Mur/Murs, la peinture au-delà du tableau

Janos Ber, Claire Colin–Collin, Michel Duport, Christian Jaccard, Chriatian Lhopital, Olivier Nottellet, Emilie Satre, Soizic Stokvis

Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art holds Mur/Murs, la peinture au-delà du tableau as its first project exhibition in this year, from April 19 through June 17. This exhibition presents murals painted directly onto the walls of the gallery by eight French contemporary artists. From representational to abstract paintings, the masterpieces will be presented in monumental size on the walls of the museums. Having existed thus far only as the background for paintings, the walls this time are utilized as an important element themselves through artistic actions by the participating artists, including spreading the paint, scratching, and blackening.

Domaine de Kerguéhennec, the co-organizer of Mur/Murs, la peinture au-delà du tableau, is the institution which practices various cultural projects in the Kerguéhennec Chateau, located at Morbihan in France. In 2015-2016, the Korea-France Year of Bilateral Exchanges, GMoMA worked in cooperation with Domaine de Kerguéhennec to successfully hold Dansaekhwa, the exhibition of Korean monochrome paintings, in France (Refer to: Domaine de Kerguéhennec, “the winner of France-Korea Cultural Prize in 2016”). GMoMA has since prepared an exhibition on French abstract art, the corresponding Dansaekhwa held in France, as a continuous project of international exchanges with Domaine de Kerguéhennec. After two years of discussion, GMoMA planned the exhibition to show a wider range of today’s French art. While French art has mainly been introduced in Korea in the forms of design, media art, and impressionist paintings, this exhibition will fully focus on French contemporary art.

The artists participating in the exhibition are famous to the extent that they have been invited to the international biennale or recorded in the history of French contemporary art. The artists in their 40s to 80s represent French contemporary art from different angles. Under the influence of Support-Surface, the artistic movement from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the artists are leading the contemporary art of France while deeply searching and creatively studying what painting truly is and the potentiality of it.

GMoMA makes Mur/Murs, la peinture au-delà du tableau an occasion showing the artistic experiments of the artists and the aesthetics of French contemporary art. The artists create the world of the abstract and supernatural images through gigantic paintings and drawings, draw visitors’ attention through an abstract mural containing signs of urban life or by a mural with a spectacular sense of space using mysterious forms, and express the flickering of life through ashes and cracks by the mural where the visitors can find a novel painting made using fire or by scratching the wall. Ironically, since the first painting in history was on the wall of a cave, these paintings on the wall delivering the experimental work of modern artists stimulate the primitive human desire for art. Thanks to the murals in the GMoMA gallery that are face to face or side by side with each other, visitors can experience the creative energy of each artist, reaching 9 meters high and as far as 50 meters wide for each work.

The artist’s works only exist during the period of the exhibition, as they are murals. With their limited lifespan, they are neither created a long time ago, nor able to be possessed, communicating closely with the wall, space, and other architectural elements. The mural has common ground with graffiti as both are painted on the wall, but the former has a different relation with the wall, as graffiti is expressed with provocative images on the outer wall of a building. For Mur/Murs, la peinture au-delà du tableau, the wall functions neither as something to be challenged nor as the background of a piece. In the artists’ way of seeking the essence of the image, the wall works as the main element of their creativity.

In the gallery where the painting beyond the canvas becomes the wall and the wall becomes the painting, visitors can enjoy the visual and perceptual experience as they promenade through the paintings that spread out beyond their view. Showing the maximized effect of the form and the color, the basic elements of the painting, and the traces of artistic acts through murals, Mur/Murs, la peinture au-delà du tableau offers the opportunity to fundamentally think about what an image is, in today’s world that is flooded with images, virtual reality, and symbols.

*”MUR/MURS” means “Wall/Walls” in French.

*Domaine de Kerguéhennec is a modern art museum in Morbihan in the northwest part of France, remodeled from Kerguéhennec Chateau. The institution practices various cultural projects by holding exhibitions and managing artist residences.

*Support-Surface: an avant-garde artistic movement around the 1970s. It refers to the artists’ group that fundamentally examined a painting by looking into the relationship between the support of the painting (the matter) and the surface (the image). The movement attempted to widen the domain of painting by deconstructing it by physically ripping the canvas out of the frame or by re-establishing the notion of painting.