Assemblages. Taking Care of Things
As part of the Gestures. Arts and Craftsmanship in Occitania programme, Les Abattoirs presents the exhibition Taking Care of Things, a historical and contemporary reinterpretation of a gesture that runs through Les Abattoirs' collections and across the ages: assemblage.
Assembly is the combination of repurposed objects or elements, sometimes even waste, most often from everyday life. An ancestral technique used in many parts of the world, it emerged as an artistic practice in the West at the beginning of the 20th century, transcending the more academic disciplines of painting and sculpture. Combining the gathering and accumulation of artefacts unusual in art, this technique produces works that defy classification and create a dialogue between disparate realities. The nature of the materials recovered (tarpaulins, fabrics, bags, tools, animal remains, paper or video archives and all kinds of relics), and the methods used to collect and assemble them (sewn, glued, nailed, patched) are specific to each artist. Their often haphazard coexistence gives rise to new plastic and poetic entities that populate invented worlds. While Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Louise Nevelson and the Dadaists were the precursors, many artists in their wake have in turn embraced assemblage as a reflection of the evolution of our relationship with objects, between a reaction to the development of consumer society and a care for things that embody stories and myths.
Through the works in the Abattoirs collections, the exhibition invites visitors to discover the multiplicity of a gesture that transcends the object itself and whose meaning and aesthetics vary according to different periods and cultures. It brings together the experiments of artists from different generations, from representatives of New Realism (Gérard Deschamps, César, Mimmo Rotella) and Informal Art (Manolo Millares, Antonio Clavé) to contemporary creators such as Diego Bianchi, Kenia Almaraz Murillo and Floryan Varennes, to Japanese boro, traditional marquetry and lirette carpet-making techniques and their contemporary interpretations, the exhibition offers an immersion into the diversity of this practice and the issues it raises. In a syncretism of forms and narratives, the works ultimately find a particular resonance where the question of our relationship with things is clearly raised, along with the need to move towards a more sensitive relationship with them, leading to their conservation, repair and reuse.
From the secrecy of the reserves to the exhibitions, museums are driven by the same ambition: to preserve collections that are assemblages of works, temporalities and perspectives on the world.
With works by Kenia Almaraz Murillo, Louisa Babari, Babi Badalov, Rina Banerjee, Marion Baruch, Renata Bertlmann, Pierre Bettencourt, Diego Bianchi, Marcel Broodthaers, Alberto Burri, Pia Camil, César, Antoni Clavé, Delphine Dénéréaz, Gérard Deschamps, Daniel Dezeuze, Mimosa Echard, Fabrice Hyber, Horst Egon Kalinowski, Julien Langendorff, Manolo Millares, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Louise Nevelson, Edith Raymond, Mimmo Rotella, Néstor Sanmiguel Diest, Marie Sirgue, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Floryan Varennes
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