News on the Collections
Acquisitions
The next Frac Occitanie Toulouse acquisitions committee will take place in 2024.
The deadline for applications is May 17, 2024.
The Technical Purchasing Committee:
The Technical Purchasing Committee is led by the director of Les Abattoirs - Frac Occitanie Toulouse. It is composed of professionals of contemporary art appointed by the Comité Syndical des Abattoirs (deliberative body), on the proposal of the director.
This working group, whose members are appointed for three years, defines the Frac's acquisition policy with its director, determines its orientations and makes acquisition proposals.
The axes of acquisition :
Initially marked by an artistic orientation determined by a geographical axis privileging artists from the south of France, Italians and Spaniards, the collection of the Frac Occitanie Toulouse also testifies through the works of Robert Filliou, François Morellet, Ange Leccia, Bazile Bustamante, Présence Panchounette or Gina Pane of a critical dimension of modernity.
In a second time, this one developed through a series of thematic axes favourable to a mutual comprehension of the aesthetic stakes of the contemporary creation and to an intellectual and active use of the art at the turn of the XXth and XXIth century. These can today be articulated as follows:
Beyond nature and culture
The introduction of the living and the organic in the art is a rather recent phenomenon. It corresponds to a moment of the history where it is a question of reconsidering the statute of the artistic activity and thus human, in the chain of the living. One of the important stakes of this movement is to go beyond the concepts of aesthetics and "beauty" such as they were reinvented in Europe in the 18th century, in a dichotomy of the man and the world. At a time of environmental or genetic mutations, and a growing awareness of the harmful effects of some of our behaviors on the living, this questioning, which could not be more contemporary, points to a crucial issue: the need to reconsider our relationship to the world and to the very idea of nature. In this ensemble, the works refer to the notions of perishability (Michel Blazy), calibration and standardization (Didier Marcel), interaction and modulation (Max Mohr), or body organicity (Franz West). Their articulation questions the current and future developments of human activity, but also the role of art, in the cycle of life and evolution. It is also through works related to the myth of the chimera, of the hybrid that the collection gives an account of the vacillating rationalism of modern Western culture.
Finally, the question of habitat, architecture, the relationship between the city and the countryside in the context of a nature that has definitely become not so much a landscape as an environment, is also addressed here.
Poetic economy
More than the "poetry to the service of the revolution of the surrealists", the "revolution to the service of the poetry", watchword of the situationists is a dynamics which irrigates the art since the years 1960. It returns to the art to present again a surrounding reality to modify the perception and the intelligence of it. Thus, it is through works directly addressing political aspects (Tania Mouraud, Olivier Blanckart, Michel Aubry, Lida Abdul) or their media representations (Wang Du, Alain Declercq) that the collection forges links with the question of political commitment.
In a more profound way, the collection explores a mental dimension that is experiencing a flagrant revival of interest in contemporary creation. This is evidenced by the resurgence in recent years of the motif, or symbol, of the brain in contemporary art. This phenomenon is at the origin of this collection within the collection, which echoes the words of the Russian physicist Andrei Linde. For him, by becoming a kind of immense brain, our world expands considerably so that reality, consciousness and illusion are totally intertwined. Therefore, he says, "How can we distinguish what is really happening from what is imaginary, what is conscious from what is not? Perhaps we will reach a deep understanding of all this ... ". Thus one of the cognitive functions of the mental representation, which is also at the origin of any artistic act, would be above all the means to assure the coexistence of the individual and his worlds. It is what stigmatize the "externalized" brains of Jan Fabre, Evru, Claude Lévêque, Mounir Fatmi, Guillaume Pinard, Bruno Peinado, or Peter Kogler acquired these last years.
The image and its diffusion
The mutations of the diffusion of images as well as their creations imply today a positioning of heritage institutions dedicated to contemporary creation in the field of visual arts. Are the collection and the exhibition places of learning about the image? Should they produce a discourse and a context specific to their reading? As a place of art, the Abattoirs are also, in a more fundamental way, a place of critical exercise. The strength of a collection is the preservation of "originals", of matrices, it is a recording of the gaps between the production of images and their reception and the exhibition is a trigger. The photographic and cinematographic image, but also the works introducing a reflection on the constitution of images, the production of visual knowledge is considered here, in a dialogue with the reflexive role of an institution dedicated to the visual arts.
Individual and collective narratives
To the end now widely acted of the modern "great narratives", narratives relative to the social and economic progress, possibly shared in a common way, succeeded a succession of stories or scenarios composed of disparate manners, sometimes shared by dispersed communities, often redistributed between individuals and collectives. Sometimes dealing with language or writing (visual or literary) the works discussed here are traversed by themes relating to globality, but also to the resurgence in the field of visual arts of narrative in often experimental forms.
How it works :
The Technical Purchasing Committee meets at least once a year, for one day.
It is composed of :
- Antoine Marchand, directeur du centre d’art Le Lait à Albi.
- Alicia Knock, conservatrice au Centre Georges Pompidou à Paris.
- Pascal Lièvre, artiste.
You can send your acquisition proposal(s) to the following address: documentation@lesabattoirs.org
Please do not forget to complete the acquisition proposal form, available below for download.