A year after its opening, the museum today envisages another aspect of the collection, offering another perspective on the French art scene, but also another way of visiting the building and viewing its artwork.
The idea is to extend the first hanging but keeping the visitor at the heart of the artwork and the order it appears. But now it’ll be more face-on … facing oneself, facing the others, with artworks illustrating the body and its presence in our world today, how it’s represented, all about the gaze.
Situated in the Val-de-Marne, this museum resonates with this suburban setting, composed of cities in the making, dynamic populations reflecting their diverse origins and cultures.
Artists tell stories and weave our common culture – we can find ourselves thanks to them. Their worldly presence can imply a direct resonance with themselves, descriptive, documentary or critical.
It can also be metaphorical, poetical and distanced. The artist can show the way without being present and reveal information without speaking.
Today we pursue this close relationship between life and creation by gathering artists’ work which has filled the French art scene for the past 50 years. Some of these people have unfortunately already left this world but they remain an essential and memorable part, like Gina Pane’s branding.
This section is made up of groups of artists and assembling their works which have common points.
Between yesterday and today, between a near past and a present in the making, the collection is deployed in this new hanging where the varied-shaped works are assembled around a common history to evoke the question of our presence in the world. The presence of the artist, by their gaze at first, and therefore their being.
The presence of each one through the representation of a human being, a body – the figure. The figure simultaneously gathers and separates – an exclusive subject for a long time, but now which gets lost in art history, being abandoned to be better retrieved.
It crystallizes artistic attitudes, repels then attracts the avant-gardes which therefore uplifts our present history and punctuates the works with its figurative or inherent presence.
It talks of itself, of others and portrays an image, sometimes a reflection.
This new hanging is a proposition to look, a point of view.
Once again, there are thousands more, and it’s up to everyone to approach the multiple meanings of a work of art with the museum lecturers, visits with other artists, the texts of literary authors of guest critics.
As this is genuinely what we want to give – a point of view which is just an opening to accompany but encourage you to go further, to get your own opinion, your own vision. No pre-written history, and no truth either. Art history is a story in the making, like that of a museum and its relationship with others … all to be invented.
Alexia Fabre, Head Curator