Angkor Royal Bronzes: Art of the Divine

While Khmer art is known around the world for its stone monuments, recent excavations have provided dramatic breakthroughs regarding our knowledge about its significant bronze statues. 

The Musée Guimet's exhibition Royal Bronzes of Angkor, an art of the divine focuses on bronze. The highlight of the exhibition is the reclining Vishnu statue from the Western Mebon - an 11th-century sanctuary to the west of Angkor - discovered in 1936 and originally measuring over five metres in length. This Cambodian national treasure will be exhibited for the first time with its long-separated fragments, after having benefited in 2024 from a campaign of scientific analysis and restoration in France, with the patronage of ALIPH (Alliance internationale pour la protection du patrimoine). It will be accompanied by over 200 works, including 126 exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, whose presence will enable visitors to follow a chronological trail of bronze art in Cambodia, from the 9th century to the present day, through a journey that takes them to the major sites of Khmer heritage.

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire which dominated part of mainland Southeast Asia for over five centuries, has preserved monumental remains of incomparable scale and beauty from its past glory. But if the architecture of the temples of the Khmer Empire (9th-14th/15th centuries) and the stone statues housed within them have been celebrated many times over, who remembers that these Buddhist and Brahmanic sanctuaries once housed a whole population of divinities and cult objects cast in precious metal: gold, silver, gilded bronze?

Exceptional loans from the National Museum of Cambodia, granted by the Royal Government within the specific framework of cooperation between the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the C2RMF (Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France), the EFEO (École française d'Extrême-Orient) and the Musée Guimet, are bringing together for the first time in this exceptional exhibition masterpieces (statuary, objets d'art or elements of architectural decoration) as well as photographs, casts and graphic documents to place these works of art in their cultural context, as well as in an archaeological and historical perspective.

Curated by:

• Pierre Baptiste, Director of Conservation and Collections, Musée Guimet, General Curator, Southeast Asia Section

• Brice Vincent, Senior Lecturer, Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO)

• David Bourgarit, research engineer, Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF)

• Thierry Zéphir, research engineer in charge of the Himalayan World collections at the Musée Guimet