Pierre Klossowski — l’énoncé à nouveau dénoncé — Exhibition Announcement Card, Galerie Beaubourg, Vence, 1999

Exhibition announcement card
Approx. 21 × 14.8 cm
Offset print on card stock; colour sculpture reproduction to recto, exhibition information to verso
Published by Galerie Beaubourg / Marianne & Pierre Nahon, Vence, France
Exhibition dates: 3 April – 12 June 1999
Condition: very good; light handling wear and minor age-related surface marks

Printed for a solo exhibition by Pierre Klossowski titled l’énoncé à nouveau dénoncé (“the statement denounced again”), held at the Château Notre-Dame des Fleurs in Vence under the direction of Marianne and Pierre Nahon. Issued late in Klossowski’s life, the exhibition gathered paintings and sculptures around a body of work that continuously moved between literature, philosophy, theatre, and image.

The front reproduces Klossowski’s Roberte aux barres parallèles (1990), a polychrome sculpture executed in painted synthetic resin, metal, and wood. The work animates characters from The Laws of Hospitality, the avant-garde trilogy through which Klossowski developed the figure of Roberte — part fictional protagonist, part philosophical device, part recurring image-system. Across these texts and later visual works, desire becomes staged rather than narrated: roles are performed, exchanged, repeated, and observed.

The sculpture itself sits between mannequin, theatre prop, and philosophical proposition. The figures appear suspended in an ambiguous scene somewhere between choreography and ritual. As with much of Klossowski’s work, the image resists a stable reading; narrative and enactment begin to overlap.

As a printed object the card performs a similar reduction. Complex literary and philosophical structures are compressed into a portable support: title, image, date, place. The exhibition passes; the scenario remains.

Original period item.