Public preview: Sunday, January 14, 3–5pm
Blum & Poe is pleased to present the first major US exhibition of pascALEjandro, the creation of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, nearly ten years in the making. An act of psychomagic in its own right, this existential and artistic project is the love child of two artists who are separated in age by over forty years. Manifested here in extraordinary works on paper, the collaboration is comprised of the masculine: Jodorowsky’s illustrations, and the feminine: Montandon-Jodorowsky’s vivid colors.
Trained as a painter with a dedicated practice for the last twenty years, Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky’s work also traverses the mediums of photography and stage and costume design. Alejandro Jodorowsky has been at the forefront of every genre he has engaged with—from poetry to graphic novels, theater, and cinema. His cult classic The Holy Mountain (1973), was produced by Allen Klein and John Lennon, and the term “midnight movie” was coined after his 1970 film El Topo. His unrealized film Dune has been acknowledged as “the most famous movie never made,” and was the subject of an award-winning documentary in 2013.
This presentation will include a selection from the last two years of the artists’ creation, an especially fertile period. Paranormal creatures and mystical lovers dance between life and death; human beings, young and old, from East and West, bring the viewer into a world of extraordinary richness and powerful sensory states. These works together are a manifesto of the artists’ uncompromising love and absolute sincerity, as well as an invitation to others to participate in this world of poetry and magic they’ve developed. pascALEjandro states, “Our working material is the material of our lives. No critical or destructive art: it’s the portion of sublimity that actually exists in all human beings and in reality. pascALEjandro is the synthesis of two beings, who form alchemy’s androgynous union.”
pascALEjandro’s works have been featured in exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2017); CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux (2015); and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012). Association Azzedine Alaïa published a catalogue on pascALEjandro’s work, Alchemical Androgynous (2017), featuring contributions by Alaïa, Klaus Biesenbach, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diego Moldes, Philippe Rouyer, María-Inés Rodriguez, Olivier Zahm, Diana Widmaier Picasso, and Donatien Grau. On the occasion of Galerie Azzedine Alaïa’s 2017 retrospective, the couturier’s non-profit exhibition space in Paris, Alaïa stated: “these drawings carry you off in a dream. Between earth and heaven, they show you a different vision.”
In celebration of the exhibition, the Hammer Museum will host a screening of Jodorowsky’s recent film Endless Poetry (2016) on Tuesday, January 16, 7:30pm in the Billy Wilder Theater, followed by a Q&A with the artists. This film is a continuation of the autobiographical story Jodorowsky began in The Dance of Reality (2014), both films for which Montandon-Jodorowsky realized costume design, and as a collaborative entity, pascALEjandro designed the distinct colors. Endless Poetry is an ode to the quest for beauty and inner truth, as told through Jodorowsky’s uniquely surreal and psychedelic visual language.