CARNETS D'ARTISTES

This exhibition offers an immersion into the world of artists’ notebooks, bringing together historical and contemporary works. From the studio notebook to the most intimate visual diary, these objects reveal a space of creation where sketches, notes, fragments of text, collages and collected images intersect.

Beyond their preparatory function, notebooks appear here as genuine spaces of self-narration. Whether historical or contemporary, they reveal how artists construct, page by page, a form of self-narrative in which the creative process, personal memory and observation of the world come together. Within these mobile and fragmentary surfaces, gestures, rhythms and temporalities specific to each artistic practice take shape.

The exhibition pays particular attention to notebooks that belong to distinct artistic practices. For certain artists, including Marianne Berenhaut, Sarah Kaliski and Steven Baelen, the notebook is not simply a preparatory tool, but a space of creation in its own right, where drawing, writing and the assemblage of images form works of art. The notebook thus becomes a singular artistic territory, where material experimentation and visual thought develop according to their own continuity.

Alongside these notebooks rooted in established practices, the exhibition will feature notebooks created especially for the occasion by artists from our wider personal and professional circles. Working on Saint-Martin Bookshop notebooks sent to them ahead by the bookshop, these newly created contributions will extend the reflection on the notebook as a living space of creation, bringing together different generations, sensibilities and ways of working.

By bringing together these diverse approaches, the exhibition highlights the notebook as an artistic form at the crossroads of the studio, the personal archive and the diary. It reveals itself here as an autonomous space, conducive to experimental, hybrid and deeply sensitive practices.

Exhibition from November 6 2026 to February 6 2027.
Curated by Barbara Cuglietta , Ariane Defrain & Saint-Martin Bookshop.