Relief(s)
10 April–20 September 2015
Opening: Thursday, 9 April, 6:30pm
The Turbulences – Frac Centre
88 rue du Colombier
45000 Orléans
France
T +33 (0) 2 38 62 52 00
www.frac-centre.fr
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This new cycle of exhibitions and events titled Relief(s) has for intent to extend and rekindle the Frac Centre’s “Art and Architecture” identity.
As a sign and as a mythical object, the mountain is a geographical category of the common sense which summons up a universal imagination. For architecture, this “ultimate form of relief” represents a pure otherness, a form of resistance that is in a state of tension with its original programme of analysis and organization of the world.
So over and above the productivist relation to the territory introduced by modernity, the mountain is still that insurmountable and unfathomable domain with which artists and architects involve us. From representation to cartography and simulation, they remain the special “go-betweens” of the mountainous landscape.
Relief(s) will explore different presences of the relief in art and architecture in the past 60 years, flushing out the aesthetic and political meanings which they convey. The representation of “elementary” natural forms is thus involved for the radical architecture of the 1960s as the medium of a criticism of the models issuing from industrial society. In its quest for the liberation of forms, the architecture-sculpture of the same period makes the relief the clue for an “augmented” experience of space: it delimits a new topographical horizon which digital tools nowadays make it possible to materialize, and it engages a state of heightened perception for the body.
This cycle sheds a new light on the way in which contemporary creation can renew our reading, of the environment, at a time when it is being forged more by human action than by any other force, be it natural or geological.
It is this encounter and this consummate hybridization between the rational order of a controlled production of space and this fundamental exteriority of the mountain that Relief(s) proposes to question through different moments.
Group show
Reliefs – Designing the Horizon
10 April–30 August
This show will create a dialogue between the Frac Centre’s collection and contemporary creators, emerging and recognized alike. The visual circuit, devised in collaboration with the artist Aurélie Pétrel, will help to conjugate the presences of the works and their renewal with the definition of interplays of “viewpoints.” In this way, the exhibition will revisit the idea of hanging, tending towards the idea of the “grip” or “hold,” that elementary form on which the mountaineer projects himself and moves, but also where light reveals and creates the conditions of the way we look at things.
In association with the artist Aurélie Pétrel.
With: from the Frac Centre’s collection:
Bloc, Archizoom, Biothing, DZ0, de Fenoyl, Günschel, Gursky, Haus-Rucker-Co, Hollein, La Pietra, Lerisse, Lesák, MATSYS, Mauger, Objectile, Parent (with Virilio, Mannoni, Ehrmann), Pellegrin, Pettena, Princen, R&Sie(n), Sottsass Jr.
and:
Alÿs, Linke, Moulin, Moriceau, Nuñez, Picard, Sanejouand, Schaal, Singer, Snøhetta
Solo shows
reverse of volume FC, Yasuaki Onishi
10 April–20 September
The Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi will present his installation reverse of volume FC, thus winding up a production residency. Somewhere between fragility and massiveness, this reverse relief will offer visitors an experience of sensory immersion and stimulation.
Gérard Singer
10 April–20 September
The Frac will be devoting one of its first major solo shows to Gérard Singer. This great lover of mountaineering incarnates, all on his own, the material innovation and the first digital experiments situated on the borderline of art and architecture, in view of an urban updating of the mountain’s natural “complexity.”
Workshop and events
Peaks
14–20 September
In September, a week of events and workshops will be organized around a proposal involving the occupation of space put forward by the architects Peaks: or how the relief forms not so much a geographical datum, but an alternative ground from which to challenge and get away from our habits.
This cycle will also go hand-in-hand with a programme of events. The different parts of Relief(s) will thus trace many different circuits, akin to so many invitations for visitors to walk around Les Turbulences, like an architectural and urban relief.
Curators
Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, programme curator
Aurélien Vernant, research curator
Guest artist
Aurélie Pétrel
Artistic accompaniment
Eric Degoutte, acting director
ContactCommunication:
Amélie Evrard
T + 33 (0) 2 38 21 79 53 / amelie.evrard [at] frac-centre.fr
