Pierre Restany, 1930-2003
27 May - 21 Dec 2015
Artistic activist
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Sophie Duplaix
Pierre Restany is so closely associated with the French New Realism, the important Sixties art movement he helped to crystallize, that one tends to forget the other very varied activities of this highly significant if controversial figure. It was in Fifties Paris that Restany emerged as an acerbic but generous critic, offering a fresh perspective on the debates over abstraction. Passionate observer of a world rapidly changing on both sides of the Atlantic, through his writings and the exhibitions he organised he brought forward and championed talents whose place in their time he articulated. A crusading author of articles, essays and manifestos, he wrote on Jean Fautrier as much as on Yves Klein and Alain Jacquet – whose work here pays indirect tribute to him – and also on sociological art and on “integral naturalism”, climax of his reflections on art, an exploration of the relations between nature and culture.
Sophie Duplaix
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Sophie Duplaix
Pierre Restany is so closely associated with the French New Realism, the important Sixties art movement he helped to crystallize, that one tends to forget the other very varied activities of this highly significant if controversial figure. It was in Fifties Paris that Restany emerged as an acerbic but generous critic, offering a fresh perspective on the debates over abstraction. Passionate observer of a world rapidly changing on both sides of the Atlantic, through his writings and the exhibitions he organised he brought forward and championed talents whose place in their time he articulated. A crusading author of articles, essays and manifestos, he wrote on Jean Fautrier as much as on Yves Klein and Alain Jacquet – whose work here pays indirect tribute to him – and also on sociological art and on “integral naturalism”, climax of his reflections on art, an exploration of the relations between nature and culture.
Sophie Duplaix