Arcimboldo Face To Face

Dear readers,

I’m delighted to announce that Centre Pompidou-Metz has just reopened, and I dream you could join us for “Arcimboldo Face to Face,” the inaugural exhibition of my program as head of the institution.

I conceived this exhibition in a dialogue with Maurizio Cattelan because we both feel that Arcimboldo’s presence is utterly conceptual, weird, and necessary to navigate the complex universe of the human and the non-human.

Gently despised and disregarded by many specialists throughout the centuries, his works have, to the contrary, been crucial to the development of surrealism and the work of many artists who might not have been the artists we know today without his creative freedom as example and inspiration.

While I was preparing the show, I was listening to Daft Punk. And I can tell you, Arcimboldo, today, would listen to Daft Punk as well to orchestrate parties as he used to do for the House of Hapsburg back in the days.

Arcimboldo was an inventor, a free soul, a rock star. His work will turn you on, as it turned me on the very first time I saw the legendary The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the 16th to the 20th Century, held at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1987 and conceived by Pontus Hultén and Yasha David. Today I wish to confront the evolution and transformation of Arcimboldo. A never-ending epic narrative, like Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

Come with us. We created a bizarre journey. We will guide you into the contemporary vocabulary of this mysterious 16th-century painter to uncover his sources and tell you how his oeuvre has influenced artists for five centuries, and how he still sheds light on several current philosophical and political debates.

We will share the exceptional presentation of the famous Seasons from the Louvre and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, but also the stained-glass windows he created at the very beginning of his career in the Milan Cathedral, the pen and blue wash drawings from the Uffizi Gallery, as well as The Librarian, which is striking for its profoundly conceptual language.

With Anne Horvath, co-curator of the exhibition, we selected 130 artists to reflect the current state of art, guided by the influence—assumed, unconscious or fantasized—that the Lombard master exerts on their thinking and art. The scenography designed by the architects Berger&Berger uses cellular concrete and suggests the cartography of a citadel in which generations, geographies, and media collide.

Our catalogue, featuring the complete version of the legendary essay by Roland Barthes, “Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur,” published in 1978, has been designed by M/M (Paris).

Arcimboldo is here. Don’t be late.

Yours,
Chiara Parisi

Arcimboldo Face to Face
With: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Francis Bacon, Enrico Baj, Hans Bellmer, Lynda Benglis, Cezary Bodzianowski, Alighiero Boetti, Denis Boutemie, René Boyvin, Giovanni Battista Bracelli, Kerstin Brätsch, Victor Brauner, Glenn Brown, Exquisite corpse [Yves Tanghy, André Masson] [Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise, André Breton] [Tobias Rehberger, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mathias Augustyniak] [Peter Saville, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno] [Marlene Dumas, Virgil Abloh, Rem Koolhaas] [Yu Hong, Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wa] [Paul McCarthy, Luchita Hurtado, Patrick Staff] [Alex Israel, Norman M. Klein, Henry Taylor] [Koo Jeong A, Ian Cheng, Philippe Parreno], Miriam Cahn, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Gregorio Comanini, Gustave Courbet, Roberto Cuoghi, David Czupryn, Daft Punk, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio De Chirico, Otto Dix, Enrico Donati, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Carl August Ehrensvärd, James Ensor, Max Ernst, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Lavinia Fontana, Llyn Foulkes, Daniel Fröschl, Giambologna, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Grandville, Francesco Guardi, Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts, Heide Hatry, Robert Heinecken, Hannah Höch, Pierre Huyghe, Rashid Johnson, Christoph Jamnitzer, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Tetsumi Kudo, Claude Lalanne, Nicolas II de Larmessin, Zoe Leonard, Roy Lichtenstein, Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, Ghérasim Luca, Master of  Bacchus, Lombard Master of the  Custodian of the Garden, Strasbourg Master of the Four Seasons, Master of the Satyr Head (Paolo Giovio), René Magritte, Man Ray, Alberto Martini, Matthäus Merian, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Annette Messager, Tomio Miki, Patrick Neu, M/M (Paris), Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Luigi Ontani, Meret Oppenheim, Bernard Palissy, Pompei and Herculanum Painter, Painter of the bestiary ceiling, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Louis Poyet, Markus Raetz, André Raffray, Antonio Rasio, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Ed Ruscha, Niki de Saint Phalle, Chéri Samba, Alberto Savinio, Iris Schieferstein, Arnold Schönberg, Cindy Sherman, Penny Slinger, Sodoma, Daniel Spoerri, Cally Spooner, Jacopo Strada, Jindřich Štyrský, Jan Švankmajer, Alina Szapocznikow, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jean Tinguely, Toyen, Rosemarie Trockel, Francesco Zucchi.

“Renaissance weekends” with special art events
May 29 – 30, 2021 with Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, Fabrice Hyber, Pierre Huyghe, Bertrand Lavier, and Yoko Ono.
September 18 – 19, 2021 with Bintou Dembélé, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Rivane Neuenschwander and, Sébastien Thiéry (PEROU)/Marc Ferrand/Marc Van Peteghem/Ruedi Baur.