Pour les passionnés et les curieux, une visite exceptionnelle de deux heures vous fera pénétrer au cœur de l'univers du Folklore. Accompagné par un médiateur, vous découvrirez les relations, parfois ambigües, qu’entretiennent les artistes avec le folklore, de l’emprunt formel à l’imitation d’une méthode, de la fascination à l’ironie critique. Se concentrant essentiellement sur une définition et une histoire européennes du terme, l’exposition Folklore offre également une rencontre entre histoire de l’art et histoire des sciences humaines, car elle dévoile en parallèle l’invention et l’institutionnalisation progressive d’une discipline, notamment grâce aux fonds du Mucem, héritier du Musée national des arts et traditions populaires.

CALENDRIER SEPTEMBRE 2020

Samedi 26 septembre à 15h

Les conceptrices de l’exposition Chagall. Le Passeur de lumière, qui sera présentée à partir du 17 octobre 2020, vous proposent des conférences approfondies consacrées à l’importance du vitrail dans l’œuvre de Marc Chagall. La meilleure façon de découvrir l’exposition en avant-première !

Jeudi 12 mars 2020
LES VITRAUX DE CHAGALL, DES PREMIÈRES COMMANDES FRANÇAISES À L’INTERNATIONAL
Elia Biezunski, commissaire de l'exposition

Dans le cadre des célébrations des 800 ans de la cathédrale de Metz

From 18 July 2020, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will present an exhibition devoted to Yves Klein (1928-1962), a major figure on the post-war French and European art scene. «The sky as a Studio » reveals the aesthetic affinities he developed, outside the New Realists’ movement, with a constellation of artists, from the Gutai group in Japan to the spatial artists in Italy, from the ZERO artist group in Germany to the Nul group in the Netherlands. As a «painter of space», Yves Klein projected art into a new odyssey with them. The sky, the air, the void and the cosmos became the immaterial workshop for reinventing art and man’s relationship with the world after the tabula rasa brought about by the war. As early as 1946, Yves Klein associated his name to the other side of the sky, appropriating this infinite space as one of his canvases, while the spatial artists close to Lucio Fontana tried out making «artificial forms appear in the sky, spectacular rainbows». Piero Manzoni became committed to the search for a limitless space in which «matter becomes pure energy», which responds to Klein’s search for immaterial pictorial sensibility and to Otto Piene’s search for art as a sensory and regenerative medium for reconnecting man to the universe.

The new visual arts strategies developed aim to go beyond the materiality of the work of art, seen as an obstacle to freedom, and venture into the experience of monochromy, emptiness and light, in gestures where the work is, like Lucio Fontana’s lacerated or perforated canvases, open to infinity. This cosmogonic aspiration is shared by these artists who, in the tradition of Klein, combine water and fire, earth and air. The light works by Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, which evoke galaxies in formation, reveal their fears in the face of the threat of nuclear war. The body becomes the seismograph of this acute awareness that man must escape from the traumatised earth, escape from it or re-fertilize it like Kazuo Shiraga’s reptile dances in the mud, which, as with Klein’s Anthropometries, make the body the very medium of painting.
In the context of the spatial conquest, the poetic dimension of the cosmos is put to the test and Klein affirms: «It will not be with rockets or sputniks that man will achieve the conquest of space because, in this manner, he will always remain a tourist in space; but it is rather by living in it and feeling it». «With Claude Parent, he explores the utopia of an architecture of air that makes energy and air the main building materials in dialogue with other experimental projects such as Constant’s New Babylon, Gyula Kosice’s hydro-spatial city, Manzoni’s pneumatic theatre designed to host Piene’s «ballets of light», which make the work of art the unlimited space where the body can project itself. In the wake of Klein, who considers how «the free man is so free that he can even levitate!» «this generation of artists share a new libertarian idealism, and make the sky the immaterial and spiritual shield against the nuclear arms race and the proliferation of its artificial suns.

Artists present or exhibited:
Bernard Aubertin, Claude Bellegarde, Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Constant, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Hans Haacke, Hiroshi Hamaya, Oskar Holweck, Eikoh Hosoe, Fumio Kamei, Akira Kanayama, Kikuji Kawada, Yves Klein, Gyula Kosice, Yayoi Kusama, Liliane Ljin, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Sadamasa Motonaga, Saburo Murakami, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Roberto Rossellini, Rotraut, Shozo Shimamoto, Fujiko Shiraga, Kazuo Shiraga, Takis, Jean Tinguely, Günther Uecker, Jef Verheyen, Lothar Wolleh, Gil J. Wolman.

Curators : Emma Lavigne, President of the Palais de Tokyo, in collaboration with Daniel Moquay, Director of the Yves Klein Archives
Research and exhibition managers: Colette Angeli et Chloé Chambelland

At the heart of the white architecture of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Susanna Fritscher transforms one of the galleries suspended between earth and air into an imaginary landscape.
The Austrian artist who is established in France, and who recently turned the spaces of the Floating Worlds of the Lyon Biennial, the Nantes Museum of Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi into immateriality, reinvents our relationship to reality, to what surrounds us, to the environment it raises, confusing the atmosphere with architecture that becomes liquid, aerial, vibrating. «The materials I use, plastics, films, veils or threads, are so volatile that they seem to merge with the volume of air they occupy. In the interplay they create in and with space, materiality shifts and changes: air now has a texture, a brilliance, a quality ; we can perceive its flow, its movement. It acquires a palpable, modular reality - a reality that is almost visible - or audible, in my most recent works that can be described in terms of vibration, oscillation, of a wave, of a frequency... » specifies the artist.

She explores the ventilation system of the Centre Pompidou-Metz like an organism whose pulse she captures. The pulsations of the air emanating from its metabolism become the raw material for a choreography of lines formed by the long silicone threads that capture and reflect the light. The constantly reinvented undulating waves propagate and set in motion this impalpable forest that visitors are invited to cross. The grand nef of the arts’ centre resonates and amplifies the air that circulates in it, metamorphosing it into an immense body of sound, a wind instrument that allows the immense blasts of air to be set free from the building. This moving, contemplative and panoramic viewpoint captures the movements and shimmering of nature. As if by capillarity, the rhythms generated by these infinite lines of silicone, which Susanna Fritscher tames and orchestrates, vibrate and harmonize in unison with those of the bodies of the visitors, who are invited to detach themselves from gravity. This environment also makes the instability of the present time perceptible, and its quivering is a prelude or an invitation to possible upheavals.

Mécène fondateur :

Frémissements est présentée avec le soutien du Ministère des Arts et de la Culture d’Autriche et du Forum Culturel Autrichien

Frémissements a été produite en collaboration avec Phileaset legero united | con-tempus.eu

All along the year 2020 several works by the artist Giuseppe Penone will travel over the territory of the Grand Est Region, establishing between Metz and Sarrebrück cross-border links dear to the Centre Pompidou-Metz ever since its collaboration with the Saarlandmuseum in 2016 on the occasion of the exhibition Entre deux Horizons.

Born in 1947, in Italy's Piedmont region, Giuseppe Penone has been exploring materials, forms and processes inspired by nature. As early as the end of the 1960's, the sculptor shared the reflections of artists principally active between Turin and Rome, united under the banner of Arte Povera by the art critic Germano Celant. All of them worked from raw materials, from pure energies, from everyday experiences or linguistic action. Faced with the collapse of the Italian economic miracle, as with the development of a consumer society and cultural industries, the "poor art" that they created, aspired towards radical austerity, to a reduction of means down to the essential, to a nomadism outside of institutions. An assumed simplicity, which prefigures current practices, eager to project sobriety.

The forest, the mountain, the river, the body are at the origin of Giuseppe Penone's work. His preferred gestures are simple: to kiss or take hold of a tree trunk in order to feel the slow process of concentric and upward growth; find the twigs burrowed in a manufactured wooden beam, by carving one by one the wood's growth rings... A living model of a perfect sculpture, the tree adapts to its environment in an exemplary fashion. The artist compares it to a skater and a tightrope walker, perfectly stable on unstable ground, defying gravity in order to catch the light. « Pump » and « lung », the tree is also a living organism which drains fluids and breathes the atmosphere.

From the Château de Versailles to the Inhotim Park in Brazil, the sculpted trees by Giuseppe Penone have adorned the most classical of gardens as well as the wildest of forests. Jointly invited by the Saarlandmuseum de Sarrebrück and the Centre Pompidou- Metz, the artist will intervene in the spring of 2020 in the public space of these two cities, in order to implant two twin sculptures: the bronze casts of trees, holding in their branches a river stone, of which the form is suggestive of a skull will signify the emergence of a thought. (Idee di Pietra, « Stone's ideas »). In Sarrebrück, the implanted tree, close to the Saarlandmuseum will be surrounded by Jaumont stones, recognisable by their typical golden hue from Metz. In Metz, the tree will be accompanied by pink sandstone from the Vosges, specific to the region of La Sarre. A geological dialogue will thus be established between the two cities.

Finally, to celebrate its 10 years, le Centre Pompidou-Metz is inviting Giuseppe Penone to take over its Forum for a protracted duration. The artist will implant in this freely accesible space, largely open to the exterior and remarkably high, an unprecedented installation: the bronze cast of a walnut tree of around 15 metres high and of which certain segments and ramifications will be in white marble. The branches of the tree and the splayed framework of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, designed by Shigeru Ban, will enter into resonance, sharing the similar structure of a meshed parasol. Plant growth, melting of an alloy and solidification of stone: the elements brought together in Indistinct confini – Noce (« Indistinct Frontiers - – Walnut ») form a hybrid wood both mineral and metallic, immaculate, and weathered the artist however sees in these different materials the continuum of a unique material, engaged at different moments with fluidity and dispersal.

Giuseppe Penone's interventions benefit from grants from Interreg V A- Grande Région : project "NOE-NOAH", and from the support of Constellations – City of Metz.

Founding sponsor: