PARIS.- What happens when love is understood not only as a relationship between people, but as something that also binds humanity to the natural world? That question sits at the heart of Garden of Love, a new exhibition at Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in Paris, on view from October 3 through December 19, 2026.

Guest-curated by philosopher, art historian and exhibition curator Guillaume Logé, the show takes its title and inspiration from his forthcoming book Garden of Love, published by Citadelles & Mazenod. Bringing together ancient art, modern masters and contemporary artists, the exhibition considers the garden as both a physical place and a state of mind — a space where love, memory, ecology and imagination meet.

For Logé, the garden offers a way to rethink love at a moment when both human relationships and humanity’s relationship with nature are undergoing profound change. The exhibition moves beyond the idea of love as an exclusively human exchange and asks whether nature itself might be considered a partner in that relationship. His concept of Homo amorosus — a human being defined by an innate capacity for love — becomes a recurring thread connecting works drawn from different periods and cultures.

Artists represented in the exhibition include André Bauchant, Pierre Bonnard, André Breton, Raoul Dufy, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Ossip Zadkine, Eikoh Hosoe, Yang Jiechang, Antonella Zazzera and Lin Zhipeng, also known as No. 223, alongside examples of African, Egyptian, Indian and pre-Khmer art.

At the center of the exhibition is Yang Jiechang’s monumental Tale of the Eleventh Day – Red Autumn (2014–2024), a ten-panel work measuring more than 14 meters across. Made with ink and mineral colors on silk using the traditional Gongbi technique, the work imagines a primordial landscape populated by animals and humans interacting across species.





Its title refers to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which ten young people escape the plague and entertain one another with stories over ten days. Yang extends that narrative by asking what might happen on an imagined eleventh day. In his vision, the landscape becomes an allegory for a world based on equality, respect and compassion, where communication between living beings appears possible without hierarchy.

That sense of paradise — and the labor required to create and sustain it — runs throughout Garden of Love. Logé draws connections between the garden traditions of Persia, India, China, Mesopotamia and Egypt, treating the garden not simply as a beautiful refuge but as a place shaped by care, attention and responsibility. In this framework, tending a garden becomes closely related to tending relationships: both demand patience, openness and an awareness of forces beyond the self.

The exhibition also reflects on the pressures reshaping contemporary life, from climate change and ecological instability to digital technology and artificial intelligence. Rather than presenting nature as a backdrop to human experience, Garden of Love places it at the center, suggesting that future ideas of intimacy, affection and belonging may depend increasingly on how people understand their place within the living world.

Among the works reproduced in the exhibition materials are Fernand Léger’s 1930 ink drawing La femme à la rose, Pierre Bonnard’s 1900 photograph Marthe debout près d’une chaise, Lin Zhipeng’s Yang Color Releasing (2020), Frida Kahlo’s The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl (1949), and an early 18th-century Indian work titled Making love in a garden while feeding peacocks. Together, these works broaden the show’s meditation on affection, desire, nature and the symbolic history of the garden.

Logé, whose research focuses on the relationship between art and ecology, has written extensively on the subject in books including Nature sensible, Le musée monde and Renaissance sauvage. He holds doctorates in aesthetics, art history and art theory, and in environmental sciences, and is an associate researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Rather than organizing the exhibition around a single historical narrative, Logé describes his approach as bringing together different voices, materials and visual languages so that visitors can form their own connections. At its core, Garden of Love proposes that humanity’s future may depend not simply on protecting nature, but on rediscovering an emotional and imaginative relationship with it.

Garden of Love is on view at Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, 5 rue de Saintonge, Paris, through December 19, 2026.