Pierrette Bloch
Sans titre, 2006
©Pierrette Bloch
“I like all tools that make lines. I know lines, I frequent them, lines with no conclusion, with no end, their turnings back, their accidents, their apparent speed, their tenacious duration, their persistence, their urgency.” (“Line”, 10 May 2002)
Pierrette Bloch was born in Paris in 1928 and has pursued her rigorous, obstinate and silent oeuvre since the 1950s.
She works with two materials: Indian ink, which she applies with little brushstrokes in repetitive, random dots in long horizontal bands composed of assembled pieces of paper, creating kinds of musical staves, with their silences and resumptions, what she calls “a place of uncertainty”; and horsehair, which she also braids, in the same horizontality, into tight, slack or uneven lines. Yet she refutes any comparison with writing: “People always end up by talking about the relationship between what I do and writing. And straight away I say: there isn’t any (but in fact I’m not sure!). And without thinking, I repeat: No, there is no relationship between my writing and what I do. (I’ll see tomorrow…)”
The Fondation Pro-MAHJ awarded the Prix Maratier 2005 to Pierrette Bloch for her entire oeuvre.
The aim of the Fondation Pro-MAHJ – heir to the Fondation Kikoïne and created on the initiative of Claire Maratier, the artist’s daughter, under the auspices of the Fondation du Judaïsme français – is to support the activities of the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. Intent on recalling the interest in contemporary painters that she shared with her husband Amédé Maratier, Claire awards the Prix Maratier every two years and organises an exhibition of the artist’s work in the Kikoïne room in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme.