Jardins — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 15 → July 24, 2017

Jardins is a modest attempt to echo the words of Foucault, often quoted but no less important for that: «The garden is the smallest part of the world and the whole world at the same time.»

The subject has been examined using its essential definition: an enclosure, a delimited area within a territory, an orchestrated area that is a window to the world. Presented at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, this multidisciplinary assembly of painting, sculptures, photographs, drawings, films and more is neither a comprehensive history of garden art, nor a catalogue with any aspirations to being exhaustive. Related notions such as that of nature, are kept away from an exhibition whose focus remains solely on its subject, which also wants to demonstrate, in the manner of a giant collage, how the garden is a complete work of art, that stimulates all of the senses, asking the central question of representation. The thematic visit, where the histories of art and science intermingle, is built as a journey where the “real” garden — neither literary, symbolic nor philosophical — is understood as both a botanical collection and an artistic construction. This “jardiniste” — a term coined by Horace Walpole and also used by Jean-Claude-Nicolas Forestier — exhibition seeks to defends the garden as an art form and its creators as artists.

Exhibition organized by the Réunion des musées nationaux — Grand Palais