Gustav Metzger "Remember Nature"

MAMAC (2nd floor of the Museum) February 11 - May 14, 2017

Opening February 10, 2017 at 7 pm

A retrospective event dedicated to a major figure in the avant-garde. An artist pioneer - engaged in the 1960s in the major environmental issues

The MAMAC devoted a major exhibition to Gustav Metzger, an artist at the international course, whose influence has been growing in recent years. Major player of the Vanguards of the second half of the 20th century, the artist, was born in 1926 in Nuremberg, has contributed, since the dawn of the 1960s, the redefinition of art, exploring new ways of creating and anchoring its approach on the big issues of his e Poque.

Like many artists of his generation, and especially of the new realists, Metzger abandoned painting in 1959 and began to create some open with objects of daily life or industrial materials to degrade. This reflection on obsolescence and even self-destruction is embodied in parts such as Acid Nylon Painting (1960), South Bank Demonstration (1961), which will be discussed in the exhibition through archives and reactivations facilities.

The exhibition focuses also on one of the major and innovative of Gustav Metzger aspects: his early involvement in environmental issues. By 1960, Metzger said in one of his manifestos: " self-destructive art demonstrates the power of man to speed up the process of disintegration of the nature and put it open. . In 1970, the artist circulated in London a 'arranged' car: Mobbile. A big transparent cube containing green plants is fixed on the roof of the vehicle and directly connected to its exhaust. Plants slowly asphyxiated by gas vapors highlight a phenomenon of intoxication of living otherwise invisible. Many other interventions and facilities will follow up his big project Mass Media: Today and Yesterday -invites the visitor throughout the exhibition, to participate in the review of subjective press around major issues environmental contemporaries.

Gustav Metzger has contributed significantly to pushing the limits of art and the notion of authorship, both in the explored shapes (performance, open to achieve or reinvent call for participation of the public, according to instructions, Primate of the) process on the shape, symposia, etc), and in the topics - including environmental issues - as many terms and issues that remain highly topical some fifty years after their early development.

Gustav Metzger and the MAMAC in Nice : based on the contributory spirit of Gustav Metzger, the exhibition offers the opportunity to collaborations with various partners for the reactivation of open and the production of associated events.
The exhibition also allows to shed light on the collections of the MAMAC through the prism of "self-destruction": haunted, like many of his contemporaries, by mass destruction that World War II was the theatre, but also by the tension of the cold war and the beginning of the race to nuclear armament, Metzger writes a manifesto about "Self-destructive" art emphasizing the fascination of Western society for the destruction in 1959. At the same time (1960-61), Arman introduces his famous tantrums, Niki de St.-artist, invents the subversive gesture of shooting on his paintings and Jean Tinguely realizes his self-destructive machine sculptures, etc. The opportunity of a new perspective on the open major collection of the MAMAC.

Office : Hélène Guenin, Director of the MAMAC.