Lions Mate with Lions, They Don't Mate with Mice: Françoise Gilot

Georgina Pounds Gallery presents Lions Mate with Lions, They Don't Mate with Mice, an extraordinary selection of early paintings and works on paper by Françoise Gilot from the Serge Bril Panijel Collection, exhibited together in Mexico for the first time. Dating from 1939 to 1959, these works offer an intimate portrait of two decades in Gilot’s life, shaped by war and liberation, love and loss, motherhood and artistic discovery, and an ever-deepening determination to forge a life and artistic identity entirely her own.

To encounter these works in Mexico is to see them in a different light. Mexico has long been a place in which women artists created new visual languages from lives marked by transformation. Frida Kahlo turned the body, love and pain into an uncompromising language of selfhood, while Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon, Kati Horna and Bridget Bate Tichenor were among the women who found in Mexico a place for artistic and personal reinvention. Many arrived carrying the consequences of war, exile, fractured relationships and displaced lives, and found here the possibility of constructing another world.

Across these same decades, Gilot’s work was shaped by the experience of being a young woman determined to become an artist, by the violence and uncertainty of wartime France, by love and motherhood, and by the struggle to preserve an identity alongside one of the most powerful artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso. Seen in Mexico, her work enters into a conversation with women who similarly transformed experiences of rupture, desire and change into images of extraordinary force. Gilot’s relationship with Picasso has too often become the lens through which her own work is viewed. Picasso remains part of the history, as love, influence, conflict and circumstance inevitably become part of an artist’s life, yet never its core. What persists is the force with which Gilot transformed lived experience into an artistic language of her own.

At the heart of the exhibition is the Serge Panijel Collection. Preserved together across decades; its depth allows these formative years to be encountered with unusual intimacy. Paintings sit alongside drawings and gouaches; resolved compositions beside exploratory gestures. Rather than presenting isolated works, the collection allows us to follow Gilot thinking returning to forms, changing them, testing colour and discovering possibilities on paper that would continue into paint. Each work bears a dedicated label on its reverse, adding another intimate and personal layer to a collection preserved across generations.

The exhibition is ultimately about that insistence: about love without surrender, transformation without disappearance, and the possibility of emerging from the lives we share with others still unmistakably ourselves.

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Today, Gilot’s work is held in major museum collections internationally, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Musée Picasso, Paris; the Musée Picasso, Antibes; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux; the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret; the Musée de Grenoble; the Musée de l’Annonciade, Saint-Tropez; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, among others