Paris Gallery Exhibition Reframes the 1970s as a Turning Point in Abstraction
At Helene Bailly Marcilhac in Paris, “The Seventies” treats a single decade as a hinge in modern art rather than a neatly bounded style. The group exhibition gathers paintings by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Hans Hartung, Chu Teh-Chun, Joan Miró, Sam Francis, Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall, using their work to map how artists in the 1970s absorbed earlier movements while pushing abstraction into new territory.
The show’s premise is less about nostalgia than continuity. Jean-Paul Riopelle, a critical figure in Canadian art and a pioneer of French Lyrical Abstraction, appears as part of a broader lineage that includes Cubism, Surrealism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Art Informel. Hans Hartung, the German-French painter known for gestural abstractions, and Chu Teh-Chun, the Chinese-French artist who bridged Eastern and Western painting traditions, underscore the exhibition’s interest in transformation rather than rupture.
Color is one of the exhibition’s most persuasive arguments. Works by Miró, Francis, and Delaunay show how vivid palettes could carry expressive and psychological weight without relying on figuration. Their paintings suggest that formal composition in the 1970s was becoming more elastic, more open to sensation, and less tied to inherited hierarchies of image-making.
The inclusion of late works by Picasso and Chagall adds another layer. Both artists belonged to an earlier generation, yet their presence here points to the way modernism continued to evolve through artists who remained attentive to change rather than retreating into established formulas. The exhibition also resonates with the broader arc of postwar painting, in which each generation inherited a visual language only to revise it again.
What emerges is a decade that feels both historically specific and unusually current. “The Seventies” suggests that the visual vocabulary of abstraction today still carries the imprint of that period, making the exhibition not only a survey of the past but a useful lens for thinking about where painting goes next. It remains on view at Helene Bailly Marcilhac through September 5, 2026.
