of 19/06/22 to 16/10/22
After the presentation of two outstanding exhibitions, The Permanent Revolution in 2019 and South-East, Constructivism as a Legacy / Eastern Europe and South America, in 2020-21, the collaboration initiated between the Fondation Vasarely and the Centre Pompidou continues this year with the exhibition Modernités cosmiques. It will be held from June 18 to October 16, 2022, at the Architectonic Centre, Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence. This event will be an opportunity to see masterpieces of modernity from the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, and the works of artists who share a common source of inspiration: the cosmos and the infinitely large. This exhibition will show the interest of avant-garde artists in sidereal observation, which is known to be present in the work of Victor Vasarely, and its persistence in current artistic creation. The exhibition weaves the links between the cosmic imagination and artistic modernity by presenting works from different aesthetics and periods from the 1920s to the present day. From Frantisek KUPKA, to Antoine PEVSNER, via Jean DEWASNE, BRASSAI, Lucio FONTANA, Evariste RICHER, Max ERNST, Alain JACQUET… these artists reveal in their perception and interpretation of the stars and the cosmos. Its curator, Michel Gauthier, curator at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, offers here, in a selection of twenty-four works and twenty artists, a fascinating reading of modern and contemporary art through the cosmic prism. Michel Gauthier
15€ (Permanent collection & Modernités Cosmiques) . 1h. . French, English
Artistic modernity has never turned its eyes away from the cosmos for long. From the historical avant-garde to the present day, the cosmos has been offered as a frame of reference to a number of works, accompanying various scans of art history. If the metaphysical significance of the cosmic vision and the disturbance it provokes are an anthropological fact, the history of artistic modernity reveals that the cosmos has often played a much more specific role. It continues to inhabit the imagination of the 20th century and the beginning of the next, but for very different, sometimes even contradictory reasons. The utopianism of the avant-garde, the desire for absolute modernity, for a radically new art, world and man, but also for the overcoming of all opposites, required a place that was not a place, an unknown and limitless space. Only the cosmos could claim such a role. As a non-place, it became the logical horizon of modernist utopias. During the period of the historical avant-garde, the cosmos acquired a right of pre-emption over abstraction, which it was able to assert in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly when it came to space, movement and light, and when geometry wanted to dream up rules other than those that had governed it since Euclid. As we know, the origins of abstraction are multiple. The difficult abandonment of figuration had to be authorised by different narratives. Although there is no cosmic genesis of abstraction, references to the cosmos punctuate its emergence and its subsequent developments. The chromatic passion and luminist tropism that accompanied the birth of abstraction gave an essential place to the solar and cosmic motif. If the cosmos of modern artists has long been that of science, it has gradually become that of science fiction. When it looks towards the cosmos, art today turns towards the past. This is revealed by several works of the last two decades, of various aesthetic orientations.
Agence Y2, InEvents, Konica Minolta, Labio, Sully Patrimoine, Villa Baulieu, Vins d’Aix-en-Provence
Exhibition catalogue Artistic modernity has never turned its eyes away from the cosmos for long. From the historical avant-gardes to the present day, the cosmos has been the frame of reference for a number of works and has accompanied various scans of art history. Cosmic Modernities” offers a journey through the cosmic imagination of a century of creation. 60 pages in French / Fage éditions
Modernités cosmiques
An exhibition in partnership with the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou
From 18 June to 16 October 2022Presentation
Commissaire d’exposition
The Comet
1959
Tapestry, wool
214.5 x 169.5 cmModernity and cosmos over time.
Thanks to the sponsors of the exhibition
Price : 15€Selection of works
