MUDAM LUXEMBOURG

Musée d'Art Moderne Grand Duc Jean

MUDAM COLLECTION

Respecting the dynamics of the building, the Mudam Collection chose resonance rather than permanence. Therefore, it reveals itself following the rhythm and the subjects of the different exhibitions. The collection is opened to the new generation of artists with the aim of showcasing contemporary creation in all its diversity. The director Marie-Claude Beaud has proposed to the board to set up a committee of experts to give advice on her acquisition policy and guarantee the quality of the collection and its pertinence in relation to international creation. Its members are currently Carmen Giménez (20th Century Art Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Alfred Pacquement (Director of the Musée national d’art moderne of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), Paul Reiles (former Director of the National Museum of History and Art, Luxembourg) and Dr. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen (Rector of the Fine Arts Academy of Vienna).

Exhibitions

Conrad Shawcross

Mo, 16.1.2012 - So, 6.5.2012

“I'm fascinated by ideas of certainty and where science is in terms of string theory and the shape of the universe. It's just speculation but it's under this umbrella of an absolute rational empirical house which is building up on itself. It's growing but it's actually unstable underneath, like these big towers and buildings that are built on stilts.” (Conrad Shawcross)

The interests of Conrad Shawcross are mainly focussed on scientific and philosophical questions in areas such as mathematics and epistemology. These disciplines combine in his artistic work to create pictures which, like the experimental mathematical models in a museum, make complicated connections or fundamental theoretical concepts visible so that people can experience them, but without explicitly naming them. The frequent use of wood and the sheer size of the kinetic sculptures by Conrad Shawcross also create an anachronistic effect: like gigantic machines from the early days of industrialisation they jolt and vibrate, go round and round and produce things with a direct usefulness which seems completely intangible - rather like basic scientific research.

The Nervous Systems, an installation designed specifically for the Grand Hall of the Mudam, is similar to a number of other machines created since 2003 by Shawcross, an enthusiastic sailor, which produce rope, but then usually separate the rope into its individual strands again. The impressive towering form of this metaphorical machine is reminiscent of both the large-scale technological installations of modern nuclear physics and the Spinning Jenny, the first automatic spinning machine of the industrial age. Its hexagonal structure, the double helix of the spiral staircase and the threads which converge like rays on a single point create visual associations with the latest insights and theories of science, from the analysis of the genetic sequence to string theory in hypothetical physics. The slowness of the movements also clearly articulates the theme of time, which is present in both of its possible basic forms, i.e. in the cyclical repetition of the 162 bobbins and the linear progression of the rope which is produced.

Shawcross’s The Nervous Systems thus provides an artistic statement on subjects which are on the boundary between physics and metaphysics. His mysterious machine remains enigmatic, paradoxical and fascinating.

Artist: Conrad Shawcross
Curators: Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Clément Minighetti

Tina Gillen

Sa, 11.2.2012 | opening

Sa, 11.2.2012 - So, 13.5.2012

The paintings of the Luxembourg artist Tina Gillen present figurative worlds offset by abstract forms. The back-and-forth between these two dimensions goes hand in hand with a shrewd balance between a great mastery of the pictorial vocabulary and a certain “slackening” in the execution. As her point of departure, the artist often takes photographs coming from different contexts - images found in publications and on the Internet, postcards... - which she subjects to a process of abstraction: “I remove elements to almost paradoxically achieve a certain readability. I try to accentuate the abstraction and only keep the strict minimum.” The exhibition at Mudam, presenting a new large-scale installation, is focused on the connection between the natural and artificial elements in Tina Gillen's work.

Artist: Tina Gillen
Curator: Enrico Lunghi

Victor Man

Sa, 11.2.2012 | opening

Sa, 11.2.2012 - So, 6.5.2012

Combining paintings, sculptures, found objects, photographs and silkscreened works, the installations of the Romanian artist Victor Man are hallmarked by the murky atmospheres, at once fascinating and disquieting, which emanate from them. Often made with found images connected to a more or less recent past, which, removed from their initial context, take on other levels of meaning, his works exude melancholy, solitude, the violence of existence, desire, and a certain mysticism. Associated in precisely presented installations, they convey less a sense and a precise narrative, and seem more haunted by subterranean energies.

Artist: Victor Man
Curator: Christophe Gallois

Børre Sæthre

Sa, 11.2.2012 | opening

Sa, 11.2.2012 - So, 6.5.2012

The installations of the Norwegian artist Børre Sæthre take the shape of dreamlike environments, on the borderline between fairy tales and futuristic worlds, calling to mind the atmosphere of a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Like these scenes associating stuffed animals and high-tech environments, playing on the concertina-ing of eclectic worlds, they trigger in viewers an impression of uncanniness: “For me, what matters”, says the artist, “is not a narrative that is to be conveyed, but it is rather much more about creating an uncanny notion within the visitors - who of course are creating their own stories, and those are not my narratives, but their own.”

Artist: Børre Sæthre
Curator: Clément Minighetti

Sarah Sze

Sa, 11.2.2012 | opening

Sa, 11.2.2012 - So, 16.9.2012

The American artist Sarah Sze creates ephemeral in situ sculptures, in which a host of everyday objects are painstakingly assembled to form light and fragile structures which invade space, calling to mind forms of spreading networks and urban fabric. Her works are invariably conceived in response to the architecture of exhibition venues, and invite spectators to move among different scales, ranging from humble to monumental, from micro- to macroscopic. Mudam has invited Sarah Sze to make a new installation for the Museum Pavilion.

Artist(s): Sarah Sze
Curator: Marie-Noëlle Farcy

Fabrica

Sa, 11.2.2012 | opening

Sa, 11.2.2012 - So, 10.6.2012

Next Cabane and Riot Act are projects of Fabrica. This think tank of the Benetton company is based in Treviso, Italy, in an ancient villa built in the seventeenth century and restored by the Japanese architect TadaoBenettonAndo. Fabrica has to be considered as an applied creativity laboratory, a talent incubator, a studio of sorts in which young artists are invited to develop innovative projects and explore new directions, from design, music and film to photography, publishing and the Internet. These artist-experimenters are accompanied along their research path by leading figures, blurring the boundaries of culture and language. Their aim is to grasp the future by giving innovative exposure to cultural or scientific projects which open a window onto tomorrow’s world.

Artist: Fabrica
Curator: Anna Loporcaro

Maurizio Galante & Tal Lancman

Sa, 11.2.2012 | opening

Sa, 11.2.2012 - So, 13.5.2012

Maurizio Galante, a haute couture fashion designer, and Tal Lancman, a trendsetter and designer, have been associated in their Interware company since 2003. In underscoring the close link between art and industry, the exhibition challenges the creative process. It takes the form of two powerful and sensitive atmospheres. From concept to making, the works on view illustrate their meetings with Baccarat, Boffi, Cerruti Baleri, Craft, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Ithemba, the Mudam, Mussi… Merging past and future, craftsmanship and technology, Maurizio Galante and Tal Lancman describe for us the itinerary of their creations, from the “conception of the idea” to the finished products

Artist(s): Maurizio Galante, Tal Lancman
Curator: Anna Loporcaro

I've Dreamt About

Mi, 23.11.2011 - So, 4.3.2012

The societies we live in are the outcome of thinking; they take form, are re-formed, transformed and revolutionized, above all by the mind. The idea of coming up with “realist utopias”, which may seem a paradoxical expression, is, indeed the feat achieved by those artists endowed with both daring and fantasy who invent worlds with unsuspected outlines, and whose works offset our most diehard habits.

Tomás Saraceno has a go at the free flight game and imagines nomadic dwellings, inflatable structures which can be modulated and also make any idea of boundaries and circumscribed territories obsolete. Above the mere pleasure of conducting experiments, he invites us to shift the way we look at things, and think differently about the political world. Michel Paysant, for his part, metaphorically conjures up that space in the making which is the European Community, a burning issue if ever there was. For Peradam (project), he has thus pushed back the strictly administrative confines, and taken, sample-like, 55 bits of asphalt from different symbolic places, from Mitrovica bridge to the square where Frankfurt’s stock exchange stands, which he has then filmed in a slow continuous movement, like a changing organic entity.

We find the same moving dynamic, forever gestating and evolving, in François Roche’s experimental work, and the R&Sie(n) research platform he has initiated. His multi-facetted maquettes propose novel models of urban expansion. He replaces the principle of city planning applying pre-established rules, by the dynamic of an organic development in which forms produce themselves, and thus become, not the outcome of a concept, but something generated by a principle of energy. Stimulated by the most unexpected architectural experiments, François Roche, together with the artist Philippe Parreno, has responded to the invitation of Rirkrit Tiranavija and Kamin Letchaiprasert - who have developed the The Land project in the very heart of Thailand, to wit a space of creation and life linked in with surrounding communities and connected to the whole world. They have duly come up with an open structure supplied with electricity by a buffalo’s power. A collective venture during which Tiravanija and Letchaipasert’s utopian project, R&Sie(n)’s forward-looking architecture, and Parreno’s film with its bewitching atmospheric poetry, The Boy from Mars, all emerge in a connected way, and reciprocally enrich each other.

The characters in Judith Walgenbach’s photographs seem informed by a similar spirit of quest and experiment, all given the distinctive signs of the perfect scholar as he appears in our collective imagination. Grey smock, the look on his face concentrated, and spectacles with severe frames, all at once alert to the world and isolated in their searches, they seem to focus on phenomena which the advances and techniques of science enable them to observe.

It is with the same ironical distance, with regard to the idea of scientific progress that, in 2009, Nikolay Polissky created the work Large Hadron Collider for the museum’s Grand Hall. Now on view outside, this sculpture with its fantastic cogs has lost nothing of its evocative power and its capacity to get us to dream. The series of drawings which preceded and went hand-in-hand with the execution of the project helps us to discover the many different developments of this machine which, though directly inspired by the same-named particle accelerator, and extremely complex, technologically speaking, bears the patina of time and is akin to certain rudimentary but fascinating ancient tools.

For their part, Steven C. Harvey’s surprisingly subtle drawings, teeming with details, plunge us into a future with at times apocalyptic overtones. His complex compositions represent so many scenes which draw as much from a collective fount as from fantastic projections. For this artist it is not a matter of being visionary, but of staging visions in which man finds himself confined within an organized, not to say authoritarian system. Chad McCail’s seemingly more larksome, if schematic drawings also plunge us into a world governed by coercive “natural” laws, and the way it is packaged is such that any escape from it seems illusory: the various stages inexorably follow on, one from the other, in a cold progression.

This disenchantment seems to permeate the work of Michael Ashkin, who develops in space what might be vast desolate urban expanses, as are to be found in American cities. Through an anarchic succession of standardized dwellings, the flaws and cracks of our societies are drawn, in the negative. These societies are revealed in all their harshness, in the raw light of the lens wielded by Paulo Nozolino, a longhaul traveller who never stops globetrotting unto the planet’s farthest flung nooks. His candid eye, which makes no concessions but is not without propriety and delicacy, reveals an extremely sensitive portrait of humankind.

Because, if various hope-inspiring utopias have informed our societies - Nous sommes tous indésirables (“We all are undesirable”) declares the work by Fernando Sánchez Castillo referring to May ’68 slogans in France - many of them have nevertheless been short-lived. Without counting those caught up in rigid ideological systems, which are themselves now vanished or contested. Filip Markiewicz’s Mao Dollar, the video The Partisan Songspiel. A Belgrade Story by Chto Delat? and Vyacheslav Akhunov’s collages involving the figure of Lenin all remind us of the not that distant era when the world was bipolar. So the exhibition I've dreamt about symbolically mingles Thomas More's city of Amaurote and Jerem Bentham's Panopticon, proof of the complexity of our societies and above all of the significance of the challenges putting the focus on both the hope and the dark side of our projections.

Artists: Vyacheslav Akhunov, Michael Ashkin, Chto Delat? / What is to be done?, Julien Grossmann, Steven C. Harvey, Filip Markiewicz, David Maljkovic, Chad McCail, Yves Netzhammer, Paulo Nozolino, Sven Johne, Philippe Parreno, Michel Paysant, Pavel Pepperstein, Nikolay Polissky, François Roche / R&Sie(n), Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Tomás Saraceno, Eric Schockmel, Judith Walgenbach, ...
Curator: Marie-Noëlle Farcy

Mudam Luxembourg

Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

3, Park Dräi Eechelen
L-1499 Luxembourg

fon: +352 45 37 85-960
email: info@mudam.lu

OPENING HOURS
Wednesday to Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday to Monday: 11am – 6pm
Closed on Tuesday.

ENTRANCE FEES
Full price: 5€
Concessions: 3€
(18-26 years old, >60 years old, Amis des Musées, Groups from 15 people. Groups are kindly request to inform Mudam about their visit, phone: +352 45 37 85-1 or e-mail: visites@mudam.lu.)

Photos: © Pierre-Olivier Deschamps / Agence Vu, Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Architect: I.M. Pei