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HERVÉ DI ROSA: UN AIR DE FAMILLE (A FAMILY AFFAIR)


Exhibition
Marseille, France
2024-2025
Selected photography by Pierre Schwartz




Studio MASH were part of the interdisciplinary team selected to design and deliver Hervé Di Rosa: Un air de famille (A family affair), a major exhibition at the Mucem (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations) in Marseille, France. The exhibition paired 120 works of ‘popular art’ from the Mucem collection – made by everyday people of the Mediterranean and selected by the renowned French artist Hervé Di Rosa – with over 60 pieces by Di Rosa himself, including several made especially for the exhibition. Di Rosa is a proponent of ‘modest art’ and frequently collaborates with traditional craftspeople. He found a ‘family resemblance’ between the folk art objects in the Mucem collection and his own work. ‘Artistic director Jean Seisser, a long-time collaborator of Hervé Di Rosa, has imagined the exhibition as an archipelago made up of some fifteen islets. Each of these islands brings together some of the objects in the Mucem collections with a creation by Hervé Di Rosa. Each island tells its own story, freely interpretable by the visitor.’ Studio MASH and local designer Gabrielle Laurin Mercury worked with artistic director Jean Seisser, Mucem curator Vincent Giovannoni and the exhibition fabricators Atelier Ni, to realise the vision of Seisser and Di Rosa and deliver an exhibition rich in colour, contrast and raw creative energy. A huge and intricate scale model of a working mine, created from memory by a retired French miner, stands alongside a floor to ceiling perforated metal screen, designed by Di Rosa as a mass portrait of the people of Marseille with a form inspired by the perforated facade of the Mucem building itself. A collection of painted wooden birds, made by Di Rosa’s father to use as hunting decoys, is mounted beneath a 3.7m long antique hunting rifle. A swooping line of suspended ox yokes – collected by the Mucem from across the regions of France – extends upwards from the back of a resin cow, sliced open, inverted and painted in Di Rosa’s immediately recognisable style. The plinths and walls of the exhibition were hand painted in bright colours, following sketches supplied by Di Rosa.