Following its stops in Madrid in January (Galería Leandro Navarro) and Barcelona in March (Artur Ramon Art), the Maillol–Manolo exhibition concludes its journey in Paris. Bringing together some forty sculptures and drawings by Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) and Manolo Hugué (1872–1945), the exhibition brings together for the first time two bodies of work united by a shared pursuit of simplicity and permanence, yet profoundly distinct in their expression.

Close friends since the 1910s, the two sculptors found themselves in the Pyrénées-Orientales during World War I—Maillol in Banyuls-sur-Mer and Manolo in Céret. Set against the backdrop of the same Mediterranean landscape and shared friendships—as attested by the poet Pierre Camo—they shared a conception of sculpture grounded in the human body, the balance of volumes, and an ideal drawn from the sources of archaic Greek art.

In contrast to the avant-garde movements that were then revolutionizing sculpture, Maillol and Manolo thus followed two parallel paths toward a classical modernity: sensual and monumental in Maillol’s work, more spontaneous and expressive in Manolo’s. By juxtaposing their works—which are at times surprisingly similar—the exhibition reveals both their affinities and what constitutes each artist’s irreconcilable individuality.