This summer, the Donjon de Vez presents the first major retrospective dedicated to Robert Couturier since 2005, entitled "Robert Couturier. La poésie des corps". Recognized as one of the most important post-war sculptors in France—alongside Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier—Robert Couturier returns to the spotlight with some twenty life-size and monumental sculptures displayed throughout the gardens and halls of the Donjon.

The twenty sculptures by Robert Couturier (1905–2008) on view at the Donjon de Vez offer a retrospective of an artist who was both a witness to and an active participant in a 20th century marked by the final waves of the avant-garde and profound transformations in artistic form.

For over sixty years, in the silence of his studio on Paris’s Villa Seurat, Couturier made the human body—especially the female body—his primary material.

Trained in drawing and lithography, he developed a sculptural language that emerged in the wake of Aristide Maillol, whom he met in 1928 and whose influence deeply shaped his early work. Maillol’s death in 1944 marked a pivotal moment, prompting Couturier’s necessary and definitive emancipation. From that point on, he sought to create an “anti-Maillol,” combining empty and full forms, the visible and the invisible, the inner and outer space of the human figure—subjects he would never abandon.

His transition toward a personal language occurred when he began to suggest form rather than impose it, while still maintaining a sense of volume. He spoke of "open form," where air and light could move freely.

Contrary to the usual additive approach to sculpture, Couturier chose to eliminate, remove, hollow out, and carve the material so that form might emerge. This “anti-sculpture” embodied an attempt to metamorphose the body: depending on the viewer’s perspective, the perception of the figure shifts and transforms.

This “draughtsman of sculpture” engaged directly with physical space, playing with the balance of forces by suggesting a form suspended between presence and absence. The viewer is immediately drawn into the work: “the spectator becomes a participant, following the suggestions it offers.”

Robert Couturier’s work is deeply rooted in the life and poetry of the everyday.