MAC Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon

Adel Abdessemed
L’Antidote
9 March – 8 July 2018
Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon

Over two floors of the museum, Adel Abdessemed presents a selection of works never before shown in France, as well as a number of new creations, including L’Antidote, the work that has given its name to the exhibition.

L’Antidote is the name of a bar in Lyon where the artist, then a student at the ENSBA Lyon, met Julie, his future wife, who would become a central figure in his artwork and his life. A souvenir of a personal experience lived by an artist who considers art to be a vital experience, necessary for one’s own wellbeing and that of the world: here, the antidote could well be that of art in the face of a brutal reality. The exhibition expresses a number of key themes in Abdessemed’s artwork (selfportrait, family life, animal life, representations of violence), in an immovable grammar that makes use of a constantly evolving vocabulary. New plastic formalizations renew the figures: a sculpture in marble (Is Beautiful, based on a photograph showing a young Angela Merkel, naked), an architectural model, Shams a frieze remarkably executed on-site from clay...

Born in 1971 in Constantine (Algeria), Adel Abdessemed lives and works between Paris and London.