L'image dans la sculpture

By Christine Macel, Curator at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Exhibition Curator

What is an image for a generation of young artists born at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s? What is their relationship to the image and what relationship does the latter have, in their works, with certain media like sculpture and installation?

“The Image in Sculpture” exhibition, in Espace 315 at the Centre Pompidou, features experimentations and works by four young artists: the Dutch artist of Iranian origin, Navid Nuur, co-curator of the exhibition, the Danish artist Nina Beier, the New Zealander Simon Denny and the Greek artist Yorgos Sapountzis. All these artists have in common a way of handling the image and the medium which places both in a sort of “impurity”: they do not select one medium in particular, but work on its alteration, its hybridisation, presenting a new interdisciplinarity.

These artists are interested in the image, both physical and mental, from diverse origins. Their images literally marry the object, sculpture or installation, in “the indiscipline of disciplines”, as put forward by W. J. T. Mitchell (Iconology: Image, Text and Ideology, 1986). The exhibition is also a nod to that cult exhibition shown at the MoMA in New York in 1970. Entitled Photography Into Sculpture, it highlighted for the first time the literal union of photography and sculpture and presented sculpture-objects in which photographs were genuinely included. The artists exploited the instability of the photographic image, a phenomenon which is even more pertinent today with the digitalisation of photography.

Nuur, Beier, Denny and Sapountzis are interested in both “vintage” media of the image, like the photocopy or the television, and the internet and new forms of display: from tablets and mobile phones to “PowerPoints”. These artists also explore other areas: drawing, projection, the image produced through printing, the text image, etc.

Their works are exhibited together in a unique space ideal for walking around. These works, a large portion of which were produced for the exhibition, are inspired by everyday or domestic objects (matchboxes, chairs, radiators, shelves, telephones, magazines, etc.). By means of these objects, the four artists, in their interdisciplinary conception of the idea of medium, produce sculptures or installations with a visible reference to the human dimension, i.e. the body, which calls for the visitor not only to observe but to physically engage with the works.