Tours of the artist’s residence are possible on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from 2pm to 5pm.
They can only be booked online.

• Admission : Full rate: 4 € ; Reduced rate*: 3 € ; Free admission: under 18
• Number of visitors per tour: 8 people
• 30 minutes tours
• The house has 3 floors and is not accessible to people with reduced mobility.

Online booking from mid-Nov. → eticket-fvvga.com

* Reduce rates: Seniors from the age of 65, unemployed visitors, large families, international artists ID, holders of the Arles City Pass, students

View of the house, with the contributions by Laura Owens et Asha Shechter

“At present I’ve also bought a dressing-table with all the necessaries, and my own little bedroom is furnished.
In the other one — Gauguin’s or another lodger’s — we’ll still need a dressing-table and a chest of drawers,
and downstairs I’ll need a large stove and a cupboard.
[…]
You wouldn’t believe how much that calms me; I have such a passion to make
— an artist’s house — but a practical one and not the usual studio full of curios.
I’m also thinking of planting two oleanders outside the door, in tubs.”
Vincent van Gogh writing about the Yellow House, Arles, 1888

From 18 November 2023 the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles is presenting an exhibition that brings together the artists of the Studio of the South, a residency hosted by Maja Hoffmann and the American artist Laura Owens in Arles since 2020.

In 1888 Vincent van Gogh dreamed of sharing his new house in Arles with fellow artists from Paris and the local area, in order that it might become a genuine, living studio. This Yellow House – formerly located on Place Lamartine but destroyed by bombing in the Second World War – included a room for guests and was furnished by Van Gogh with “decorations”, by which he meant his own paintings and the Japanese prints he hung on the whitewashed walls. Van Gogh wanted his home to become a place in which to live and work, with the aim of fostering the creation and blossoming of a community of artists who would shape the future of art.

Ahead of Maja Hoffmann’s, President of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles and Founder of LUMA, 2018 invitation for Laura Owens to exhibit her work alongside Van Gogh’s, the American artist, having visited Arles as a teenager and several times in her life, deeply admired his intentions for communal living, and creating, in the French city. As she started to conceptualise exhibiting her work alongside that of the Dutch painter, and began reading Van Gogh’s correspondence, Owens developed an invested interest in the thinking behind his dreams of a ‘studio in the South’. Inspired by Maja Hoffmann’s vision for the LUMA Foundation in Arles, it was a natural step for Owens and Hoffmann to collaborate with one another and for the LUMA Foundation to to fund and delegate Julie Boukobza of Luma Arles to manage the Studio of the South residency located in a private house on rue du Cloître.

In 2020 Owens moved to Arles to begin working on her show with the Fondation, scheduled to open the same year, although postponed due to COVID-19 restrictions. In a dialogue with LUMA, she then began to invite artists local to France to join her in Arles, whilst continuing to conceive the body of work that would eventually be exhibited at her show the following year. Over the summer Owens created handmade ceramics, elaborate site-specific mosaics, silk-screened curtains, hand-embroidered pillows, paintings, drawings and murals on the walls for the residence. She subsequently invited 23 artists – collaborators, friends and pupils – to continue the project up to its conclusion in July 2023. During their stays, which ranged in length from a few weeks to several months, these artists lived and worked in the house, in most cases one after the other, although occasionally at the same time. The domestic environment of this house-cum-studio was thus shaped by the imprints that each person left behind. It was invested and embellished with multiple artistic contributions – drawings and paintings on the walls, installations in situ, texts, newspapers, collages, painted furniture – and animated by events programmed by the residents. By inhabiting the house, the artists gradually transformed it into a global and collective work of art.

In early 2023, the end of the residency project approaching, Maja Hoffmann and Bice Curiger – at the initiative of Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, director of exhibitions and programmes at LUMA – decided to organize an exhibition reuniting all the participants in Arles. They chose to host it at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in line with Hoffmann’s wish to further build bridges between the two Arlesian institutions LUMA Arles and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.

As a result, Studio of the South: The Exhibition invites all artist to relive this stage of their artistic career in which they discovered Provence. The works on show – in some cases directly inspired by this experience, in others specially conceived for the exhibition – proclaim the adventurous, sensual and joyful character of this group of artists. Ranging from sculpture to video, and with a strong focus on painting, they reveal how the spaces in which artists live and create influence their production. The exhibition will also examine the promises offered by collaboration as a form of artistic practice, and the importance of quitting large urban centres in order to work differently. Lastly, it will interrogate the notion of the domestic sphere as a place of artistic experimentation.
As an extension of the exhibition, the private house on Rue du Cloître will also be open to the public (booking required, see practical information above).

Curators of the exhibition: Bice Curiger, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Margaux Bonopera, Eimear Martin