From November 16, 2024 to April 20, 2025, the Musée GRATALOUP presented I Dreamed of the Mountain, an intimate winter exhibition dedicated to one of the most enduring and meaningful themes in GRATALOUP’s work: the mountain.

Far more than a landscape motif, the mountain occupies a unique place in the artist’s imagination. Throughout his career, it emerged as a symbol of spiritual elevation, inner quest, self-transcendence, and humanity’s confrontation with the fundamental forces of nature. Present from the earliest stages of his artistic development, this theme reappears in many forms—sometimes majestic, sometimes enigmatic, but always imbued with a profound symbolic dimension.

For this exhibition, Milena Cheynet de Beaupré assembled an exceptional selection of paintings created between 1975 and 2005, offering a unique perspective on the evolution of this subject over nearly three decades. The exhibition was dominated by several monumental works from the Great Symbolic Landscapes series, in which mountains, horizons, and vast spaces become vehicles for reflection on the human condition, the passage of time, and the infinite.

These works also reveal GRATALOUP’s deep admiration for the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose contemplative landscapes and spiritual vision of nature profoundly resonate with his own artistic approach. As in Friedrich’s work, the mountain becomes a place of meditation, a threshold between the visible and the invisible, between the physical world and the realm of imagination.

The exhibition also featured a number of earlier paintings from the 1970s, demonstrating the remarkable continuity of this inspiration throughout the artist’s career. Even in these early works, mountain forms, rocky masses, and open expanses appear as metaphors for an inner journey and a reflection on humanity’s place within the universe.

At the heart of the exhibition, a particularly striking group of works attracted special attention: the Plane Crashes series, created in August 2001, only weeks before the tragic events of September 11 in New York. Charged with an unusual dramatic intensity, these paintings evoke themes of collapse, rupture, and the fragility of human constructions when confronted with forces beyond their control. Seen in retrospect, they inevitably raise a recurring question in the history of art: can artists sometimes intuitively perceive events before they unfold? Without claiming to provide an answer, this remarkable coincidence highlights the ability of certain creators to sense the underlying anxieties of their time before they emerge in historical reality.

Through this collection of monumental and deeply contemplative works, I Dreamed of the Mountain invited visitors on an inner journey where landscapes become territories of thought, memory, and spirituality. The exhibition revealed the visionary power of GRATALOUP’s art and his unique ability to transform nature into a universal language capable of addressing the great questions of human existence.