56 boulevard du Jardin Exotique
98000 Monaco
The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco has developed a new dynamic program at Villa Paloma in two spaces—the videoroom and the project space—focused on artists whose practices could interact and dialogue with the Duane Hanson exhibition in the main galleries and question the mutual relationship between the viewer and the work of art.
Videoroom
Oscar Murillo, meet me! Mr. Superman, 2013–15
February 20–May 30, 2016
The video meet me! Mr. Superman depicts a street scene in Murillo’s hometown of La Paila, Colombia, in which people are seen chatting, drinking, and dancing to live music. Filmed by the artist on New Year’s Day, its footage shifts between documentary and experimental styles, using both wide-angle and detail shots that, at times, abstract the figures’ bodies into a chaotic arrangement of imagery, colour, and movement. Murillo employs sound as a major, integral component of the work: its soundtrack fades between the original audio and a commissioned score, interweaving loud, jarring street noise with tempered bell-like harmonies.
Oscar Murillo’s paintings, videos, and performances are tied to a notion of community stemming from the artist’s cross-cultural ties to London, where he currently lives and works, and Colombia, where he was born in 1986.
Leticia Ramos, Vostok, 2014 (Collection NMNM)
June 15–August 28, 2016
Leticia Ramos’ artistic investigation focuses on the creation of photographic apparatuses and their relationship to the captation and reconstructing of movement and presentation on video, installation and photography. In Vostok, she develops complex geographical novels that ramify and are formalized in different media.
For the film Vostok, 2014, the artist drew her inspiration from Russian research stations’ scientific discoveries. More precisely, this station bares the name of a subglacial lake in Antarctica, on top of which it is implanted.
The sound and image plunge the viewer in what seems to be a science-fiction documentary shot in the future. Vostok presents the reconstitution of a supernatural and distant underwater landscape, where the search for life questions the relationships between men as well as the constant search for sensible relationships between mankind and its environment.
Leticia Ramos was born in 1976 in Santo Antonio da Patrulha, Brazil; she lives and works in São Paulo.
Project Space
Roland Flexner
February 20–April 17, 2016
By questioning the techniques he uses and exploring how forms are made, Flexner shares with other artists the confidence that, in order to see, we need to signify what appears, and turn it into signs. Based on a rigorous materialism, he proposes potential images, which reflect the fleeting desire that is inherent in any gaze.
His works do not focus on the subject, rather they question the conditions in which forms appear in the space of a sheet of paper: he does this by inventing new formal relations, by shifting familiar viewpoints, upsetting traditional representation.
For this show, Roland Flexner presents some 80 drawings, coming from several series (“Figures and Vanitas,” “LGY,” “LGBY,” “GIL,” “LG”), each one of which may be read in an individual way, or as part of a whole.
Roland Flexner was born in 1944 in Nice, France; he lives and works in New York.
Thomas Demand from the NMNM and UBS Art Collection
April 29–August 28, 2016
Berlin-based artist Thomas Demand is known for his large-scale photographs exploring the gap between reality and its representation. In constructing three-dimensional and life-sized models out of paper and cardboard of locations often based on mass-media images, and by photographing the constructed scene, Demand plays with the viewer’s notions of the real and the fictional.
Whereas the avatar survives, the model is destroyed after the picture is taken. Demand questions our notion of photography as a faithful transcriber to unmask the construction of the image itself. Always requiring the viewer’s double-take, the experience is such that the very idea of an original recedes completely.
In the project space both works from the NMNM collection and Ubs art collection will be shown.
Thomas Demand was born in Munich in 1964; in 2010 he was invited by the NMNM to curate the inaugural exhibition of the Villa Paloma (La carte d’après Nature) he lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.
