a woman with upraised arms.
By fully covering the original object to the point of rendering it invisible, Pierre Yermia opted for an approach at odds with the majority of the other works on display. This approach attests to the constancy of his research and the coherence of a body of work he has been creating for 30 years, taking care not to bow to the trends and fads of his time.
The artist’s output draws on the history of art in its entirety, ranging from archaic Greek art, Cycladic art and even – in some respects – Ancient Egyptian art, to the work of Henry Moore and the generation of British artists who followed in his footsteps, including Elisabeth Frink.
Pierre Yermia does not attempt to capture the zeitgeist, the spirit of a moment that is necessarily ephemeral and transitory. His bronze sculptures of massive bodies supported by frail legs, which are firmly rooted to the ground but somehow convey a sense of precarious balance, speak to us about the universality of our human experience and our humanity, which is always teetering on the brink and yet buoyed by an irrepressible elan.
Exhibition: Les Aliénés du Mobilier national, le retour.
Mobilier national – 42 avenue des Gobelins, Paris, France
October 11, 2023 – January 7, 2024.
