Her bronze and silk works are on display in every major Paris museum until January 2025. Barbara Chase-Riboud waited 50 years since her first solo exhibition in Paris, in 1974, at the Museum of Modern Art of Paris-ARC, for this belated recognition. During this half-century eclipse – apart from an exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation in Paris (from October 2021 to January 2022) – the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, native, now 85, built up three parallel and alternating careers as novelist, poet and sculptor.

She now makes a powerful comeback with a treasure hunt of an exhibition for art lovers, under the unique name 'When a knot is untied, a god is set free,' taken from one of her poetry collections. It features some 40 works exposed in eight major national institutions.

This artistic "grand slam" is a multi-faceted catch-up, as Chase-Riboud's work, by embracing a very broad cultural history of art, finds its proper place in very diverse collections. It also contributes to correcting the historical under-representation of women and non-white artists in Paris, especially as she has always been committed to making Black figures of the past more visible. From hieratic monuments to steles draped in red, black or gold, her style can be easily recognized by its hybridities, blending the rigidity of metal with the fluidity of fabrics, thus subverting contradictions between hard and soft, figurative and abstract, masculine and feminine, Western and non-Western and power and powerlessness, creating alchemies between grandeur and fragility.

This alignment of the stars comes on the heels of an exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation that created a dialogue between her work and that of the Swiss sculptor, whom she met in his Montparnasse studio and was her first major sculptural influence. The exhibition, which traveled to MoMA, in New York, in 2023, set off an international chain of major exhibitions, from the Serpentine Gallery in London to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri, and soon in Germany and China.

In Paris, where she has been living since marrying the photographer Marc Riboud (1923-2016) in the early 1960s, this is quite simply the first multi-museum exhibition to be held during an artist's lifetime. "It all started with a conversation with Laurence des Cars [director of the Louvre] and Laurent Le Bon [director of the Centre Pompidou] about celebrating deceased artists. We wondered whether we should switch to a living artist who had not been celebrated in a way commensurate with their importance," explained Donatien Grau, an adviser to the Louvre Museum's contemporary programs and co-curator of the exhibition with Erin Jenoa Gilbert, an American specialist in Chase-Riboud's work.

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