Future exhibition

Joël Andrianomearisoa – Tools of Emotions and Desires

30.11.2025 – 22.02.2026

Joël Andrianomearisoa works in a multidisciplinary manner, with materiality and scale being important aspects. Imbued with complex emotional experiences, his delicate, often ambiguous works are an ongoing series of evolving exercises that consider the aesthetics and architecture of feelings that all can perceive but not necessarily name. He works in a multidisciplinary manner, with materiality and scale being important aspects.

Born in Antananarivo, Madagascar in 1977, the artist lives and works between Paris and Magnat-l’Ètrange, both in France, and Antananarivo. He obtained a diploma in architecture from the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris in 2003. In 2016, he received the Arco Madrid Audemars Piguet Prize. In 2019, he became the first artist ever to represent Madagascar at the 58th Venice Biennale. Since then, his work has been exhibited in leading international institutions such as the MAXXI, Rome (2018), the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC (2015), the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005).

More recent commissions and exhibitions have taken place at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (November 2021), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (August 2022) and MACAAl, Marrakech (September 2022). In October 2021, Andrianomearisoa presented two public sculptures in Antananarivo with the support of the Yavarhoussen Fund. His works are part of the major international collections of the Smithsonian, Washington DC, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Yavarhoussen Collection, Antananarivo and the Museum Sztuki, Łódź.

Andrianomearisoa’s approach to poetry and architecture allows him to explore his own unique paths by creating a new architectural layout within the exhibition space. Special textiles and weaves, as well as his use of specially dyed and manufactured papers, play a major role, exploring materiality, haptics, and oversized dimensions as essential criteria. In this way, the artist succeeds in transforming spaces in his own unique way and imbuing them with emotional energy.

Andrianomearisoa continues his poetic exploration with textiles embroidered using a traditional Malagasy technique. For “Manifeste d’une Rupture,” he collaborated with artisans from his hometown of Antananarivo, again pushing the technical boundaries of traditional embroidery by using raffia, a palm fiber typical of Madagascar. The chromatic minimalism, the use of similar hues, makes the embroidered words almost impossible to read.

For the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, he will further develop these concepts and create two different, yet mutually referencing, pictorial spaces.

The exhibition was curated by Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid, Director of the Ludwig Museum Koblenz, and Jérôme Sans, artistic director, Paris.