The permanent collection of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art is enriched with 800 works from the Art & Language movement. To celebrate this event, the museum is dedicating a major exhibition to it from 5 April ART & LANGUAGE: REALITY (DARK) FRAGMENTS (LIGHT). Recognized as a pioneer of Conceptual Art, the Art & Language movement is present in the collections of the greatest museums: Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA.
« We Must Continue To Work Because If We Stopped It Would Be Like If We Had Never Started”.
Art & Language
Artists out of frame
ART & LANGUAGE: REALITY (DARK) FRAGMENTS (LIGHT), gathers 50 years of the career of these critical, provocative, subversive and punk artists. This Art & Language attitude has often made them appear as unclassifiable and marginal artists, refusing to give in to the ease, fashions and impoverishment of art in order to return to the essential: the work itself.
Through the major questions at the heart of Art & Language’s work: the conversation and its capacity to create work, the description, the porosity of artistic practices, the crisis in the relationship between the artist, the museum and the art gallery and its implications for the very process of creation, the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art questions the sometimes simplistic reading that has been made of Conceptual Art. Far from the dematerialization of the work of art, would conceptual art have given birth to contemporary art?
From room to room: PORTRAITS, WOMAN, DESCRIPTION, MUSIC IN CASE, MODERN, TEXT, PAST, VOID, ALIENS, CORPORATION, REALITY, FRAGMENTS, FORBIDDEN, the exhibition presents iconic pieces of the movement such as Mirror Piece or The Air conditioning show, installations (Tell me) have you ever seen me? and unpublished texts like the Pornographics texts.
Invariably, the works cause confusion and force us to think outside the box to establish angular, disjointed relationships with language and the visual.