Image: musée d'Art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Paris
MAC VAL’s new collection display is the result of a broad shared curatorial process, with the selection of works presented to the public developed collectively with all of the museum’s teams. The teams met regularly in workshops, where proposals, choices, debates and selections were discussed before being agreed. The collection is presented in a renewed form approximately every 18 months, enabling works to be rediscovered through an updated theme, context and approach.
Titled ‘Le genre idéal. En principe, une tentative d’épuisement’, the exhibition addresses each of the five genres in the hierarchy: history painting, portraiture, the genre scene, landscape and still life. That hierarchy was formulated in 1667 by the art historian André Félibien in the preface to his ‘Conférences de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture’.
The collection grew from a departmental policy supporting artists that was implemented in 1982, and its distinctive focus is contemporary art in France since the 1950s. Visitors will be able to discover or rediscover symbolic works from the collection.
