Renaissances — Un hommage contemporain à Florence — Fondation Etrillard Paris – Hôtel de La Salle — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 14 → December 18, 2016

Renaissances — A contemporary tribute to Florence

Florence, today silent and somewhat hieratic witness of its glorious artistic past, was by the mid-16th century the central cultural battleground between Medieval theology-inspired art and philosophy and the man-centered political and artistic revolution of the Renaissance.

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On behalf of the Etrillard Foundation, Anna Morettini (curator and director of the Foundation) has conceived an exhibition which intends to detect Florentine Renaissance artistic codes and baselines in contemporary art production and by so doing better to understand how breakthroughs and ruptures can transform themselves after centuries into artistic references and traditions.

In other words, the intent is to trace the path by which today’s artists continue to look backwards devoid of nostalgia but with an incisive and somewhat ironic quest for Florentine and European tradition and its pendulum-like procession of hopes and despairs in humanist values.

The curator attempts to create an inspired dialogue between works by contemporary artists who invest in or echo the Florentine heritage and territory.

Those artworks by fourteen artists refer to Florentine Renaissance art, its materials, techniques and universal message: Sandow BIRK, Guillaume BRESSON, Glenn BROWN, James Lee BYARS, Jan FABRE, Ryan GANDER, Laurent GRASSO, Candida HÖFER, Patrick NEU, Adrian PACI, Gerhard RICHTER, Thomas STRUTH, Pieter VERMEERSCH and Massimo VITALI.

The exhibition includes more than thirty artworks among which marble sculptures, video, paintings, drawings and photographs.

The photographs present today’s city of Florence, its figures and architecture. All contemporary photographic techniques are used to capture the real essence and nature of this eternal City-Museum.

Revisiting tradition and praxis, a focus is put on practices techniques and materials in a homage to its Renaissance Masters in such a manner that time or chronology fade away leaving us without historical certainty.