Every year, concurrently with the permanent presentation of its collections, the museum holds two major temporary shows. As a rule, their theme is based on the museum’s identity, history and collections, as well as on the desire to keep the institution open to current artistic activity.
Some exhibitions have a historical character, Chagall et l'avant-garde russe dans les collections du Musée national d'Art moderne /Chagall and the Russian Avant-garde in the collections of the Musée national d'Art moderne (5 March /29 May 2011).
Others are based on the museum’s collections. In the spring of 2010, Italian drawings, the first part of a triptych devoted to the museum’s collections of drawings. Followed, in 2011, by French drawings, and, in 2014, by Nordic drawings.
Others still emphasize contemporary art, Stephan Balkenhol, Sculptures et dessins. Sculptures and Drawings (30 October 2010 /23 January 2011)
Lastly, every year the museum reaches out to Grenoble’s inhabitants by offering an extra-muros exhibition in one of the city’s neighbourhood facilities.
New York, 2001, Peinture à l'encaustique sur toile marouflée sur bois, 81 x 116 cm, Collection particulière, ADAGP, Paris, 2013
PHILIPPE COGNEE
From 10 November 2012 to 3 February 2013
Next autumn, in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts in Dôle, the Musée de Grenoble will be holding a retrospective show of the work of Philippe Cognée.
Philippe Cognée appeared on the art scene in the mid-1980s, with a figurative painting marked by primitivist overtones. In the early 1990s, he deeply questioned his thinking and started to broaden his ideas. Basing his work on an original pictorial technique, he developed a more complex research into painting and its relation to the photographic image. Underscoring the ambiguity of the visible, he contrasted the assertive objectivity of the photograph with the wavy quivering of a liquefied matter, challenging the very subject it is meant to represent. As a painting of doubt, it turns out, paradoxically, to be an act of faith in art, alone capable of reinstating the contradictory fullness of reality. The exhibition—the largest ever devoted to this artist—will bring together a hundred or so paintings, including the famous set titled Carcasses (2003), made up of 36 pictures. The show should help visitors to grasp the breadth and ambition of an oeuvre spanning more than two decades, and making Philippe Cognée one of today’s most important French painters.
Exhibition curators
Guy Tosatto, senior curator, director of the Musée de Grenoble
Exhibition catalogue
Actes Sud, November 2012
Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, 1950, bronze peint, 175,6x37x39,6 cm, © Succession Giacometti, Collection musée de Grenoble
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI
9 March – 9 June 2013
In conjunction with the Fondation Giacometti, the Musée de Grenoble will have an exhibition dedicated to the works of Alberto Giacometti from 9 March to 9 June 2013.
Regarded as one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century, Alberto Giacometti, whose stubborn research into the representation of the human figure has found a very specific echo in the art of the past 30 years, is still a rare artist in French public collections. It is in fact the Musée de Grenoble that is credited with having been the first, in1953, to acquire a work by the sculptor titled The Cage (Woman and Head). This is an unusual key piece based on the juxtaposition within one and the same space—“The Cage”—of a standing female nude and a male bust, thus recapitulating many of the artist’s concerns. In particular, it raises the issues of spatial representation, the role of the pedestal, the figure’s relationship to space, and the relation of the figures to each other…
Around these themes, and thanks to a selection of sculptures, paintings and graphic works coming from the Fondation Giacometti as well as public and private collections, French and foreign alike, this show will propose a precise and didactic approach to the artist’s method, while focusing, through a rigorous spatial arrangement, on recapturing each work’s full share of mystery and its powers of fascination.
Exhibition curators
Guy Tosatto, senior curator, director of the Musée de Grenoble
Veronique Wiesinger, director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti
More informations
// History
