L’école Prouvé de Vantoux transformée en galerie d’art : « Un lieu rarissime »

The article

In the print edition of Le Républicain Lorrain of 28 April 2024 (page 26, Metz and Meurthe-et-Moselle Nord editions), Lisa Lagrange visits the former Jean Prouvé school in Vantoux, three weeks before the gallery's opening on 16 May. She starts from a detail in the corridor: the pupils' small coat hooks, still facing Prouvé's characteristic portholes, in a school closed since 2014 and now listed as a historic monument.

The journalist traces the choice made by the municipality, which owns the premises and which, after the departure of the architects and designers who had occupied the building, selected from several applications the project of Nathan Chicheportiche and his mother. The gallerist, who is from Paris, recounts that he discovered the school during his art history studies and that he wants to open it to the public beyond the European Heritage Days, by showing artists who respond to Prouvé's work.

Having come to take part in the hang, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, aged 84, whose work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, MoMA and the Guggenheim Bilbao, has taken up again his faience tiles from the 1993 Venice Biennale, which earned him the prize of honour, adding the print of a skull and coloured letters and numbers. The town hall brought out the original double desks, which will not be for sale, to recreate the classroom. The article states that the artist now rarely accepts exhibitions and agreed only out of admiration for Prouvé, and that other artists have already expressed their wish to exhibit in Vantoux.