Spring exhibitions

Lucy Skaer: The Hunt
Daniel Otero Torres: (Dis)placements
The Pergola: new display of the collection
March 25–June 4

The Life Aquatic
March 25–June 18

Curated by Sandra Patron, Director of Mrac

Lucy Skaer: The Hunt
Lucy Skaer (born in 1975, lives and works in Glasgow) has gained international recognition on the art scene in only a few years. In 2007, she was among six artists selected to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale and in 2009, she was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. For her first monographic exhibition in France, Lucy Skaer takes over 900 square-meters on the first floor of the museum, presenting a set of existing pieces dating from the last five years as well as new creations, representative of her practice which combines drawing and large-format prints with sculpture and film. Lucy Skaer develops working procedures where recognisable, abstract objects and images are transformed by all sorts of manipulations, repetition and disparities of scales. Driven by reality’s prolific links with the sublime, Lucy Skaer endeavours to reveal the essence of certain objects and materials to give a personal and evocative interpretation of elements to the past.

At the Mrac, she presents, among others, the installation Eccentric Boxes (2016, coproduction Rennes Biennale)—made in and on the basis of her family home; Stick and Stones (2013-ongoing), a serie of sculptures that starts with a slice of red mahogany, which gradually evolves, providing a serie of horizontal sculptures lying on the ground; as well as a new body of work which establish a parallel between desire and satisfaction, the animate and the inanimate and in fine, between abstraction and narration.

Daniel Otero Torres: (Dis)placements
In a space devoted exclusively to emerging artists, the Mrac presents a series of works by Colombian artist Daniel Otero Torres (born in 1985). Playing with clichés both literally and figuratively, the artist retouches and reworks with graphite photographs made on the ground or taken from the internet in order to change the figures’ poses. In a skilful play on staging and mise-en-scène, the artist explores the representation of the Other and diverts stereotypes from the ethnocentric perspective.

The Pergola: new display of the collection
Daniel Buren, Andrea Büttner, Andy Goldsworthy, Renée Lévi, Laurent Grasso, François Morellet, Tobías Rehberger, Francisco Tropa, Tatiana Trouvé, Ian Wallace, Raphaël Zarka, among others

The new display of the collections brings together the 2016 acquisitions, along with a selection of artworks from the National Collection of Contemporary Art’s collection managed by the Cnap.

Titled after the newly acquired work by Pierre Leguillon, the exhibition is an invitation to pause and marks an area of transition that refers to the outside world and to the contemplation of it. Moreover, The Pergola by Leguillon also allows the introduction of reflection on the painting and its migration into other disciplinary fields.

The Life Aquatic
Dove Allouche, Marcos Avila Forero, Hicham Berrada, Simon Faithfull, Aurélien Froment, Ellen Gallagher, Piero Gilardi, Maria Laet, Laurent Le Deunff, Jochen Lempert, Mehdi Melhaoui, Enrique Ramirez, David Renaud, Allan Sekula, Shimabuku, Maarten Vanden Eynde, Hannah Wilke

From Moby Dick to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, from William Turner’s seascapes to Odilon Redon’s symbolist engravings, the sea has for centuries inspired artists.

The exhibition The Life Aquatic brings together the works of 17 artists from around the world and explores Man’s ambivalent relationship with the sea. Through open and polysemous works, rejecting any catastrophist and moralistic stance, it proposes to take a look at all of these questions from both a poetic and committed viewpoint. Between beauty and violence, contemplation and political awareness, The Life Aquatic attempts to establish an analogy between two ecosystems, that of contemporary humankind and that of the sea, this huge expanse of water which is home to many issues: our seventh continent.