Villa Carmignac - Exposition 2023 - L'île intérieure

In the beginning, there are landscapes and bodies, landscapes in bodies, then a tangle of situations like dreams know how to produce, blurred situations,
pleasant, sometimes disturbing. The eye wanders before works that act as mirages...

If contemporary art has never been so political and so in touch with the world, a whole field of creation - painting in particular - seems to be detaching itself from it, offering dizzying plunges into inner worlds and withdrawals. What does this departure from reality mean today?
More than 80 works by some 50 artists, from public and private collections, the Carmignac collection and our own productions, sketch the dotted contours of an inner island, with each visitor filling in the gaps in his or her own way.

From Peter Doig to Anna-Eva Bergman, from Ali Cherri to Auguste Rodin, the exhibition will confront visitors with these floating worlds outside known geographies and temporalities.
Archipelagos will be created in the exhibition, as with Agnieszka Kurant's termite-sculpted installation under the water ceiling of the Villa Carmignac. Strange presences - human, animal, hybrid or supernatural - will populate the premises through paintings by Andrew Cranston or Verne Dawson, as well as sculptures by Francis Uprichard or Corentin Grossmann in the gardens. You'll have to surrender to the vertigo and tilts that await you in the solar or twilight worlds of Harold Ancart, Marcella Barceló, Tursic & Mille or Christine Safa.

If a fictitious, mental and abstract island takes shape, the real, Mediterranean island regularly comes to mind with works created in Porquerolles over a century ago
(Jean-Francis Auburtin, Henri-Edmond Cross), a few years ago (Bernard Pesce, Bernard Plossu) or a few days before the opening (Darren Almond or Jennifer Douzenel).

It is the island's energy, its suspended temporality and its fragility that give rise to these dialogues with works of contagious poetry, inviting us to change scale and question the creative gesture and its significance today.
Box office opens February 2023.

COMMISSARIAT

L'île intérieure is an exhibition conceived by Jean-Marie Gallais, art historian and curator, curator with the Pinault Collection since May 2022, previously head of programming at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where he curated the exhibitions Peindre la nuit (2018-2019), Lee Ufan.

List of artists (not definitive)

Caroline Achaintre
Darren Almond
Harold Ancart
Giulia Andreani
Lucas Arruda
Jean-Francis Auburtin
Marcella Barceló
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Anna-Eva Bergman
Ragna Bley
Tim Breuer
Alexander Calder
Ali Cherri
Francesco Clemente
Marcus Cope
Andrew Cranston
Henri-Edmond Cross
Verne Dawson
Jérémy Demester
Peter Doig
Jennifer Douzenel
Antoine Espinasseau
Spencer Finch
Helen Frankenthaler
Rodney Graham
Corentin Grossmann
Simon Hantaï
David Horvitz
Pia Krajewski
Agnieszka Kurant
Roy Lichtenstein
Jill Mulleady
Otobong Nkanga
Albert Oehlen
Bernard Pesce
Bernard Plossu
Sigmar Polke
Auguste Rodin
Christine Safa
Edgar Sarin
Norbert Schwontkowski
Kiki Smith
Léon Spilliaert
Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille
Francis Upritchard
Adrián Villar Rojas
Frank Walter
Christopher Wool

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