Natures Mortes, Anne Imhof's Carte Blanche at the Palais de Tokyo - performance dates

A major exhibition... This is what the Palais de Tokyo is offering with a new Carte Blanche devoted to artist Anne Imhof, entitled Natures Mortes, and running from May 22 to October 24, 2021. The performances take place from October 14 to 18 and October 21 to 24, 2021.

The exhibition is a continuation of previous cartes blanches, initiated by Ugo Rondinone in 2007, the last of which, by Tomàs Saraceno, was held in 2018. The idea behind the exhibition?"To show the amplitude and protean nature of Anne Imhof's practice", as the museum explains in a press release. The retrospective will showcase her work as a painter, but also as a draughtswoman and sculptor.

Inspired by Picabia 's"Natures Mortes : Portrait de Cézanne, Portrait de Renoir, portrait de Rembrandt",Anne Imhof 's exhibition highlights from the outset"the entropy and degradation that occur in the action of living". The title, Natures Mortes, also questions"our perception of what is alive and what is not, and underlines the contractions that occur between these two states of being and matter", in the image of the artistic genre dear to many artists, such as Cézanne.

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Two universes, that of still life and the"formative part of his work", which thus provokes"a manifestation of absence, of what has already or not yet taken place and of which sometimes only ruins and traces remain". And an exhibition venue, the Palais de Tokyo, which becomes, as it did for his exhibition at the German Pavilion in Venice in 2017,"a territory of resistance and resonance". As at the Venice Biennale, the artist emptied the premises of all ephemeral structures for the occasion, keeping only the building's skeleton.

The result is"a vast landscape made up of recycled glass walls", reconstituting an urban-domestic ensemble in which"the visitor wanders through a glass labyrinth that separates and at the same time allows the gaze to pass through". Between isolation and perception, visitors are confronted with"the challenges of looking and observing that arise in these spaces of encounter and confrontation with others".

In addition to his flagship works such as Rage, Angst, Faust and Sex, the exhibition also features a whole new range of old and new artistic productions, in the form of paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, musical compositions and a new performance piece. And works that"resonate" with the worlds of other artists, including Alvin Baltrop, Trisha Donnelly, Eliza Douglas, Théodore Géricault, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Joan Mitchell, Cady Noland and Paul Thek.