Lavoir Vasserot exhibition - MONTANI Ricarda

I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Ricarda Montani, and I'm an artist born in Salzburg, Austria.

My father is Italian and my mother Austrian. Three years ago, I moved to Saint-Tropez and realized my dream of making this beautiful town my home, which also inspired my next exhibition, "Le Beau Saint-Tropez!"

I set up my studio, Petit Bijou, three years ago to work on my collection for "Art Basel Miami", where I was present in 2024. After a year, friends encouraged me to turn my studio into a gallery, allowing other artists to show their work too. It turned out to be a wonderful decision - after all, taste is subjective!

For the past two years, I've been working on a special exhibition, and I'm delighted to now be presenting it in Saint-Tropez. The series was created using a vintage Polaroid camera (Land 360), used by Andy Warhol for many of his portraits. The film I used, FP-100c, has been out of production since 2013, but I managed to source high-quality stocks from collectors in Japan and the USA. What makes this Polaroid film unique is the presence of a negative, enabling large-format prints. The process of recovering the negative involves carefully removing the first layer with bleach. To my knowledge, no artist has ever exposed FP-100c film negatives or printed them on acrylic glass before.

The prints will be presented on acrylic glass, placed in white wooden boxes measuring 120x100 cm, and each piece will be limited to a series of five. Enclosed are examples of some twenty completed works from the collection. To complement the exhibition, I would also like to present my black-and-white silver photographs of Saint-Tropez. These were taken with a Leica M6 and Hasselblad camera and developed by hand in my personal darkroom. I'm attaching a few examples from this collection, which I've been working on over the last few years.

From Thursday 21 to Wednesday 27 August 2025 between 10 am and 10 pm.

Free entry.