Andrea Büttner / Flatland / Abstractions narratives #1

Andrea Büttner
Guest curator: Céline Kopp

For her first solo exhibition in France, Andrea Büttner introduces "Xerox Retrospective," a newly commissioned series of works, as well as the first European presentation of Piano Destructions.

In her work, emotions such as embarrassment or confusion are transformed into positive statements. Büttner freely embraces traditional skills and a conceptual approach; using mediums as varied as woodcutting, glass painting, sculpture, performance and video. Within this diversity of means, modesty always emerges and highlights the issue of aesthetic judgment. Her radical work translates into social, political and aesthetic subjects intertwined with the history of art and taste, often exploring religion, poverty, community, and sense of shame, considered by her as a creative force and an ethical way of viewing the world.

The exhibition includes the multiscreen installation Piano Destructions, gathering an exhaustive documentation of works by mainly male artists who, since the 1960s, have destroyed pianos as part of their practice. The gendered cacophony is placed in parallel to a video of a performance, where nine female pianists played nine pianos in unison at the Banff Center (Canada) in 2014.

With "Xerox Retrospective," Büttner offers a black and white journey in the museum’s entire graphic arts department, pulling together the invisible threads that connect her intellectual approach. She invites visitors to enter a vision of culture full of contrasts, where religious mendicant orders appear alongside figures such as Simone Weil or Chris Kraus.

Following the exhibition, an artist’s book will be co-published in 2017, presenting Büttner’s recent research into the iconography of beggars at the Warburg Institute in London.

Flatland/Abstractions narratives #1
Guest curators: Sarah Ihler-Meyer et Marianne Derrien

The exhibition Flatland / abstractions narratives #1 focuses on artists doubly mirroring the domain of visual arts in Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 book, Flatland, une aventure à plusieurs dimensions, in which the narrator, a square from "Flatland," is declared a heretic and locked up for his insistence that he had discovered "Spaceland," a three-dimensional world.

Three main methods of introducing shapes to scenarios will be on display.

Codification, whereby abstract shapes appear as signs, pictograms and ideograms structured into stories.

Condensation, when shapes and colors, in theory pictorial or sculptural, are in fact hybrids of heterogeneous vocabulary. Based on the template of musical mixes or samples, this vocabulary is visually condensed without using any symbolic code.

Finally, suggestion, in which abstract shapes and colors are suggestive, through the effects of texture and material, of sensations and atmospheres conceived by many narratives.

Flatland/abstractions narratives #1 aims to recognise the realm of historical and emerging artists, who are sometimes little known in France, and who are united, beyond the diversity of their themes, by the ambition to tell stories based on resolutely heteronomic abstract shapes.

The artists whose work will be displayed are:

Cyril Aboucaya, Wilfrid Almendra, Sylvain Azam, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Becky Beasley,Rana Begum, Louidgi Beltrame, Karina Bisch, Simon Boudvin, Jessica Boubetra, Simon Collet, Guy de Cointet, Philippe Decrauzat, Thea Djordjadze, Peter Halley, Jugnet+Clairet, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Harald Klingelhöller, Vera Kox, Pierre Labat, Fabio Mauri, John McCracken, Matt Mullican, Damián Navarro, Julien Nédélec, Bruno Peinado, Manfred Pernice, Mai-Thu Perret, Bojan Šarčević and Blair Thurman

The Promenade: A walk through Cnap's long-term loan
Until February 19

Curator: Sandra Patron

The Mrac benefits from an exceptional loan of artworks from the National Collection of Contemporary Art managed by the Cnap. This loan spans five years, and is exceptional in scope (170 works on loan, increasing the museum’s collection by 38%), hence offering more varied and historically rooted collections.

The choice of works results from collaboration with the Cnap’s scientific teams, in tune and in keeping with the existing collection, strongly influenced by the artistic history that has evolved in the region and includes the following artists:

Xavier Antin, Thomas Bayrle, Katinka Bock, documentation Céline Duval, Jimmie Durham John Giorno, Andy Goldsworthy, Carsten Höller, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Mike Kelley, Alison Knowles, Katinka Lampe, Guillaume Leblon, Allan McCollum, Adrien Missika, Joan Mitchell, Matt Mullican, Dieter Roth, Georges Tony Stoll, Gérard Traquandi James Turrell and Kelley Walker