Curators: Rémi Enguehard and Michel Huynh
With works by:
Jacopo Belloni, Corentin Darré, Erik Dietman*, Frederik Exner, Richard Fauguet*, Alison Flora, Diego Giacometti*, Youri Johnson, Lou Le Forban, Marion Verboom and Xolo Cuintle
Hybrid and marvellous figures:
The exhibition brings together works from the collection of the Fonds régional d’art contemporain d’Île-de-France* and from artists with fantastic universes. These works reflect the medieval taste for hybrid and marvellous figures that populate our imaginations, tinged with heroic fantasy – a frequent gateway to an often fantasised Middle Ages.
From room to room, these chimeras spring up among the works in the museum. They offer their own interpretations of Western medieval art, extending its sources and meanings. Namely, those of a predominantly Christian world imbued with magic, where the visible and the invisible are superimposed.
The contemporary works are first and foremost in dialogue with medieval architecture and sculpture. In fact, their motifs share the same fantastic, natural, plant and animal inspirations. Many of the works are also rooted in the history of the decorative arts and religious furniture, where the shapes of drinking horns, aquamaniles and reliquaries are used to revive old ideas and practices. The world of interest to contemporary artists is first and foremost a time that preceded Renaissance humanism and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, whose everyday world they are trying to capture. In direct echo of the historical objects in the museum’s display cases, the works accompany the discovery of the sociabilities and activities of an entire world.
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Musée de Cluny – musée national du Moyen Âge
28 rue Du Sommerard – 75005 Paris
Open every day except Monday, from 9.30 a.m. to 6.15 p.m.