BEAUTIFUL PAINTING IS BEHIND US
UGM | Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6, Maribor
2 August – 9 September 2012
opening: Thursday, 2 August 2012 at 19.00
You
are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition as part of the
project ART ALWAYS WINS/TERMINAL 12! Opening speaker: Mitja Čander,
programme director of MARIBOR 2012 – European Capital of Culture.
Exhibition curators Arne Brejc and Eva Hober will held a guided tour of
the exhibition after the opening.
The
exhibition was initiated by Jean-Luc Maslin, Cultural Counsellor and
Director of the French Institute of Turkey. He suggested to Eva Hober, a
gallerist from Paris, to curate an exhibition focused on contemporary
French artists. Beautiful painting is behind us has already been
on display in Istanbul (2010), Ankara (2011) and Nantes (spring of
2012). For the exhibition at the Maribor Art Gallery, Eva Hober decided
to expand it with works by several Slovenian artists and she invited
Arne Brejc for a collaboration. In 2013, a second version of the
exhibition, with a new group of artists, will first be shown in Europe.
Then, the show will be hosted by in USA, in 2014.
Beautiful painting is behind us
exhibited by the Maribor Art Gallery, is one of the exhibitions in the
frame of the Art always wins project / Terminal 12 and has been
supported by the Maribor 2012 – European Capital of Culture and the
French Institute Charles Nodier. Thirty-six artists from France and
Slovenia exhibit their most recent works, which are exceptional
contemporary artistic confessions, a commentary and analysis of Man
being trapped in the shackles of this complex world. The exhibition is
about the power of contemporary painting which leaves no one cold and
unaffected; it speaks about the generation of artists who have grown and
formed themselves under the influence of television, computers, comics,
film and the great classic treasure chest of art, and for whom the
painting has remained a relevant medium. Each with their own expressive
language the artists bear witness to the violence of the modern world.
Their return to figurative art reflects a brilliant and at the same time
distressing picture of our time in which numerous references to
history, painting and the world in general blend into an interpretation
of reality and reveal an often visionary interpretation of our
contemporary myths and society. In spite of the variety of stylistic
languages used by individual artists, several features are common to
their works, such as subliminally accentuated interpretations in the
works by Axel Pahlavi, Youcef Korichi and Audrey Nervi, and the
violently marked flow in the works by Jérôme Zonder, Damien Deroubaix,
Ronan Barrot, Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille.
»When
today a young painter /paintress stands in front of a canvas or any
other medium used, this surface is never white, never entirely empty; a
white canvas is only an appearance, yet never an emptiness. Through this
surface the history of art pulsates, the images seen by young artists,
reproductions and originals stored in their memory (even though they
never think of them); through this surface an enormous arsenal of
contemporary media imagery is moving, thousands of images that surround
artists in their every-day life. It seems painters these days very
rarely think in advance about the »form«, about its abstract idealism,
purity, spirituality, metaphysics. Media image-making is realistic,
semantically functional, focused on the message, while the appearance
serves the content; in media there is on principle nothing abstract in
the Kantian sense, nothing by itself, because of itself. As a result,
contemporary painting is »realistic«, combining cartoon, film,
photography and television fragments, and is just as performative as any
external action; it contains elements of posters and media, music and
video spots, it is full of sophisticated colours and polished surfaces.
It is equally full of all that belongs to an urban visual dumpsite, the
disintegration of used images and commercial messages: these messages
have been present in another medium, and have now found their place in
the painting as a fragment, an association, a metaphor, also as an error
or enigma – to summarize, as a much more »open work« than allowed by
the media communicative functionality. In a special way the paintings
are dysfunctional, useless, private, but because of this they address
the viewer with even more passion.« (Tomaž Brejc and Arne Brejc, from
the exhibition catalogue).
artists: Ronan
Barrot, Julien Beneyton, Romain Bernini, Katia Bourdarel, Alkis
Boutlis, Andrej Brumen Čop, Damien Cadio, Nicolas Darrot, Damien
Deroubaix, Tina Dobrajc, Gregory Forstner, Mito Gegič, Cristine Guinamand, Jaša, Barbara Jurkovšek, Youcef Korichi, Kosta Kulundzic, P.
Nicolas Ledoux, Élodie Lesourd, Iris Levasseur, Marlène Mocquet, Audrey
Nervi, Maël Nozahic, Florence Obrecht, Axel Pahlavi, Mark Požlep,
Raphaëlle Ricol, Lionel Sabatté, Miha Štrukelj, Iva Tratnik, Ida Tursic
in Wilfried Mille, Luka Uršič - Kalu, Sanja Vatić, Uroš Weinberger,
Jérôme Zonder
curators: Arne Brejc and Eva Hober
produced by: Kultura 21
coproduction: Maribor 2012 - European Capital of Culture / Terminal 12
supported by: Institut Français Ljubljana and Maribor 2012 - European Capital of Culture
