2021 program of exhibitions

Set in a remarkable sculpture park, the LaM has established a unique itinerary for visitors, highlighting the intersection between modern art, contemporary art and art brut. With over 7,000 works, the museum provides a striking overview of the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. By encouraging new ways of interacting and thinking about art, whether through its permanent collection, temporary exhibitions or cultural programme, the museum is focused on sparking your sense of curiosity, and leaves you feeling inspired and moved.

Inaugurated in 1983 to house the modern art donation bequeathed by Geneviève and Jean Masurel, the LaM has since emerged as a leading museum on the world stage. Boasting an ambitious programme, it encourages encounters between artists who not only bear witness to their time, but weave a deeply personal perspective into their work.

Laure Prouvost. Deep See Blue Surrounding You
Until October 3, 2021

Laure Prouvost is a native of the Lille Metropolis and winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013. The exhibition sees her revisiting the installation that she presented at the most recent Venice Biennale, Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre, putting it in dialogue with the Museum’s art brut collection, which she takes possession of with humorous intent.

Using video, drawing, tapestry, ceramics, photography and, above all, language, she creates immersive installations. Manipulating words and images, she invents new expressions and narratives with dual meanings, in which reality and fiction intermingle to create stories imbued with humour.

Organised around the film They Parlaient Idéale, which follows a poetic, road trip taken by a motley little community on their way to Venice (via Roubaix!), the exhibition presented at the LaM blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and between the artist’s own works and works from the Museum’s art brut collection.

Curated by Marie-Amélie Senot, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary art, LaM

The french pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale was produced by the French Institute in closed collaboration with the french Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs and the french Cultural Ministry. It was curated by Martha Kirzsenbraun.
 

Giorgio Griffa. Marvels of the unknown
February 12–November 28, 2021

Made up of some hundred works (large-scale drawings and canvases), most of which have never or only very infrequently been exhibited before, the exhibition that the LaM will be devoting to Giorgio Griffa (born in Turin in 1936) in early 2021 is an invitation to discover a major figure on the Italian art scene who has previously been given little exposure in France.

Despite possible connections with Arte Povera, Minimal Art and Analytic Painting, Griffa’s works cultivate a measure of independence and, albeit with humility, the artist strives to put himself at the service of the unfettered intelligence of matter.

Like Paul Klee’s work, Griffa’s art follows the simple, timeless and sometimes haphazard pulsations of living, moving bodies. A form of hedonism, an expression of the simple joy of existing, emanates from his palette of glowing colours, which Henri Matisse himself would not have disowned.

Curated by Sébastien Delot, Director, Chief Curator, LaM and Marie-Amélie Senot, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary art, LaM

Guillermo Kuitca, denouement
April 16–August 15, 2021

The LaM is inviting the Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca to present over forty years of creation through groups of works (drawings, paintings and installations) most of which have never been exhibited in Europe. Multifaceted and created in dialogue with a variety of pictorial languages, Kuitca’s artistic work is constantly reinventing space, oscillating between repurposing of architectural plans and large-scale compositions with hints of cubism.

Almost 30 years after his presentation at Documenta IX (1992) and 20 years after his last exhibition in France at the Fondation Cartier, this event, designed in close collaboration with the artist himself, is an invitation to rediscover an essential body of work, providing an overview of an artist who is largely unknown in our country although he is one of the central figures in Latin American creation.  

Curated by Sébastien Delot, Director, Chief Curator, LaM and Grégoire Prangé, Curation Coordinator, LaM

Paul Klee, between-worlds
September 18, 2021–January 9, 2022 

Initially scheduled for February 2021 and postponed to the autumn due to the health crisis, Paul Klee, between-worlds will be taking a fresh look at the work of one of the few modern artists represented in the Masurel Donation yet to be the subject of a monographic exhibition, focusing on his interest in the question of “art’s origins.”

Like many other avant-garde artists, Klee sought new forms of pictorial expression. In 1902, following his stay in Italy, he realised that the arts of Antiquity and the Renaissance were not compatible with his artistic goals. In order to escape the dead end of academic canons and be able to create something new, he had to identify the “original source” from which (as it was then supposed) all forms of art had sprung.

Bringing together no fewer than 120 works from different periods of the artist’s creative life, in dialogue with a series of objects and documents from his personal collection, the exhibition will be highlighting the four pathways that Klee chose in his quest for the origins of art—children’s drawings, non-Western art and prehistoric art—while providing a critical counterpoint to the myth of a return to the sources of creation.

Curated by Sébastien Delot, Director, chief curator, LaM, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Head curator, Zentrum Paul Klee, Jeanne-Bathilde Lacourt, Curator for modern art, LaM assisted by Grégoire Prangé, Curation Coordinator, LaM and Livia Wermuth, Volonteer art historian, Zentrum Paul Klee

Exhibition co-produced with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, where it will be presented from May 7 to September 5, 2021.
With the support of the Fondation Crédit Mutuel Nord-Europe, exhibition sponsor

Press contacts: 
National and international press - Claudine Colin Communication
Pénélope Ponchelet: T +33 (0)1 42 72 60 01 / lam@claudinecolin.com
Regional press - LaM 
Florentine Bigeast: fbigeast@musee-lam.fr / Alexandre Holin: T +33 (0)3 20 19 68 56 / aholin@musee-lam.fr 

The LaM is a Public Establishment for Cultural Cooperation whose members are the Métropole Européenne de Lille, the City of Villeneuve d'Ascq and the french State.