Amar Gallery is honoured to contribute important works to the Opelvillen Foundation's exhibition on artist Hélène de Beauvoir. The Opelvillen Rüsselsheim is dedicating itself to an artist who was long overshadowed by her famous sister and whose work is now being highlighted with new intensity: Hélène de Beauvoir (1910-2001). Under the title Seeing with Different Eyes, the museum is showing the first museum retrospective in Germany and presenting over 150 works - from early sketches, copper engravings and drawings to monumental oil paintings and acrylic paintings.

 

The exhibition traces the artistic path of a woman who asserted herself early on and was present in the cultural centers of Europe. As early as 1936, Hélène de Beauvoir exhibited at the Jacques Bonjean Gallery in Paris, where Picasso, Braque and Dalí were also represented. Picasso himself called her works "original". Over the course of her career, she showed her paintings in Paris, Milan, Tokyo and Geneva, and her works were exhibited at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Nevertheless, the painter was largely forgotten after her death - her art remained overshadowed by the radiance of her sister Simone, the great philosopher and icon of the women's movement.

 

Dr. Beate Kemfert, the curator of the Opelvillen, is now bringing new attention to Hélène's work. She not only presents the artist's aesthetic diversity, but also emphasizes themes that have so far gone unnoticed: the intensive examination of the female body, questions of sexuality, vulnerability and strength. It is precisely these perspectives, which Hélène de Beauvoir pursued consistently and independently, that make her painting an important contribution to the history of art and women in the 20th century.

 

The exhibition reveals how Hélène de Beauvoir experimented in different media and how narrative power and formal freedom are combined in her works. From the early figurative compositions to the expressive, almost abstract paintings of the 1960s, there is a common thread: the struggle to find a language for female identity and experience. The exhibition at the Opelvillen is more than just an art historical discovery - it is an invitation to see Hélène de Beauvoir "with different eyes" and to bring her work out of the shadows and into the cultural memory.