Earth has always fascinated and inspired artists. It is both the origin and the end. Works created from earth-matter, often with a raw appearance, are all imbued with a form of mystery, they have an unspeakable character, a magnetic depth. They reveal the traces of time, memory and life. It is these “earth stories” (to borrow a title from Dubuffet's Matériologie) that our exhibition Terres d'artistes invites us to discover, through works by Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), Monette Guermont (b. 1925), herman de vries (b. 1931), Richard Long (b. 1945), Caroline Le Mehauté (b. 1982) and Benoît Lefeuvre (b. 1994). Three generations of artists who, over the years and through their work, have made us aware of the pure, archaic beauty of the Earth, expressing a desire for fusion between man and nature, and inviting us to become more aware of our shared fragility. “For a long time, mankind has looked to the sky,” remarks Gaspard Koenig, evoking the need to take a close look at the Earth, ‘this infinite other that we don't look at even though we depend on it’. In the age of the Anthropocene, this change of focus is urgently needed, and is echoed in the works presented here.

Domitille d'Orgeval