Written in French.
Lasting from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, New Realism was part of an overall drive to renew artistic forms and themes in a booming consumer and industrial society, in reaction to the immediate post-war period: Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Fluxus, Zero Group, New Realists... Klein, Hains, Villeglé, Tinguely, César, Arman, Spoerri, Raysse, Dufrêne, Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Deschamps, Christo - dubbed the "New Realists"* by the art critic Pierre Restany - held many group shows and happenings. They integrated scraps of the everyday urban industrial world into their works (fences, barrels, plastic items, rubbish, cars or traffic signs...) --
The exhibition of about 200 works shows the vitality of "New Realism" through the reconstitution or display of some installations and a thematic and historical circuit which explores the special features of the movement and the highlights of their shared adventure. It focuses on a brief decade - from 1958 to 1965/69 - the time of its group shows, an extremely dense and lively period which was later obscured by the artists' individual careers.
As well as works by artists directly attached to the movement, the exhibition includes a few pieces by artists who were close to them (the "Objectors" united by Alain Jouffroy such as Raynaud, Pommereulle, Dietman, or again Malaval and Jacquet; artists who came from Fluxus such as Filliou or Vostell, or from Zero Group, such as Günther Uecker; American neo-Dadaists, Rauschenberg, Stankiewicz, Johns, Bontecou, Chamberlain...) in an effort to show the many different currents that animated the movement and to avoid reducing New Realism, as is too often done, to an emblematic, schematic presentation of a few actions.
Exhibition at the Grand - Palais, in 2007.
Written in French.
351 pages
Rmn - Grand Palais Publishers
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