Welcome to the latest edition of the De Jonckheere newsletter. We have been looking forward to this moment, because it is our opportunity to announce an exciting and highly unusual new exhibition that we have been quietly developing through the winter months.

The upcoming exhibition, entitled Face au temps is an amalgam of two collections. On the one hand, there is the contemporary collection of Philippe Austruy, owner of the truly magnificent Commanderie de Peyrassol where the show will take place. On the other hand, there are Old Master works drawn from the gallery’s private collection. Though the art is very different, both collections are driven by the same passion for collecting, a shared obsession with quality, a similar kind of discernment.

So the idea of this exhibition is to take about twenty pieces from each of the collections, and then to pair them up in such a way as to create a dialogue, to spark a conversation between the coupled works, and among the people who come to see them. The twenty or so curated pairings will create notional threads across genres and epochs, styles and ideologies. Taken together, these threads will amount to a web of ideas and juxtapostions – some harmonious, some dissonant; some literal and visible, others poetical or opaque.

That, at least, is our aim. We are presently in the process of marrying the works, creating dyads and duos that we hope will intrigue and provoke all who see them. For now we can tell you that we are planning to show an Anish Kapoor piece alongside a vision of the afterlife by a follower of Bosch; a sculpture by the radical Cuban conceptualist Yuan Capote next to a Cranach portrait of Martin Luther; a mirror installation by the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and a panoramic landscape by the 16th-century Flemish master Jacob Grimmer…

We will be providing more details about the show in upcoming editions of the newsletter. For now, please not that the exhibition will run for seven months from the beginning of April. We very much hope to see you in South of France at some point during that time. We know it is going to be a special and memorable event.
Face au temps.
Regards croisés sur les collections Philippe Austruy et De Jonckheere

La Commanderie de Peyrassol
April – November 2022