Sedje Hémon - EMOTION OF SPIRITS
“The logical explanation is the relationship between painting and music, both of which live in me and my work as a spiritual intermediary”, said Sedje Hémon. For decades, Hémon’s multifaceted practice was lightyears ahead of the way artistic practice has been understood within the West. Hémon described her paintings as music compositions and their abstract forms are to be read as scores in relation to various musical parameters such as duration, pitch and timbre, while fulfilling her theory of the “integration of the arts.” This was her effort to make comprehensive the common origin and intersectionality of all arts and sciences.
The title of her tryptic takes its cue from an eponymous painting titled Émotion des Esprits. And like many of her works reveal, Hémon’s practice was a deep deliberation on natural sciences and epistemologies shaped by her lived experience as shoah survivor and resistance. Sedje Hémon excelled in the making of cut-outs, sculptures, musical instruments like the Hémon Pan Flute and method, as well as inventing medical devices and corrective prosthetics. In 1955, she debuted a career as a painter in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles group exhibition Comparaisons at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since then her works have been presented by orchestras like the Athens Symphony Orchestra and in few exhibitions across Europe. In 2017 her work was presented at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.