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Press Release

Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibitions in 2018-2019From October, Centre Pompidou-Metz will present the exhibition Painting the Night devoted to a central theme of art history which has never ceased to inspire artists. The exhibition proposes to plunge the visitor into modern and contemporary painting, with a presentation in a space of around two thousand square metres transforming the spectator into a night bird leading him from giddiness to vertigo: vertigo of the senses, of reason, cosmic vertigo. Night, both a refuge and a window open onto the universe, appears to be a territory and a temporality to be explored, for anyone choosing to remain awake. Taking several directions (“Painting the Night” does it not mean both to represent night and to paint at night?), the exhibition assembles over 200 works of artists from the XX and XXI centuries, major figures, but also discoveries or rediscoveries, as well as some large installations which redefine the notion of painting today. We will come across the painters of the nights of the années folles as well as the great insomniacs of the XX century, the dreamers for whom the night was their medium, the painters for whom night was an abstraction without any limits, or even the attempts by contemporary artists to grasp that intangible substance which the night is made of.

The immersion in an unprecedented space-time will be prolonged with The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights 87 V 10 6:43:00 PM – 87 V 11 01:07:45 AM NYC by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. A major work by the musician, this solo for piano accompanied by the lighting effects created by his wife Marian Zazeela pursues La Monte Young’s quest for an eternal music.

In February, the monographic exhibition of the Korean artist, poet and philosopher Lee Ufan. Inhabiting Time presents a selection of his work from the end of the 1960’s up until today. His paintings and his sculptures reveal his very personal definition of contemporary art, detached from language and conceived as an immediately sensorial experience.

The transdisciplinary exhibition Rebecca Horn. Theatre of Metamorphoses, organised in collaboration with the Museum Tinguely of Basel, will be on show in June. It is based on the founding theme of metamorphoses in the artist’s work. The presentation goes back over five decades of creation, bringing into dialogue her works with those of other major artists who have inspired her such as Man Ray, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.

Also presented in June as an echo to the 350th anniversary of the Opéra national de Paris, the exhibition – event Opera as the World is a testimony to the encounter between the visual arts and the operatic genre from the

Press contacts

Centre Pompidou-MetzAgathe BatailleHead of Publics and Communications

00 33 (0)3 87 15 39 83agathe.bataille@centrepompidou-metz.fr

Marion Petit Communication officer 00 33 (0)3 87 15 52 76marion.petit@centrepompidou-metz.fr

Claudine Colin CommunicationPénélope Ponchelet

00 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01penelope@claudinecolin.com

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beginning of the XX century. Set models, costumes and other theatrical elements will be presented next to important installations and new creations. In September, Centre Pompidou-Metz is presenting a retrospective exhibition to The Ecstatic Eye. Sergei Eisenstein at the crossroads of the arts which explores the work of the film maker in the light of his very personal relationship with the history of art. The exhibition gives his rightful place to this major artist of the XX century, beyond the ideological interpretations of his work.

The exhibition The Adventure of Colour also continues until July 2019. Veritable polychrome symphony, it invites visitors to discover the chromatic environment of the artists of the beginning of the XX century up until today, with the exceptional collection of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne.

The Centre Pompidou-Metz programme benefits from the support of Wendel, founding sponsor.

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The exhibitions in 2018 and 2019 :

• Painting the Night From 13 October 2018 to 15 April 2019 Galleries 2 and 3

• The Adventure of Colour Up until 22 July 2019 Grande Nef

• La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights 87 V 10 6:43:00 PM – 87 V 11 01:07:45 AM NYC (1964/1973/1981/today) From 22 September 2018 to 7 January 2019 Gallery 1 (installation)

• Lee Ufan. Inhabiting time From 27 February to 30 September 2019 Gallery 1

• Rebecca Horn. Theatre of Metamorphoses From 8 June to 11 November 2019 Gallery 2

• Opera as the World From 22 June 2019 to 27 January 2020 Gallery 3

• The Ecstatic Eye. Sergei Eisenstein at the crossroads of the arts From 28 September 2019 to 24 February 2020 Grande Nef

IMAGES ARE AVAILABLE ON THE PHOTOTHEQUE centrepompidou-metz.fr/phototheque

LOGIN NAME: pressePASSWORD: Pomp1d57

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Painting the Night13.10.18 > 15.04.19Galleries 2 and 3

Night is at the very heart of current debates, whether they be societal (should we open shops at night or devote night to sleep?), ecological (how to limit light pollution which prevents us from seeing the stars or disrupts the natural world?), political (public support for victims of terror (nuit debout), clandestine crossing of frontiers) or scientific (we never cease to increase our knowledge of the night).

The night world with all its questioning is omnipresent amongst artists, notably at the end of the XIX century. Night has changed and has changed us, because of major revolutions such as electrification and lighting, psychoanalysis and space exploration: as many upheavals in the definition and the relationship that we have with the night.

A major source of inspiration throughout the history of art, night still remains today a fertile field of experiences. Coming back to a subject as vast as the night enables us to ask essential questions about our condition and our place in the universe, as well as about the role of art. Painting in particular has regularly tried to grasp the substance of the night. If such a proposition can appear at first to be a contradiction, “painting the night”

on the contrary turns out to be full of sense. The title voluntarily contains an ambiguity: either painting the night means representing the night, or

Peter Doig, Milky Way, 1989-90 © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: Jochen Littkemann / ADAGP Paris, 2018

“Listen to the Earth’s heartbeats. Surrender yourself to the fear that comets and the unknown provoke in man. Switch off the sun on request. Light the brain’s lamps at night.”Max Ernst

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painting at night. Painting the obscurity or painting in the obscurity is already to make a choice, that of sharpening one’s exterior vision or in fact of abandoning it. Night enables both physically as well as symbolically this “detachment from the world” so dear to modernity. The arrival of dusk could in fact be the perfect metaphor of the volatile frontier between the figurative and the abstract.

Through an approach tied to the perception of night rather than its iconography, the exhibition presents itself as a nocturnal experience, a perambulation which transforms the visitor into a night bird, and which passes on this vertigo which the night provides, vertigo of the senses, interior vertigo, cosmic vertigo. We advance in the exhibition just like we advance at night.

Faithful to the spirit of the exhibitions at Centre Pompidou-Metz, it does not limit itself in an exclusive manner to painting, although it is central, but offers echoes and parallels with music and literature notably, as well as with video and photography.

It brings together around one hundred artists and historical figures (Winslow Homer, Francis Bacon, Anna-Eva Bergman, Louise Bourgeois, Brassaï, Max Ernst, Helen Frankenthaler, Martin Kippenberger, Paul Klee, Lee Krasner, Henri Michaux, Joan Mitchell, Amédée Ozenfant, etc.) and contemporary artists (Etel Adnan, Charbel-joseph Boutros, Ann Craven, Peter Doig, Jennifer Douzenel, Rodney Graham, Paul Kneale, Olaf Nicolai, Gerhard Richter, etc.) as well as spectacular installations of which certain were specially conceived for this project (Harold Ancart, Raphaël Dallaporta, Spencer Finch, Daisuke Yokota, Navid Nuur, etc.).

Curator : Jean-Marie Gallais, Head of exhibitions, Centre Pompidou-MetzExhibition and research officer : Alexandra Müller, Centre Pompidou-Metz

With the support of the Moselle departement

Patrons of the exhibition:

The exhibition has benefitted from exceptional loans from the musée d’Orsay

With the assistance of Pianos Schaeffer

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“Six nights at the museum” 8.11.18 > 04.04.19

Every month a night show will enable the discovery of the exhibition at nightfall in exceptional situations: after a programme of music played in front of the works, one or several guests will each reveal, according to their discipline (philosophy, astrophysics, dance, music…) a different representation of the night. Each one of these night shows will be an opportunity for the Gabriel Pierné regional conservatoire of Metz Metropole to occupy the spaces for programmes of music given in front of the works or in the semi-darkness of the scenography. The arts centre comes to life at night thanks to these interventions which are an echo to sections of the exhibition: get lost in the night, rhythms and presences, nocturnal obsessions, unobstructed eyes, attracted to the stars, night enveloping me. Each one of these night shows also gives the right to an invitation, with which the evening can be extended at the exhibition, in the Studio or at the Wendel Auditorium: philosopher, astrophysician, dancer, musician, film maker come to share their definition of the night.

For the associated programme :

NIGHT #1 : THE NIGHT OF THE OWLThursday 8 November 8 2018 at 20:30ConferenceNight, living without a witnessEncounter with the philosopher Michaël Fœssel From 18:00 to 20:30 (continuous)Sound Installation by Zad Moultaka

NIGHT #2 : THE SACRED NIGHTThursday 6 December 2018 at 20:30 DanceJérémy Demester, creation for the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine

NIGHT #3 : THE STARRY NIGHTThursday 10 January 2019 at 19:30 ConferenceEncounter with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan 21:00DanceAlban Richard, Counting the stars

NIGHT #4 : THE NIGHT OF MYSTERIESThursday 7 February 2019 at 20:30 ConcertThérèse Malengreau, Clair de lune (Moonlight)

NIGHT #5 : THE LYING NIGHTNight of Thursday 7 March to Friday 8 March 2019 from 23:30 to 06:00 Sound Crossing Stéphane Garin/ensemble 0 and guests, Nuit#couchée

NIGHT #6 : THE SILENT NIGHTThursday 4 April 2019 from 18:00 to 20:30 (continuous) ProjectionMadeline Hollander, Flatwing21:00Concert performance by Jeff Mills (subject to approval)

With the assistance of Pianos Schaeffer

With the support of DODO®

Raymond Jonson, The Night, Chicago, 1921© The Raymond Jonson Collection, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM.Photo : © Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

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The Adventure of ColourUntil 22.07.19 Grande Nef

From the very first stages of the creation of the Centre Pompidou in 1977, colour, used as a code is at the heart of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ architectural project. It is the same pure colours which open the polychrome ball of the exhibition The Adventure of Colour, devoted to the persistence of reflections about colour in the history of modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition proposes a thematic exploration of colour, at times feared as a powerful medium of emotions and sensations, at times as a limitless support of reflections on the physicality and the spirituality of painting. Unveiling a certain number of physical and sensory experiences, the presentation invites the visitor to progressively become aware of the embodiment of colour, through dialogues which are rich in meaning.The iconic Bleu de ciel (1940) by Wassily Kandinsky opens the way to the immersive environment Pier and Ocean (2014) by François Morellet and Tadashi

Martial Raysse, America America, 1964Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP

© Adagp, Paris 2018

“Colours are living beings[...] the true inhabitants of space.”Yves Klein

Kawamata, inviting us to drop anchor on an island of bluish neons, and giving a particular resonance to the words of Gaston Bachelard in L’air et les songes “At first, there is nothing, then a profound nothing, then a blue profundity”.

In 1810, exploring in his Theory of colours, optic and physiological mechanisms that are the base of the colour spectrum, Goethe anticipated an emancipation through pure colour and monochrome. This adventure with colour would lead to an awareness of the universality and of the harmony of man with the fundamental unity of things. For Matisse, almost a century later, colour is a veritable liberation. His cut paper collages are a rhythmic exultation which inspire the visual research of Jean Dewasne, Simon Hantaï, Bridget Riley and Sam Francis. Colour plates of his work express, Jazz, punctuate the presentation in such a way as to underline the intense influence that Matisse had on his heirs.

Committed – as early as 1946 – to his Monochrome Adventure, Yves Klein, considered colour as a field of energy, which generates psychological spaces. Other monochrome philosophies cohabit with his spiritual vision of colour, amongst which are those of Claude Rutault, Dan Flavin or even Robert Ryman whose white paintings, far from being rigidly monochrome, contain limitless variations which enable “other things to occur”. With the energy of Pop Art and of New Realism, colour becomes a pulsation, celebrating the real. “What interests me is the profusion of colours of the mass-produced article” declares the Frenchman Martial Raysse: “Prisunic are the modern art museums”. With America America, he trades in the paint brush for the neon: a “living colour, a colour beyond colour”. The American artists of the Hard Edge and the Minimal Art are committed as

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far as they are concerned to a reduction of the components of the work: colour is well-defined, normalised, analysed in terms of industrial colour charts. For Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly, the work must provoke an immediate, comprehensible, visual sensation. It must refer to nothing other than itself. Its form, its material, its colour, take to a logical extreme the cut paper collages of Matisse. Having become coloured fields, they interact with space and with the spectator, pursuing the quest of Yves Klein. Behind this ascetism, crouching in the radicalism of the monochrome, the talent of colour for waking up emotions lies dormant.

Curator: Emma Lavigne, Director of Centre Pompidou-MetzResearch and coordination officer: Anne Horvath, Centre Pompidou-Metz

Patrons of the exhibition :

In the foreground:Yves Klein, Pigments purs, 1957original installation 1957 – recreation 2017 / Paris, Private Collection© Succession Yves Klein c/o ADAGP Paris, 2018 Ain the background to the left:Yves Klein, M72, Monochrome yellow “violet“, 1957, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne / © Succession Yves Klein c/o ADAGP Paris, 2018In the centre;Dan Flavin, “monument“ for V.Tatlin, 1974-1975 / © Adagp, Paris 2018In the background to the right:Robert Ryman, Chapter, 1981© Adagp, Paris 2018Photograph: © Centre Pompidou-Metz / Photo Jac-queline Trichard / 2018 / Exhibition The Adventure of Colour L’Aventure de la couleur. Oeuvres phares du Centre Pompidou, pictures of the exhibition

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La Monte Young and Marian ZazeelaThe Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights 87 V 10 6 :43 :00 PM – 87 V 11 01 :07 :45 AM NYC (1964/1973/1981/today)22.09.18 > 07.01.19Gallery 1 (installation)

As an echo to The Adventure of Colour and in the prolongation of the presentation of the Dream House, a luminous and musical installation first performed as a four hands duet by the duo of artists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Centre Pompidou-Metz presents The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights 87 V 10 6:43:00 PM – 87 V 11 01:07:45 AM NYC, considered to be the master work of La Monte Young.

It was in 1962 that the American composer La Monte Young first performed The Four Dreams of China and becomes aware of his desire to “construct musical works which could be played for a very long time, indeed indefinitely”. In the same year, he met the visual artist and musician Marian Zazeela and as early as the month of August 1963, they conceive together the first visual and sonic installation by the name of Dream House. Marian Zazeela developed in it a system of progressive and coloured lighting which she placed on suspended mobiles. As far as La Monte Young is concerned he uses different oscillators of sinusoidal waves, oscilloscopes, amplifiers and loudspeakers to produce continuous frequency environments.

La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, New York, Photo : John Cliett. Copyright © La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela 1981, 2018

“When I imagined that a piece of music could be developed and changed prermanently if it was able to have a permanent place where musicians can play every day, I originally had the idea of the Dream House: a building where musicians can live and work.” La Monte Young

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The music played, made up of held notes which can be prolonged indefinitely, provoke a minimal reaction from the suspended mobiles. The projected shadow, resulting from the combination of several light sources, creates new three dimensional forms.

In 1967, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela met Pandit Prân Nath, a specialist of Indian raga and of the Kirana style. They became his disciples in 1970 and remained so until his death in 1996. La Monte Young stated, concerning Pandit Prân Nath: “It was with him that I truly understood the progressive transformation of a continuous note” The first installation of the Dream House at the heart of a venue dedicated to art took place at the Friedrich Gallery in Munich in July 1969, and numerous others were presented in museums and art galleries in Europe and in the United States the following years, for periods of a few days to several years: Fondation Maeght, Saint Paul de Vence (1970); Documenta V, Kassel (1972); Dia Art Foundation, New York (from 1979 to 1985, then in 1989-1990); Ruine der Künste, Berlin (1992); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994-1995). In 1993, a Dream House was permanently installed at the MELA Foundation of New York. In 1998, the Contemporary Art Museum of Lyon proposed to Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young to expose the work in a definitive version, which entered into the collection at the end of the exhibition.

It is therefore in this dream house that La Monte Young circulates and performs his works amongst which The Well-Tuned Piano composed and performed for the first time in 1964. This major piece in the history of music, is an echo to a cycle of preludes and fugues by Johann-Sebastien Bach brought together under the title of the Well-Tempered Keyboard, it continues even up until today to change, and expand according to the will of the improvisations of La Monte Young. In this video projected in the lit environment imagined by his wife Marian Zazeela, the artist, improvises a solo for piano during six hours and forty-three minutes on the principle of accurate intonation, performing eternal sounds which unfold in the magenta space. This mythical composition is an invitation to a new musical experience, blurring the visitor’s spatio-temporal references.

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Lee Ufan. Inhabiting Time27.02 > 30.09.19Gallery 1

Centre Pompidou-Metz is to present from 27 February 2019 a monographic exhibition devoted to the Korean artist Lee Ufan, tracing a career at the heart of his painted and sculpted work from his first creations from the end of the 1960’s up until his most recent creations. The exhibition endeavours to show the manner in which the artist’s vocabulary has been transformed and has changed during the course of the last five decades of his creation, each series of works bringing about the following.

Born in 1936 in a Korea at the time under Japanese domination, the traditional Confucian education which Lee Ufan received profoundly marked the artist that he was to become. Since the 1960’s, Lee Ufan, is looking for an equilibrium between his Korean roots and his ties to Japan, then to the west, as well as between philosophy and art. His works are to be considered as much as encounters as experiences to be lived. If his sculptures and environments play with space, his paintings play more with time, Lee Ufan is always looking to control the infinite. Each one of his works has the power of an aphorism and translate visually and physically essential philosophical principles.

The presentation creates a dialogue with his celebrated series From Points, Line, Winds; Dialogue; Correspondence and Relatum, with works and installations rarely shown to the public, often pivotal in his reflection, which enable to comprehend the successive or simultaneous phases of his work, creating close links between his painting and sculpture.Around his favourite themes are the relations between objects and the space

Water colour on stones, 1998, Hakone Valley © Lee Ufan workshop and all rights reserved

“It is not the universe which is infinite, it is infinity which is the universe.”Lee Ufan

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which surrounds them between what is full and what is empty, but also, the dialogue between the natural and the industrial between the interior and the exterior, Lee Ufan proposes a walkabout-meditation in which a very personal definition of contemporary art takes form, detached from language and which can be understood as an immediate sensory experience.

Lee Ufan lives and works in Kamakura (Japan) and in Paris. His work has been the subject of multiple presentations all over the world at the heart of important institutions such as the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg, the Serpentine Gallery and the Pace Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum of New York, the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, the Château de Versailles, the Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, et the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, the Kunstmuseum of Bonn, the Städel Museum of Frankfurt and the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Seoul; as well as being part of numerous artistic manifestations such as the Biennale of Venice (2007, 2011), Gwangju (2000, 2006), Shanghai (2000), Sydney (1976), São Paulo (1973) and Paris (1971). In 2014 and 2017, the work of Lee Ufan was presented at Centre Pompidou-Metz as part of the exhibition Simple shapes (2014) and Japanorama. A new vision on art since 1970 (2017).

Curator : Jean-Marie Gallais, Head of exhibitions, Centre Pompidou-MetzExhibition and research officer : Pauline Créteur, Centre Pompidou-Metz

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Rebecca Horn. Theatre of Metamorphoses08.06 > 11.11.19Gallery 2

Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Museum Tinguely of Basel are joining together to organise from June 2019 two exhibitions devoted to Rebecca Horn (born in 1944 in Michelstadt, in Germany): Theatre of Metamorphoses in Metz and Body Fantasies in Basel. Presented simultaneously, the exhibitions explore the process of metamorphoses, in turns animal, mannerist and cinematic in Metz and machine like or kinetic in Basel. They offer complementary major perspectives on the work of one of the most singular artists of her generation, of which certain parts of her work are still unsung.

The exhibition Rebecca Horn. Theatre of Metamorphoses at Centre Pompidou-Metz highlights the extraordinary range of forms of expression which the artist employs. It will also underline the role of creative influence that her cinematic work has had, a true theatralisation of her

works supported by a liberating and anarchic energy where poetry and humour are at the heart of the subject.

The project goes back over the subtle dialogue linking the works of five decades of creation. “Everything overlaps. I always start with an idea, a story, which changes into a text, then from the text come the sketches, then a film, and from all that come the creation of the sculptures and the installations”1. The exhibition thus highlights the types of materials, fetish objects, such as the fan or the stilettos, that the artist submits to constant changes. The presentation of the exhibition is conceived as a voyage through a composition, with the resurgence of themes, image reverberations, and significant feelings. The visitor is taken into the flow of the creative cycle of the artist, in the dance of thoughts and of moving images.

Through her pronounced taste for paradoxical associations, Rebecca Horn tirelessly theatricalises the antagonisms which underlie our lives: subject and object, body and machine, human and animal, desire and violence, strength and disability. The living and the inert appear transfigured, in roles which we do not usually bestow upon them; the object is endowed with a soul, the individual is characterised by his physical deficiency. From this comes the “the frightening strangeness” of her work. Rebecca Horn perpetuates in a unique manner the themes handed down to us from mythology and fairy tales: the metamorphosis as a mythical or hybrid creature, the secret life of the world of objects, the alchemy or the fantasies of robots. These founding themes, which have been part of numerous currents in the history of art such as Mannerism and Surrealism are at the heart of the exhibition. It also brings to light the artist’s spiritual “peers” which have fed her imagination: Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau or Luis Buñuel and which throw light on the work of the work of Rebecca Horn. Rebecca Horn lives and works in Bad König, in Germany. As early as 1972, she took part as the youngest artist in the documenta 5, organised by

“It is the way in which we accommodate within us emotions, opposite forces (for example gentleness and agressiveness, which are linked by a tight thread, by a bow) It is this sensation of a perpetual flow of energy which maintain things in movement.” Rebecca Horn in interview with Michael Stefanowski, in: Rebecca Horn in the Guggenheim Museum New York, Mainz : ZDF, 1993, 12 min.

Rebecca Horn The feathered prison fan (Die sanfte Gefangene) 1978Extract from the film The Dancer (Der Eintänzer) Daros Collection, Zürich© ADAGP Paris 2018

1 Rebecca Horn in John Dornberg, “Rebecca Horn. The Alchemist’s Tales”, ArtNews, Dezember 1991, p. 94-99, here p. 99 ; in the original : “It all interlocks. I always start with an idea, a story, which develops into a text, go from the text into sketches, then a film, and out of that come the sculp-tures and installations”.

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Harald Szeemann in Cassel. Three further participations in the prestigious manifestation were to follow. She was also present at the Skulptur Projekte in Münster in 1987 and 1997. Her work is exposed in institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, la Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Tate Gallery et the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Her work has earned her numerous distinctions of which The Carnegie Prize (1988), the Goslarer Kaiserring (1992), The Alexej-von- Jawlensky prize of the city of Wiesbaden (2007), the Praemium Imperiale (2010), the Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques de l’Académie d’Architecture de Paris (2011) and Lehmbruck Prize (2017).Visitors to Centre Pompidou-Metz have already been able to discover one of her installations as part of the exhibition Infinite Garden. From Giverny to Amazonia (2017). The exhibition Rebecca Horn. Theatre of Metamorphoses will be the first large-scale monograph devoted to the artist in France since her presentation at the Musée de Grenoble in 1995 and at the Carré d’Art in Nimes in 2000.

Curators : Emma Lavigne, Director, and Alexandra Müller, exhibition and research officer, Centre Pompidou-Metz

The exhibition Rebecca Horn. Body Fantasies will be presented by the Museum Tinguely in Basel from 5 June to 22 September 2019.

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Opera as the World22.06.19 > 27.01.20Gallery 3

The exhibition Opera as the World is a testimony to the encounter between the visual arts and the operatic genre in the XX and XXI centuries. More than an exhibition devoted to opera sets produced by artists, it aims to explore, as an echo, or on the contrary, in tension with the heritage of the Wagnerian “Gesamtkunstwerk” (the concept of a total work of art), how the visual arts and the operatic genre fed off each other mutually and sometimes even radically influenced each other. In this to and fro movement, opera thus serves as a fertile field of experimentation and a catalyst for new sensitivities, aesthetics and politics.

Exposing opera today has more than one sense. The myth of the “final opera” no longer exists. If Pierre Boulez’s famous declaration in 1967 - “Opera houses

Grazia Toneri, Semper edam, 2004 Special project for the Fenice Theatre of Venice

should be blown up” - seemed to come down like some fatal and definitive verdict in the 1970’s, we can now observe that the genre, on the contrary, throughout the XX century and precisely these last decades, has continued to produce important and remarkable creations. The spectacularisation once

criticised has largely touched other artistic domains. Opera as a place of high spectacle enables henceforth, to explore from another angle, this innervating theatricality more and more after years of more conceptual art, in the contemporary field.

Presenting models, costumes and elements of sets, as well as imposing installations and new creations, the presentation mixes images and sounds, showing how opera is both a factory of shared artistic desires as much as a symbol of liberty. Theatrical experiences of the first avant-gardes such as La Main heureuse (1910-1913) by Arnold Schönberg to the scores which are now lastingly inscribed in the programme of the great theatres such as Saint-François d’Assise (1983) by Olivier Messiaen, whilst not forgetting more experimental but so emblematic forms such as Einstein on the Beach (1974) by Philip Glass and Bob Wilson, Opera as the World will outline a different mapping of inter-disciplinarity. Opening out into different thematic sections, going from the theatre stage as a moving painting, to political projects and sometimes more radical utopian forms and new places for opera, by way of fairy tales or even the passion of myths, the project essentially focusses on a selection of creations which are particularly representative of these fruitful stage – artist relations. Certain great classics – such as The Magic Flute, or Norma will also be exposed, revealing how the repertoire when handled with audacity, has served both as a means of transgression and of transformation, whilst still guaranteeing a certain longevity for the genre. The exhibition will question the very capacity of an exhibition if not to reproduce, to at least mention the sensory power of opera and its bewitching character. An important work on the reactivation of certain creations from the past, as well as certain commissions given in the past to contemporary artists, will enable to show the passion which the genre still arouses today, and to plunge the visitor into the singular magic of the

“It is not a question of re-composing an opera with its hierarchies, but rather to build an instrument which produces freedom.”Pascal Dusapin on the subject of ”To Be Sung”

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operatic spectacle.

Curator : Stéphane Ghislain RousselResearch and coordination officer: Anne Horvath, Centre Pompidou-Metz A rich programme of associated performing arts will be proposed in connection with the exhibition.

The exhibition Opera as the World is produced as an echo to celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Opéra national de Paris.

Throughout the 2018/2019 season and up until 31 December 2019, the Opéra national de Paris will celebrate its 350th anniversary: it was in 1669, the 28 June, that Louis XIV signed the letters patent authorising the Councilor Pierre Perrin to establish the Royal Academy of Opera, which would later assume the name of Royal Academy of Music. This anniversary is a unique occasion in the life of the Opéra national de Paris to pay a tribute to its history. Parallel to its programme based on three and a half centuries of history it is incumbent on l’Opéra national de Paris to step out of its own buildings and it is legitimate that it is associating with the Musée d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou Paris and Metz, the Bibliothèque nationale de France for large-scale exhibitions, but also to reply to the invitation from the Collège de Fance and numerous regional theatres.These institutions and the Opéra have coordinated their projects with the aim of covering the majority of great epochs in the history of the Opéra de Paris and to provide a full historical panorama. Exhibitions, conferences, master classes and meetings will enable the comparison of the heritage of an institution with its future aspirations.

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The Ecstatic Eye. Sergei Eisenstein at the crossroads of the arts 28.09.19 > 24.02.20Grande Nef

Sergei Eisenstein, mythic film director who was the glory of Russian cinema, is a lot more than a film maker. Cultivating the art of montage and of lighting to the point of inventing a new visual language in the middle of the 1920’s Eisenstein has always placed himself at the crossroads of the arts. Man of the theatre and of literature, artist, theorist, passionate about archeology and anthropology, all throughout his career he never ceased to learn about the history of art. Centre Pompidou-Metz is proposing a retrospective of his work compared with this universal heritage. We will find the great films which made his reputation (Strike, 1924; The Battleship Potemkine, 1925; October, Ten days that shook the world, 1927; The General Line, 1929; Que Viva Mexico !, 1932; Alexandre Nevsky, 1938 and Ivan the Terrible, 1944-46), but also his theatrical experimentations, his drawings rich with symbols, drawn with clear lines or his unfinished projects. The exhibition goes back over the methodology and the visionary approach of the film-maker, the productions with a strong link to Russian history but also his numerous voyages in Europe, to Mexico and to the United-States, to his lectures and his meetings. If during his lifetime, Eisenstein was an artist that the whole world demanded and whose work and philosophy perturbed minds, today this aura has considerably diminished, because of the fact that his film work is no longer systematically distributed via the cinema clubs. Likewise, the complexity and the scope of Eisenstein’s accomplishments have for a long time been underestimated because of essentially ideological interpretations, reducing his work only within the context of the communist USSR and his relations with Stalin. The exhibition The Ecstatic Eye. Sergei Eisenstein at the crossroads of the arts intends therefore to discover or rediscover for the French and European public a major name of the seventh art and of world culture, a man considered to be the “Russian Leonardo da Vinci” and who was the first to present himself in artist’s clothing. We must therefore insist on the

Serguei Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible, 1945

“It seems that all the arts have, through the centuries, striven towar-ds the cinema. In return, the cinema helps to understand their methods.” Sergei Eisenstein

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Eisenstein the maker, the amateur, collector, commentator, image editor, a visionary Eisenstein, always eager for radical experiments intended to have a profound and durable impact on the spectator. By consulting the vast range of references created by Eisenstein in his work, this confrontation between fixed images and moving images enables the revelation in an exemplary way, of the manner in which a creator produces his images, at a time when the question of artistic creation has become central. The exhibition engages a dialogue with the history of art, in an attempt to show how Eisenstein nourishes himself intellectually in his work, with chef d’œuvres from the history of world art, the works of his Russian and foreign contemporaries, but also and above all the artistic heritage preceding the advent of the cinema, such as painting, sculpture, engraving, drawing, architecture. The exhibition also shows Eisenstein’s interest and yearning for popular cultures (American, Russian, European), in an abolition of hierarchies which is representative of his associative logic. Eisenstein, as a theorist rereads the history of art in the light of cinema. Indeed, the cinema did not so much represent for Eisenstein a medium but rather a philosophical operation, a materialization of psychological processes fixed in man since the dawn of time. In this respect, cinema enabled him to rethink the entire history of art and of world culture, which is translated in the exhibition by galleries of paintings and of sculptures that Eisenstein analyses in cinematic terms and of which certain can also afterwards be interpreted through the prism of the cinema. The history of Eisensteinian art is deliberately anachronistic and dehierarchised, open to extra-western cultures. Centre Pompidou-Metz is proposing with this exhibition a rediscovery of the seventh art, through one of the most eminent figures in its history.

Curators: Ada Ackerman, Research associate at the CNRS/THALIM, art historian and Philippe-Alain Michaud, curator at the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Head of the experimental cinema department Research officer: Olga Kataeva, artist and researcher