Exhibition Ron Mueck
Ron Mueck has been invited to present his new sculpture at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain from 16 April to 29 September 2013. This is his first major exhibition in Europe since the hugely successful Fondation Cartier exhibition of 2005.
 
In addition to six important recent sculptures the show includes three produced especially for this event. A new film recording their creation has been made for the occasion by Gautier Deblonde. Revealing the reclusive artist at work further emphasizes the sensitivity and power of Ron Mueck’s sculpture and highlights its particular resonance for our time.
 
A Ron Mueck exhibition is a rare event.
Based in London, Ron Mueck has had highly acclaimed exhibitions around the world from Japan to Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, but shows of his new work in Europe have not been frequent occurrences. Mueck works slowly in his small North London studio, making time itself an important element in his creative process. His human figures are meticulously detailed, with surprising changes of scale that place them as far from academic realism as they are from pop art or hyperrealism.

Gerald Petit wove together this exhibition at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, using figures split in several pieces, cracked (the effect of a relationship breaking up), sucked in by the fascinating power of myth or duplicated several times.
His work with photographs and paintings consists in an attempt to reassemble them at the same time as their decomposition is accepted and exhibited. The role assumed by the artist, then, is to capture both aspects at once, every time—what people aim for and cannot reach, those who seduce them and those who would rather flee. And then, this: subjects and their own image, the image and its medium, the medium and its history, the character and its double. Everything irreconcilably divided, cracking up, including the relation of the painter (or photographer) to the model. And accordingly, everything the artist seeks to intercede in, then tries to make a work out of this very intercession. Finally, from moments of grace (of flirt) to crepuscular moments when the charm is altered, the exhibition also unabashedly displays a fetishistic, padded side, its relation to the fragment and to love, in the manner of « A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments ».
Judicaël Lavrador

This exhibition, comprising over two hundred works, offers a reflection on the main themes that structured German thinking from 1800 to 1939. It places artworks and their artists—including Caspar David Friedrich, Paul Klee, Philipp Otto Runge and Otto Dix—in the intellectual context of their time, and confronts them with the writings of great thinkers, chief among whom is Goethe.
 
German history from the late 18th century to the eve of World War II is marked by the difficulty of establishing political unity at a time when the concept of a Europe of nations was gaining hold. A multi-faith country characterized by geographical discontinuity, the instability of its borders and different or even antagonistic political and cultural contexts, Germany needed to establish the underlying unity of all Germans, from Bavaria to the Baltic, from the Rhineland to Prussia.
 
The concept of Kultur, inherited from Enlightenment thought, seemed most likely to constitute the breeding ground from which a modern German tradition could emerge. The Napoleonic occupation fostered awareness of this unity and provided the political background for the beginnings of Romanticism, at the start of our timeline—while at its end, the rise of Nazism highlighted the tragic dimension of this concept, without managing to destroy it. The exhibition analyzes the role of the fine arts, from Romanticism to New Objectivity, in this period of great artistic innovation that sought to invent a new German tradition.

This year, as part of its contemporary art programme, the Musée Rodin invites the artist Erik Samakh to occupy and exhibit his works in the museum garden. Between nature and sculpture, materiality and impalpability, Erik Samakh designs a one-of-a-kind outdoor exhibition in the Musée Rodin garden.
Opens to the public on the Night of Museums, Saturday 18 May, from 7 PM to midnight.
 
Erik Samakh describes himself as a “hunter-gatherer” of images and sounds, which he has captured, recorded and exhibited for over 25 years in natural settings. His work is nurtured by a constant dialogue with nature, via an approach that combines a certain archaic relationship with the living world, and extremely sophisticated technical devices and systems. The artist ever seeks to trigger actions and reactions on the part of men and landscapes, to awaken the senses, and to perturb or shift our perception of place.
 
Taking advantage of the spirit and atmosphere unique to the Musée Rodin, particularly its garden, Erik Samakh creates two large, one-of-a-kind installations, in response both to the garden’s urban, domesticated and yet eminently poetic nature and to Rodin’s sculptures.
 
“Voices, yew trees”, is a sound installation presented around the main courtyard. This installation pursues the artist‘s constant theme of sound and its capacity to create meaning all by itself. However, the encounter with Rodin’s oeuvre induces a slight shift of focus: used to “chasing” sounds made by animals and their movements, Samakh here turns his attention to humans and the human voice. Calling upon the female voices of the Musée Rodin, the artist uses the women’s breathing, laughter, smiles and whispers to create a spatialized, sound-based creation occupying and moving about among the yew trees surrounding The Thinker and The Three Shades, thereby evoking female presences. While jolting our habitual perception of the site, Erik Samakh also uses these ghost-like voices to respond in his own manner to the materiality of Rodin’s sculptures and his relationship with figures and models.
 
The second installation, “Firefly Stones” , departs from the main courtyard and continues on where the first installation left off. Ten blocks of natural stone are scattered about the garden, all spangled with the artist‘s famous “fireflies”: left untouched or covered with moss, resembling so many rough sculptures seemingly fallen from the sky or risen up from the ground, miniature gardens during the day and luminous stones at night. The artist’s signature “fireflies” light up the garden and its sculptures, in shady corners and at nightfall. Designed specifically for the Musée Rodin, these strange stones pursue Samakh’s stone theme, as illustrated by such works as his “Sound Stone”, “Lizard Stone”, “Lizard balanced on a stone” , etc. They underline the garden’s tranquillity and poetry, while at the same time disturbing our habitual perception of the site and adding complexity to the relationship between sculpture and nature: a connection is drawn between Rodin’s bronzes and the stones' patina-like moss, between the garden as a whole and these miniature gardens, between the raw Portuguese stone and Rodin’s blocks of non finito marble, while the colour and brutality of granite is contrasted with the refinement of the bronze casts or the ethereal whiteness of the marble.
 
Born in 1959 in Saint-Georges de Didonne, the artist and national art schools professor Erik Samakh has exhibited his work in France and around the world: the Quai Branly Museum, the Maubuisson Abbey, the International Center of Art and Landscape at Vassivière Island, the Château de Chaumont sur Loire, the Santiago de Chile Contemporary Art Museum, the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, etc.