This summer, Galerie Lucas Ratton, in collaboration with Galerie Dina Vierny, presents in Gassin the most significant exhibition devoted to the sculptor Robert Couturier since 2005. Bringing together twenty-three sculptures in the garden and around ten works indoors, the exhibition places his work in dialogue with African and Oceanic artworks, revealing unexpected formal and poetic affinities—a dialogue made all the more natural by the fact that Couturier himself owned a number of African art objects.

Alongside Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier, his exact contemporaries, Robert Couturier represents one of the three major currents of post-war French sculpture. Where Giacometti imbued his figures with an existential, grave, and tragic dimension, and Richier created a world inhabited by hybrid, sometimes monstrous bodies, Couturier responded with sculpture that is profoundly human, light, and poetic, often infused with a discreet sense of humour. Together, they radically reinvented figurative sculpture in the aftermath of the Second World War, each pursuing a distinct artistic path.

Trained first as a lithographer before devoting himself entirely to sculpture, Couturier initially worked in the tradition of Aristide Maillol, whose studio assistant he became and whom he admired throughout his life. He achieved his first major success before the war with Le Jardinier, installed on the Esplanade du Trocadéro for the 1937 International Exposition, enabling him to build a house and studio on Villa Seurat in Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life. Invited three times to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, his work gradually gained international recognition, from Japan to Canada, and was honoured with major retrospectives at the Musée Rodin (1970), the Monnaie de Paris (1975), and the Musée Maillol (2005).

Couturier is widely regarded as the inventor of allusive sculpture. Whereas sculpture had traditionally sought to occupy space, he made emptiness a material in its own right, allowing the viewer's gaze to circulate through the very heart of his figures. His work constantly seeks a balance between presence and lightness, construction and disappearance. He summed up his artistic ambition in a simple statement: “My greatest joy is to evoke as much humanity as possible by seeking the simplest and most economical means of working with matter.”

Couturier described his work as “anti-sculpture,” even “anti-Maillol.” Not because he opposed his master, whom he deeply admired, but because he sought to overturn the conventions of traditional sculpture. Where Maillol created solid, dense, and sensual volumes, Couturier drew with space, allowing emptiness to circulate and suggesting rather than asserting. His figures often appear delicately balanced, assembled with a deliberately economical use of means, as though they were less sculptures than the very idea of sculpture. This negative definition of sculpture led him to create a sculpture of emptiness, in which the absence of matter becomes as important as matter itself. This move away from realism also recalls African art, which similarly turns away from faithful imitation in favour of more direct, essential forms.

His attention to everyday objects, akin to that of Miró or Picasso, also reflects this freedom of invention. A gutter cut in two becomes Soldat through its hieratic appearance; a salvaged cone is transformed into Femme qui marche; a bar of soap gives rise to a remarkable seated woman; while wooden planks become Jumeaux. This permeability between the ordinary object and the work of art likewise finds an echo in African art, where everyday objects occupy a central place and the boundaries between the ritual and the secular are often blurred—or even non-existent.

The exhibition thus offers a genuine journey through Couturier's oeuvre. The sculptures presented in the garden span nearly half a century of creation, from 1944 to 2000, tracing the evolution of an artist who, throughout his exceptionally long life—103 years—never ceased to renew his sculptural vocabulary while remaining faithful to one essential pursuit: creating sculpture that is profoundly alive, free, and deeply human through a remarkable economy of means.