GROUP EXHIBITION: OLD VESSELS, NEW SPIRITS
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present Old Vessels, New Spirits, a group exhibition that brings contemporary artists into dialogue with figurative masters of the 19th and 20th centuries.
November 25, 2025 - January 10, 2026
The exhibition’s historical anchor includes works by Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, Charles Despiau, Norbert Goeneutte, Antoine-Jean Gros, Winslow Homer, Albert Marquet, and Andrew Wyeth.
Bonnard’s Still Life with a Basket of Fruit (1930–35) turns a simple domestic scene into a study of perception. Degas’s Portrait of a Woman (c.1887–90) brings that intensity to the figure, where the shimmer of fabric and feather becomes psychological. Goeneutte’s In the Garden (c.1876) and Despiau’s Faun (modelled 1912, cast 1953) share that focus on presence: one through glimpses of Parisian life, the other through classical rigour. Gros’s The Citoyenne Poussielgue (1797) shows how fashion and gesture could define identity long before photography, while Wyeth’s Overflow Study (1978) transforms that idea of portraiture into something private and intimate.
Homer’s Light Blue Sea at Prout’s Neck (1893–94) and A Volante on a Mountain Road, Cuba (1885) expand the view - from Maine’s solitude to the brightness of Cuba - both shaped by the human confrontation with nature’s scale. Marquet’s View of Agay, the Red Rocks (1905) brings that vastness to rest, turning the sea into a moment of reflection.
While the historical works in the exhibition form the vessels - the structures, subjects, and habits of seeing inherited from the past - the contemporary ones provide the new spirits that inhabit them. The contemporary artists presented - Jean-Marie Appriou, Izzy Barber, Giulia Cenci, Nick Goss, John McAllister, Piotr Uklański, Chloe Wise, and Xue Ruozhe - work with the same enduring genres: portrait, landscape, still life, and sculpture. Yet they treat these not as fixed traditions but as porous systems, open to revision - containers for new emotions, contradictions, and ways of looking at the present.
Appriou’s The Briar Rose (rosa x centifolia) (2022) takes its cue from the mythic and botanical. A tangle of bronze, half flower, half apparition, its surfaces flickering between tenderness and ruin. Cenci’s slow flower (2025) works in a similar register of metamorphosis - aluminium branches, bones, and car parts welded into tense, searching anatomies.