At the Venice Biennale in April 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged artists around the world to support Ukraine. Éditions Jannink responded to this appeal by asking visual artist Jean Pierre Raynaud to donate a previously unseen work to Ukraine. Like Picasso's Guernica (1937), Raynaud has taken the exact dimensions (3.49 m x 7.76 m) of this emblematic work. Like the Spanish painter's canvas, Untitled - Ukraine uses art to denounce the horrors of war.
Jean Pierre Raynaud, born in 1939, was close to the New Realists and Pop artists, and began to develop a language of signs and signals. The most representative of these is the one-way sign. The symbolism embodied in these signs not only eludes contextualisation, but also serves as a universal and brutal reference to the obstacles to freedom posed by war, violence and barbarism.
The work was donated to Ukraine when it was unveiled at the Sorbonne on 24 February 2023 and exhibited until April 2023, where it stood opposite a life-size reproduction of Guernica. The two monumental canvases will be exhibited at the ST-ART contemporary art fair in Strasbourg before embarking on a worldwide exhibition tour. As part of this project, a limited edition of 2022 copies will be published, retracing the history of Picasso's Guernica and Raynaud's Untitled - Ukraine.
24/07/2023