Simple Shapes

ExhibitionsSimple Shapes

  • GE90 Design Team, Jet Engine Fan Blade (model GE90-115B), 2011

From 13 June to 5 January 2015

Locations : Galerie 2
Category : Exhibitions
Public : All ages
  An exhibition by Centre Pompidou-Metz and Fondation d'Entreprise Hermès

This exhibition brings to the fore our fascination with simple shapes, from prehistoric to contemporary. It also reveals how these shapes were decisive in the emergence of the Modern age.

The years between the 19th and 20th centuries saw the return of quintessential forms through major universal expositions which devised a new repertoire of shapes, the simplicity of which would captivate artists and revolutionise the modern philosophy. They introduced, within the evolution of modern art, both an alternative to the eloquence of the human body and the possibility that shapes could be a universal concept.

Nascent debates in physics, mathematics, phenomenology, biology and aesthetic had important consequences on mechanics, industry, architecture and art in general. While visiting the 1912 Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne with Constantin Brancusi and Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp stopped short before an aeroplane propeller and declared, "Painting is dead. Who could better this propeller?"

These pared-down, non-geometric shapes, which occupy space in a constant progression, are no less fascinating today. Minimalist artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra, spiritualist artists such as Anish Kapoor, metaphysical artists such as Tony Smith, or poetic artists such as Ernesto Neto are as attentive to simple shapes as were the inventors of modernity.

The exhibition draws on the senses to explore the appearance of simple shapes in art, nature and tools. This poetic approach is balanced by an analytical view of the twentieth century's history.

It connects scientific events and technical discoveries with the emergence of modern shapes. Subjects pertaining to industry, mechanics, mathematics, physics, biology, phenomenology and archaeology are equated with objects from art and architecture, which are in turn set alongside their ancient predecessors and natural objects.

The Fondation d'Entreprise Hermès* is joint producer and patron of Simple Shapes. Fondation d'entreprise Hermès is concerned with the creativity man employs to shape an object, a tool or an artefact. The Foundation and Centre Pompidou-Metz have therefore joined together to give a wide audience a new view of objects in their purest shape, and of the creative energy released through the interaction of man and nature.

Logo Fondation d’entreprise Hermès

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Curator:
Jean de Loisy, President of Palais de Tokyo

Associate curators:
Sandra Adam-Couralet, independent curator
Mouna Mekouar, independent curator

Exhibition design:
Laurence Fontaine

*Fondation d’entreprise Hermès supports people and organisations seeking to learn, perfect, transmit and celebrate the skills and creativity that shape and inspire our lives today, and into the future. Guided by a central focus on artisan expertise and creative artistry, the Foundation’s activities explore two complementary avenues: know-how and creativity, know-how and the transmission of skills.
The Foundation develops its own projects: exhibitions and artists' residencies in visual arts, the New Settings programme for the performing arts, the Prix Émile Hermès international design award, the Skills Academy, and projects in favour of biodiversity. It also supports partner organisations working in these areas around the globe.
The Foundation's unique mix of programmes and support is rooted in a single, underlying belief: Our gestures define us.

www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org

1. BEFORE SHAPE

There are no simple forms in this initial group. Instead, it introduces one of their characteristics: the emergence of the latent form within a still disorganised matter. Movements, silhouettes, faces push their way to the surface, caught in the act of transformation; not yet fully formed but already instilled with life. The works in this section display an energy that shapes the world, stirs its fecundity, accentuates its evolutions. Ritual objects, sculptures, photographs or drawings, they neither duplicate reality nor represent the visible, but mimic or question the vital force that pulsates within all things.


2. THE MOON

The mechanism of the world follows a mysterious dynamic, made evident to us by the very simple form of the Moon. Since the dawn of time, Man has contemplated the Moon whose constant transformation has produced multiple legends. Celebrated by poets, hinted at in ceramic, painted, observed, photographed and ultimately brought within reach, it is the very first simple form. Whether the poet’s metaphorical Moon or the scholar’s algebraic Moon, it suggests an autonomous process of transformation which characterises form as a suspended state, a hiatus in time.


3. FLUX

Form, any form, is a transitional state, a temporary stabilising of matter. A diffusional, expansive energy, it is the materialisation of a permanent activity that resonates deep within elements: stone, fire, air, water. It is this discernible vitality which the monk must meditate, or the artist whose gestures, breathing and rhythm will align to express the vibrations of the cosmos as he experiences or imagines them. Many spiritual doctrines take root in the belief that a concordance exists between objects, beings and the world including, in the early modern era, the Gnostic and theosophical movements inspired by Oriental philosophies.

4. WHO COULD BETTER THIS PROPELLER?

Forms created by the constraints imposed on them; forms adapted to the forces they exert in order to perform their function. The product of technique, they are beautiful because they are the perfect fulfilment of a need. Primitive tools such as a bow or a boomerang already display the perfection which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would be that of aero-mechanical engineering, and would captivate artists. At the 1912 Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne with Constantin Brancusi and Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp would thus stop short before an aeroplane propeller and declare that "Painting is dead. Who could better this propeller?" Part of the appeal which simple forms held for artists in the twentieth century comes from this fascination with lines that eschew subjectivity; which appear to mould themselves to the forces imposed on them.


5. BREATH

The expression of life, breath gives form to glass in its temporary molten state. Because of the symbolic nature of this vulnerable substance, this operation takes on vital meaning as soon as these two fragile elements are combined. To create a three-dimensional form using breath is to inject the content of our own body into the object, so as to give it its final shape. It is, by virtue of its plastic qualities, as though suspended between material and immaterial.


6. TO CONTAIN

To contain is to mould the properties of a content with form, or rather to stretch or swell so as to duplicate the precious weight held in check. Form symbolises how emptiness and fullness are mutually engendered; how surface tension is determined by the nature of what is inside and by the effort made to prevent it from spilling outside its contours. The dynamic simplicity of archaic forms provides modern silhouettes with a repertoire suited to industrial processes.


7. TO CUT
To cut is a symbolic act whose importance is underscored by the quality of the objects associated with it. They are both tools and emblems that derive their prestige from the finite nature of the act they are designed to perform. Symbolising the original decision, the separation between day and night, life and death, determinate and indeterminate, intimate and cosmic, the blade – and the cut it makes – is a simple form with a powerful theological and political content which, after the Second World War, enabled art to break free and found a new aesthetic.

8. BEYOND GEOMETRY

Geometry studies, ex nihilo, the properties of space by expressing in numerical form the relationships between point, line, plane and volume. A mathematical and symbolic instrument, geometry serves to depict, calculate and understand how the world is organised and the properties of things. Since the Neolithic age, Man has invented complex forms to express combinations and figures that would become the basis for creation, the best-known example being the five Platonic solids. While artists in the twentieth century believed that geometry, because of its apparent objectivity, could be the path towards a new and universal art, Euclidian geometry is here referred to from a different perspective. Simple forms appear to belong not to the mental permanence of concepts but to the dynamic of life. Their presence is influenced by evolutions in geology and advances in non-Euclidean geometry. They invite us to venture beyond traditional geometry.


9. SHAPES-FORCES

Forces mastered by new material physics and the subsequent possibilities thrown open by the ingenuity of engineers were of critical importance to art. Whereas proportion had always been central to architecture, construction now revolved around analytical reasoning, the Eiffel Tower being an iconic example. New materials such as iron, steel and reinforced concrete, the feat these constructions represent, as well as economies in materials and means produce effects of constraint, tension and balance, and the new emotions they convey became an inspiration for artists.


10. MATHEMATICAL SHAPES

By giving form to functions that reveal the invisible movements and physical consequences of their calculations using mathematical objects first described in the 1870s, scientists invented an unexpected repertoire of forms that prompted a sudden shift in artistic references, an abstraction prior to abstraction. Artists' interest in mathematics goes far back, to the invention of perspective. In the twentieth century, mathematicians' new hypotheses gave credence to the ideas of the cubists, constructivists and surrealists. As this desire to represent imperceptible dynamics grew, new simple forms emerged.


11. NATURE, BIOMORPHISM

Since Aristotle, and more specifically over the last two centuries, living things, the life cycle of plants, their morphogenesis, cellular development, diversity, reproduction and decline have given rise to biological studies, illustrations and photographic representations which identify and develop models for their essential stages. The physiological mechanisms of plants' cellular and molecular functioning were described in the early twentieth century. Artists took inspiration from this new repertoire of forms, seizing upon the leaf's contours, pliancy, decorative or symbolic value, or the maturation of a piece of fruit. These are analogies, not representations, which give a newly poetic form to the principles that presided over their creation.


12. GENERATING SHAPES

The forces of fertility are often symbolised by forms that are associated with generation and the sacred. The cosmic egg, lingam and standing stones express causal principles that are worshipped in numerous religions. The forms which represent them are pure, perfect - like the ovoid form of the egg - and transitory, because they contain life in evolution. Artists of every period have seized upon these forms and made them the subject of symbolic reflection, even though the fundamental principles of fertilisation and embyrogenesis were not understood until the nineteenth century.


13. HUMAN SILHOUETTES

Ancient civilisations offer many examples of how the human body can be depicted with extraordinarily simplicity, whether Cycladic heads or the silhouettes of predynastic Egypt. These pure forms immediately captivated western artists when they were rediscovered at the very end of the nineteenth century. Sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti reproduced Cycladic idols whose stylised, dynamic contours are a condensation of the human form. By representing the body in its most essential aspect, the artist forgoes the notion of identity in favour of a synoptic expression of human vitality. Silhouettes and faces no longer represent a single individuality but humanity as a whole.


14. ANIMAL SILHOUETTES
These animal silhouettes contain and condense the impression of speed associated with their representational form. Certain oceanic stones, in their natural or barely transformed state, embody power and sacred energy in their pure, zoomorphic line, the repository of an ancestor or a divinity. This energy, which defies the image and takes over space, enables the artist to capture its principle through elision, conserving only the alert and powerful efficiency of life. The simple or simplified form suggests the animal as it leaps or flees. It relates movement in exactly the opposite way to chronophotography which, in the late nineteenth century, multiplied the number of views to capture the many details of the animal in motion.

15. OBJECTS WITH POETIC REACTION

There is an imperceptible stage at which the mind spontaneously completes the as yet still absent form. This is the fragile moment when a stone is still completely a stone, yet already something else; the moment when it is both matter and form. The stones which Charlotte Perriand collected are symptomatic of those objects which from ordinary become "objects of poetic reaction", to borrow Le Corbusier's phrase, because they contain analogical and metaphorical propositions. Whereas found objects are eroded by nature, used objects are eroded by the forces that pitilessly fashion them. New forms appear, intended as the perfect tool, shaped through repeated gestures, carved through matter rubbed against matter. Through the very weakening inflicted by time, the form grows stronger. It relates the persistence of time on matter that elicits emotion, and the ghosts of those who used them appear in the ultimately rarefied material.


16. WEIGHT OF THINGS

Certain forms appear to result exclusively from the destiny of the substance from which they are made and which, allowed to move freely in space and time, is frozen where it falls. This section shows forms which, like a dress whose elegant drape we admire, through the effect of gravity, create new figures. In doing so they show how the materials that compose them resist or accommodate the laws of physics.


17. ENIGMAS

The form offers itself fully, in all its simplicity. Nothing is withheld, yet whoever contemplates it cannot help but see in it a symbol, a carefully composed mystery, an enigma. There is an order, it seems, to its facets yet these mute figures continue to greet us with haughty silence, refusing to deliver the solution. Astonished by such enduring fascination, we read a primordial complexity into this simplicity, as though the very necessity which seems to have presided over their creation had instilled in them an essential revelation which could never be put into words, and which is the ultimate explanation of their power of attraction.

 

  

SIMPLE GESTURES

From 26 September 2014 to 1 Mars 2015
LA GRANDE PLACE, MUSÉE DU CRISTAL SAINT-LOUIS


The mind makes the hand, the hand makes the mind. The gesture which does not create, the empty gesture, provokes and defines the state of consciousness. The gesture which creates exerts a continuous action on inner life. The hand wrenches the sense of touch from its merely receptive passivity and prepares it for experience and action. It teaches man to conquer space, weight, density and quantity. It fashions a new world and leaves its imprint everywhere upon it. It pits itself against the matter it transforms, the shape it transfigures. Educator of man, the hand multiplies him in space and time.

Henri Focillon, In Praise of the Hand (1934)


“ At the heart of the manufacture Saint-Louis (the oldest crystal factory in Europe, opened in 1586), in the museum that is home to some of the workshops’ most remarkable creations, Simple Gestures is an exhibition conceived as a counterpoint to the ideas developed in the exhibition Simples Shapes, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. While the latter highlights the fascination exerted by objects themselves, the exhibition at Saint-Louis focuses on the processes upstream of the finished piece : subtle gestures informed by expert know-how, the automatic, ‘mechanical’ gestures of everyday life, gestures alien to the repetition of mass production, expressive gestures of human relationship and interaction. A variety of registers, interpreted by the participating artists in works inscribed with the physical gestures of their makers - gestures that communicate as much as they ‘do’. Leading the visitor through the permanent heritage collections, the show’s contemporary sculptures, photographs and video works are a paradoxical reminder in this digital age, of the importance, effectiveness and persistence of gesture, and manual gestures in particular (the word ‘manufacture’ itself derives from the Latin, ‘to make by hand’.)
From the timeless wear of a pebble, held and manipulated against the palm of a hand (Gabriel Orozco) to the ‘mechanical’ gestures of everyday life (Natascha Nisic, Ali Kazma), the virtuoso handling of tools (Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Guillaume Leblon) and dance (Eva Kotatkova, Aneta Grzeszykowska and Emilie Pitoiset), each gesture celebrates the particular qualities of homo faber, whether in elemental movements that become music or sculpture (Melik Ohanian, Jean-Marie Appriou ) or the coded movements that scroll across the electronic screens that have invaded our lives (Julien Previeux).
All carry within them the most ancient and modern aspects of humanity. ”

Jean de Loisy


Simple Gestures is the first in a new series of temporary exhibitions at La Grande Place, musée du cristal Saint-Louis in Saint-Louis-lès-Bitche (Moselle), organised by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, echoing the contemporary art programmes it has sponsored since 2008 in its six exhibition spaces (Brussels, Berne, New York, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo).

Since 2008, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has initiated exhibitions in its six gallery spaces (Brussels, Berne, New York, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo). Simple Gestures will be the first in a programme of exhibitions at La Grande Place, Musée du Cristal Saint-Louis in Saint-Louis-lès-Bitche. Each year, the Foundation will propose two exhibitions whose main focus will be contemporary creation. Thematic group shows for the most part, they will consider glass or techniques, although the door will remain open to other themes.

Fondation d’entreprise Hermès will invite a cultural institution in the Lorraine region to curate three consecutive exhibitions in this space.

Centre Pompidou-Metz is the guest institution for 2014 and 2015.

Curators:
Jean de Loisy, President of du Palais de Tokyo
Sandra Adam-Couralet, independent curator

LA GRANDE PLACE, MUSÉE DU CRISTAL SAINT-LOUIS
Rue Coëtlosquet
57620 Saint-Louis-lès-Bitche
Exhibition open to the public from 26 September 2014 to 1 March 2015,
every day except Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (included in museum entry ticket, rates : 6 €, 3 €)

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