Artists

Joseph Beuys

Press release

If we limit ourselves to exact reproduction, we halt the evolution of the spirit. — Constantin Brancusi

Thaddaeus Ropac London presents the first UK exhibition dedicated to Constantin Brancusi’s photographs in over two decades – and the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since his landmark Tate Modern show in 2004. The exhibition brings together three decades of the Romanian artist’s photographic work, the majority of which will be shown in London for the first time. In 2026, the 150th anniversary of the modernist sculptor’s birth will be marked by a programme of institutional exhibitions worldwide, including Brancusi, The Birth of Modern Sculpture at the H’ART Museum in Amsterdam and Constantin Brancusi at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, both organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Photography formed an integral part of Brancusi’s practice, as both a documentary tool for his sculptural works, and an artistic medium in its own right. Some of Brancusi’s sculptures survive only through photographs, including Woman Looking into a Mirror (1909–14), which was later adapted into Princesse X (1915–16; Centre Pompidou, Paris), his controversially phallic portrait of psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. In 1956, Brancusi bequeathed his entire studio to the French State, including a significant body of photographs, which later became the focus of an exhibition presented alongside his first major retrospective in France at the Centre Pompidou in 1995.