CONSTRUCTED WORLDS. A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU by CENTRE POMPIDOU METZ

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS

22.11.19

23.08.21

centrepompidou-metz.fr #mondesconstruits

Constantin Brancusi, La Colonne sans fin III, avant 1928. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Succession Brancusi - All rights reserved (Adagp) © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP Design graphique : Doc Levin / Jeanne Triboul

A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION...................................................................................5 2. EXHIBITION ITINERARY.......................................................................8 3. FIVE QUESTIONS TO BERNARD BLISTÃ&#x2C6;NE, EXHIBITION CURATOR....23 4. LIST OF ARTISTS...............................................................................25 5. RELATED EVENTS..............................................................................26 6. EXHIBITION PARTNERS.....................................................................29 7. IMAGES AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS..................................................31

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

Brancusi, accroupi, taillant à la hache une Colonne sans fin, vers 1924 - 1925 Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 23,9 x 29,7 cm © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

1. INTRODUCTION CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU FROM NOVEMBER 22, 2019 TO AUGUST 23, 2021 GALERIE 1

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, a large part of modern sculpture marked a radical shift away from tradition, by following the route of abstraction. Paradoxically this was a way of analysing the world in a more objective and universal manner: rather than modelling the surface of things, certain artists like the cubists wanted to reveal their essential structure. They divided up the objects they studied into lines, volumes and planes. In their wake, sculptors and diverse avantgardists baptised their works “constructions” or “structures”, opting for a radical abstraction, where lines and right angles predominated. If industrial architecture encouraged these tendencies known as “constructivist”, occasionally willing to produce functional objects, sculpture also looked to redefine what is unique to it: the relationship to gesture, to

materials and above all to space, clearly structured, even modular and dynamic, involving the spectator. Modernist artists wanted a transparency and a balance for their sculptures that they wanted to see transposed into human structures. The most important pieces which are assembled here from the Centre Pompidou call into question the spawning of this utopian abstraction, followed by the analysis of it and finally, its contemporary deconstruction. Curators: Bernard Blistène, Director of the Musée national d’art moderne, with Jean-Marie Gallais, Head of the Programming department, Centre Pompidou-Metz and Hélène Meisel, research and exhibition manager.

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

2. EXHIBITION ITINERARY

Constructed Worlds, in the continuity of Phares, Musicircus and The Adventure of Colour, offers a thematic voyage over a long period, of the collection of the Centre Pompidou - Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Through around fifty works, from Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti to Bruce Nauman, Rasheed Araeen and Rachel Whiteread, this fourth part, accompanied by a mediation through images, explores the sculptural research carried out by artists from the beginning of the XXth century up until today.

the simulated collapsings by Monika Sosnowska (Rubble, 2008). Ceasing to be an object, sculpture topples over into the “extended field” which the art historian Rosalind Krauss once described, to become a structure, an installation, an environment, a site, a performance… From the very beginning of the exhibition, the huge timber carved by Joseph Beuys into the barely squared trunk of a tree and laid out on the ground like a sarcophagus, embodies the anonymous archaism of votive objects (Nasse Wäsche Jungfrau II, 1985). In the same vein, the monoliths assembled by Ulrich Rückriem suggest the art of stone masons, going from megalithic alignments to builders of cathedrals (Dolomit, 1982). The direct size of the raw materials presents as a starting point, a primordial gesture, doing away with superfluous transformations, in order to serve a sacred purpose. Further along, Robert Smithson's structures (Mirror vortex, 1964), Donald Judd (Untitled, 1978) and Gerhard Richter (6 stehende Scheiben, 2002/2011) on the contrary show a perfectly industrial manufactured workmanship, of glass surfaces, metal or plexiglass without any faults. Just as anonymous, these minimalist sculptures seem to be prototypes coming out of a factory, produced by machines rather than by hand: objects without gestures, heralding other venerations (technological, mercantile?).

Without following a strictly chronological order, the exhibition layout approaches some of the fundamental problems of sculpture, by thwarting the presupposed classics: the placing of the gesture, the presence, absence or integration of the pedestal, the invention and reinvention of sculpture beyond the statuary, of volume, gravitas or immobility. The diversity of works and of currents represented in this exhibition navigates through possible “configurations” of a medium which is sometimes pushed back to its outer reaches: graphic sculpture, on the borderline of drawing, with the welded silhouettes by Julio González (Femme à la corbeille, 1934) ; the sculpture “aboveground” and dynamic with the mobiles by Alexander Calder (Fish Bones 1939) ; sculpture on the borderline of architecture with the Architectones by Kasimir Malévitch (Gota, 1923 / 1989), the monumental impressions by Rachel Whiteread (Untitled (Room 101) 2003) ; or even the sculpture on the point of disappearing with

The paradoxes which punctuate this exhibition offer a contrasted rereading of a slice of the history of sculpture from the 20th and 21st centuries, starting

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

from the history of forms, revealing lines of descent just as much as fertile dissensions. In the room devoted to the celebrated aesthetic duel opposing verticality and horizontality, cohabiting as such in an exceptional manner the Colonne sans fin by Constantin Brancusi, and the metallic expanding netting on the ground by Carl Andre (4 Segment Hexagon, 1974). A great admirer of Brancusi – “(before him) verticality was always determined: the top of the head and the soles of the feet were the limits of sculpture. Brancusi's sculpture exceeds its vertical limits and continues beyond its terrestrial limits" – Carl Andre would nonetheless decide to bring down the Colonne sans fin, by adopting an overt horizontality. The exhibition plays on these tensions which constantly redefine modern and contemporary sculpture.

As an introduction and conclusion to this exhibition layout, the artist Falke Pisano born in Amsterdam in 1979) has been invited to conceive an original installation, conceptualised as a " little history of modern sculpture". Since the middle of the first decade of this century, Falke Pisano questioned the paradoxes of modern and contemporary sculpture: can a sculpture be at one and the same time abstract and concrete? Can a sculpture become a conversation? The artist's texts and conferences develop the issues which are dear to her - language, the body, and context. This research is then spatialised and divided into mechanisms capable of accommodating works, diagrams, posters and projections as well as performances.

André Cadere A Romanian artist born in Poland, André Cadere settled in Paris in 1967. In 1970, he abandoned abstract painting in order to devote himself to the production of “bars of round wood” composed of coloured segments. Of variable sizes and thicknesses, they could fit into a pocket or reach two metres high. Three to seven colours were aligned according to a mathematical system of permutations into which an error always slipped in. Being able to be placed, hung or moved around in the manner of a pilgrim’s rod, Cadere’s bars defied hierarchies: without neither back nor front, without neither height nor depth, the artist often introduced them into institutions without having been invited. The six roundwood bars were throughout the exhibition area.

André Cadere, Six barres de bois rond, 1975 12 cylindres de bois peint pour chaque barre. H.: 115 diam. 9,5 (chaque) Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Courtesy Succession André Cadere © Philippe Migeat - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

scattered

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 1

UNBOXING Some questions to Falke Pisano, September 2019

Rhetoric, diagrams or structures: since the middle of the first decade of the century, Falke Pisano has created systems likely to solve the mystery of modernist sculpture. Because of its abstraction, it can indeed seem to be an inscrutable enigma, a purely formal game, indifferent to the course of things. It is, however, always the fruit of a personal or collective project. It appears in the form of tangible materials, it exists in a context; we have an emotional experience from it, we argue about it; it transforms us. Suggesting light propaganda structures, constructivist podiums and stands from the 1920’s, Falke Pisano’s boxes create a mobile pedagogical apparatus. Set up in the space, they are made up of tables and thematic panels on which can be read real or fictional conversations, between different major figures of the exhibition. Unboxing, “unpacking”, thus reveals the exchanges between artists, which, far from being anecdotal, have often had a determining impact on forms of modernism, of which the purity led us to believe however that they had no story to tell.

Centre Pompidou-Metz: The history of sculpture is central in your work, yet one could say that it is language and discourse that are your main material. How do the two articulate (sculpture and language)? Falke Pisano: The sculptural object, rather than the history of sculpture, has indeed been a central presence in my practice, especially in earlier works. The way I think about and use language as material, has developed in relation to the sculptural. Paradoxically, while I have a genuine love for the material object of sculpture, I have always used these physical objects to think about all the things they are not. My first works, that were mainly text-based, all started from questions such as “How can an object exist in different conditions?”, “Can a sculpture consist of language?”, “How can a sculpture turn into a conversation?”. So language has been a way to investigate and question the limits of materiality and objecthood, and sculpture has been a way to experiment with the potential of language to create material fictions. CP-M: For this new commission, Bernard Blistène invited you to give your interpretation of the exhibition Constructed Worlds, and more generally about the collection. What does a collection like the Pompidou Center represent for you? As a contemporary artist, what relationship do you have with museums in general? FP: A museum collection of the size of the one housed by Centre Pompidou, that is historically built up out several collections, that over the years has followed different acquisition policies, that is supported by significant donations and seems to be, to a certain extent, decentralized and decompartimentalized, for me is almost like a city of art. As in a city, it is possible to see the institutional narratives that have been produced in interplay with economic and cultural values. I believe strongly that as a visitor we should question how inclusive they are and that the institution itself should commit to overcoming its own historical limits. At the same time, I think it is important to look as well beyond the institutional, to the collection as a very human space, that is made

Portrait de Falke Pisano

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

CP-M: Why did you choose to highlight in Unboxing, through these conversations, what is called the "little story": anecdotes, encounters, asides, affinities, frictions, travel? FP: I find it fascinating how, especially in the context of museums, the opening of the exhibition functions as a threshold moment between the complex processual nature of the making of the exhibition and the ‘fait accompli’ of the exhibition itself. When we visit an exhibition, we are rarely aware of what has happened before it opened its doors, of all the aspects that have played a role in determining this specific selection of works, the way they are presented and how they are contextualized. We tend to accept that what is presented to us, was meant to be this way and forget that it is preceded by a long and often quite complex institutional process. And of course something similar happens to the works itself. As an artist I know that whatever doubts I have about the work, whatever compromises I have made, all the things that could be better or otherwise, the people and personal experiences that have influenced the work indirectly – nothing of this is obvious for the person that sees the work in an exhibition. I think this is one of the attractive qualities of art: even if a work makes you think about many issues besides itself, you engage with what is there. However, as an artist, more than in the objects itself, I am interested in art as a situated practice that cannot be seen separate from the context in which it takes place. With that I mean that for me the art object is just one term that operates in a broader set of relations, some social, some phenomenological, some conceptual... but all related to an expanded, and ultimately collective, experimental practice that concerns our relations to and engagement with the world of which we are a part, and to the past, present and the possible futures of this world.

up of many different stories, encounters and the love, commitment and ambitions of many different people. There will always be problems, blind spots, messy corners, but as life, it is a work in process that requires a continuous engagement and rethinking. CP-M: Your installation takes the shape of several thematic boxes, that could remind teaching materials or constructivist agit-prop props. Where do these shapes, half-objects half-sculptures, come from? FP: There is always a performative aspect to the objects and installations I make. I want them to do something. The form of the boxes and the way they open up to become a hybrid between sculpture and narrative display, reflects the idea behind my installation: How to create a presence of all those things that the sculptures exist of besides their material existence? At the same time I wanted to make clear that this is my reading, one of many possible ways to look at these objects and their histories and one of the many ways to bring them out in the open. That is why I did not choose for a more conventional display of archival material and histories, but for a quite idiosyncratic system involving besides the objects, diagrams, fictional conversations, cartoonish drawings and an organisation of elements that demands a different perspective than usual: remades of sculptures are hung upside down, boxes are place low on the bare floor, images are displayed horizontally etc. This is to say, we are not passive spectators, but we do things with the art that we encounter. While we might want to place works in the proper art historical context, we are also allowed to be more playful and creative, when we are constructing our own relations with and individual narratives around the works of art we see in museums. Pourquoi as-tu pelé les murs de ta maison de famille ? Est-ce que tu voyais cela comme un nettoyage des surfaces, Heidi ?

Les artistes Saloua Raouda Choucair et Heidi Bucher ont souligné le rôle que l’expérience joue dans l’accès à la connaissance et à la vérité, éloignant leurs œuvres des mouvements dominants comme le Constructivisme ou le Minimalisme. Les deux femmes ont bénéficié d’une reconnaissance tardive, leurs enfants se sont assurés du soin constant requis par l’œuvre de leurs mères.

Il y a eu quelques peaux que j’ai faites parce que je devais les faire. C’était une urgence...

De prendre le contrôle sur quoi ? Le passé ? Le présent ? Sur ton expérience ?

...d’abandonner et d’avancer, de prendre le contrôle...

Unboxing Constructed worlds. The Love for Sculpture: Care copyright Falke Pisano, 2019

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 2 ARCHAIC FORMS

At the beginning of the 20th century, masks, totems, talismans from African, Oceanian, Indigenous American tribes fascinate Westerners by their expressive force and their ritual functions. The primitive avant-gardists find in their geometrical simplicity and their raw materiality the path to abstraction. But even more than geographical boundaries, archaism emerges from the depths of time, a survivor of immemorial origins, from prehistory or from antiquity. Caves, Megalithic

alignments or burial mounds, archeological sites give to some post-war artists a taste for monumental scales and collective building sites as well as their cosmic dimensions. Concerned about the integrity of the materials, they privilege the technique of carving directly, working by hand with blocks of wood or stone. Their idols and monuments synthesise multiple influences: Paleolithic, Neolithic, Cycladic, Celtic, Gothic...

Mathias Goeritz Before establishing himself in Mexico in 1949, the German artist Mathias Goeritz lived for several years in Spain, where he was in awe of the Altamira grotto. The artist founded there the ephemeral school of the “New Prehistoric”, assembling the personalities open to the fiery and diagrammatic delineation of cave paintings. In Mexico, he then conceived monumental projects which embodied his concept of “emotional architecture”: combining the influence of pre-Hispanic pyramids with constructivist modularity, his sculptures aspired to the universal spirituality of dolmens, totems, or obelisks. Here, the work of time can also be read on the surface of the different materials used, of which some are rusty.

Mathias Goeritz, Pyramides mexicaines, 1959 5 éléments en tôle clouée, partiellement peinte sur âme de bois 279 x 324 x 138 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © droits réservés © Philippe Migeat - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 3 VERTICAL / HORIZONTAL

sans fin [The Endless Column], proposed in a variety of forms over forty years. This laid down important milestones for modern sculpture, like the abandon of the pedestal, and the repetition of geometrical modules, essential for American minimal art of the 1960’s. Fascinated by The Endless Column, the minimalist Carl Andre nevertheless decided to bring this heroic uprightness back down to earth – Brancusi dreamt of a column that would be higher than a skyscraper –, preferring instead a stretched out horizontality, which would simply become part of the exhibition space.

That which is vertical follows the direction of the thread of the lead weight, pointing under the effect of weight towards the centre of terrestrial gravity. Verticality also symbolises humanity standing up straight, leaving the ground, stretched out towards desires of elevation, like a growing tree. The column materialises this balance, solid and stable in its role of an architectural support. There is therefore between the tree, the column and man, strong symbolic ties, which culminate in the image of the axis of the world (axis mundi) which connects the terrestrial to the celestial. Constantin Brancusi produced the abstract synthesis of it in La Colonne

Constantin Brancusi Constantin Brancusi made several versions of his Colonne sans fin [Endless Column], in different sizes and materials. The structure however remains the same, based on the repetition of rhomboidal forms rising one above the other, generating an upward dynamic to which rhythm, harmony and simplicity of form all contribute. The work seems to extend to infinity, the vehicle of a transcendence that links earth and sky, the terrestrial and the spiritual. The last version of the Column, installed at Târgu Jiu in 1938 in honour of the young Romanian dead of the First World War, is 30 metres high. Constantin Brancusi, La Colonne sans fin III, avant 1928 Bois (peuplier) 301,5 x 30 x 30 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Succession Brancusi - All rights reserved (Adagp) © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 4 DRAWING IN SPACE

Both an exceptional goldsmith and blacksmith, Julio González predicted at the beginning of the 1930’s the emergence in modern sculpture of a “new Iron Age”. In 1928 he assisted Pablo Picasso in the creation of the models of welded wire for a project for a monument in memory of Guillaume Apollinaire. Highly graphic, these slender structures suggest the poet’s calligrammes. González therefore defines the limits of a linear sculpture, enabling both writing and “drawing in space”, by grasping “the essential

expression” by a line, a transparency and a void. Sometimes worked on a single plane, like Sculpture à deux dimensions [Sculpture in two dimensions] by Berto Lardera, these works play between flatness and volume, the shadow they project recalling their perforated materiality. Stretched like the strings of an instrument, radiating like beams of light, with industrial means, their lines take on an architectural dimension, particularly evident in the second part of the 20th century.

Rasheed Araeen At first a self-taught painter, Rasheed Araeen studied engineering in Pakistan. When he established himself in London in 1964, new British sculpture and the work of Anthony Caro fascinated him. But rapidly, he developed a very critical philosophy in the direction of the cultural colonialism of the west, which would lead to the creation of performances and militant reviews. For Araeen, western modernity, and notably minimalism, did not have the monopoly on geometry, which is fundamental in Islamic culture. His Cube of 1966, with its sides crossed through with a diagonal, would become the basic module of structures that he would not put into an order. Initially conceived to be manipulated by the public, the historical work One Summer Afternoon is installed here by the curators of the exhibition.

Rasheed Araeen, One Summer Afternoon, 1968 Bois, peinture, colle Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Rasheed Araeen © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 5 ARCHITECTURE

Sculpture and architecture are traditionally defined as two distinct disciplines – one decorative, the other utilitarian – brought together within the context of complementarity, and sometimes in competition. Numerous avant-gardists have however striven for their consolidation during the first half of the 20th century. Suprematism and constructivism in Russia, De Stijl and neo-plasticism in the Netherlands, Bauhaus firstly in Germany, and then in the United States, Cercle et Carré [Circle and Square] and

Abstraction-Création in Paris or Concrete art in Switzerland, were all looking to conquer a threedimensional space. Their abstract orthogonal geometrical structures made up only of lines and right-angles, floating planes in primary colours, suggest the models of modernist architecture, which had become much more flexible since the appearance of reinforced concrete, the steel framework and the glass shell.

Kasimir Malevitch For Malevich, the square, “new icon” of a world without a purpose, was the starting point for the vocabulary of suprematism. The volumes of the Architectones (from the Greek arkhitektoneo, “to be an architect, builder”), developed from 1923, result from the projection of squares into space, transformed into cubes and then into parallelepipeds. More than an architectural model, Gota is a theoretical model for a new spatial vision. When it entered the collection of the Centre Pompidou in 1977, the work was incomplete: 56 of the 243 elements of which it is composed were missing. These were reconstituted thanks to the collaboration of Troels Andersen (historian), Poul Pedersen (artist) and Chantal Quirot (restorer). Kasimir Malevitch, Gota, 1923 / 1978 Plâtre, 85,2 x 48 x 58 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Jacques Faujour - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 6 MONUMENT

Whereas during the 19th century monuments glorified and commemorated the history of a nation by an heroic representation and enduring installations, modern artists developed an abstraction and a dynamism more appropriate for portraying ideals pointing towards the future: technical progress, but also democracy and pacifism. The Monument to the Third International, modelled by Vladimir Tatlin in 1919 after the October Revolution, is exemplary in terms of scale and utopian vision. Its double steel spire should have gone higher than the Eiffel

Tower and house a sphere, a cube, a pyramid and a glass cylinder supposed to accommodate various administrations. Never built, this mythical project founded the political orientation of constructivism as implied in public spaces and made claim to having cosmic dimensions. The very same which would be directly later taken over, in the 1960’s, by artists making the site and the landscape a contribution to monuments devoted to the elements or to geological forces.

Antoine Pevsner In 1920, Antoine Pevsner wrote in Moscow, with his brother Naum Gabo, the Realistic Manifesto, the founding milestone of constructivism. He settled definitively in Paris in 1923 where he would take part in the activities of Cercle et Carré [Circle and Square] and AbstractionCréation. Thought out in terms of dynamic, transparency and depth, his sculpture is made of thin rods of welded metal and of surfaces striped with a file. Monument symbolisant la libération de l’esprit [Monument symbolising the liberation of the mind] is the second version of a model produced for an international sculpture competition launched in 1952 by the International Contemporary Art Institute of London on the theme of the unknown political prisoner. At the centre of a geometrical netting emphasising the sequence, is a suspended cell, the transparency of which suggests the force of emancipation.

Antoine Pevsner, Monument symbolisant la libération de l'esprit (Monument pour le prisonnier politique inconnu), 1955 - 1956 Bronze, laiton brasé et résine synthétique, 132 x 140 x 90 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2019 © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 7 FREE FORM

Without forming a specific current, and whilst belonging to different groups, the promoters of free form became liberated of all functionalistic constraints during the 1950’s in order to inspire themselves with organic forms and mathematical formulae. Geometry, and notably topology which is the study of the relationship of positions, is for example for Max Bill, “the primary element of any work of visual art”. In 1934, whilst searching for an endless movement, he intuitively rediscovered the

Möbius strip by folding on itself a strip of paper, to which he added a half-twist. This is the starting point of his series Endless Ribbon produced from 1935 to 1953, in hard stones, perfectly mechanically polished. The straight line no longer had the monopoly of architectonic rigour; the curve, infinite and open forms become part of the reflections about unknown spaces and more complex geometries, that art helped to imagine.

Max Bill, Unendliche Schleife, version IV (Ruban sans fin, version IV), [1960 - 1961] Socle en granit: 18 x 175 x 40 cm 130 x 175 x 90 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2019 © Jacqueline Hyde - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 8 MOVEMENT, BALANCE

At the beginning of the 20th century, numerous avant-gardists looked to transcribe into their sculptures the dynamics which were acting upon industry, science and technology. Galvanised by “the beauty of speed”, the futurists became enthusiastic about the aggressive movement of machines. The constructivists preferred to evoke the speed of light (300.000 km/s) as being the most absolute manifestation of movement. However, far from these mechanical or cosmic debates, the first veritable kinetic work (in movement) is presented

firstly as a playful makeshift production: a bicycle wheel fixed onto a stool, actionable by whoever wishes to contemplate the infinite rotation of the cycle. The “ready-made” bicycle wheel by Marcel Duchamp opens in 1913 the era of fruitless machinery, authorising the spontaneous balance of Calder’s mobiles or Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines. These objects celebrate impermanence, the random and the transformation peculiar to life, whilst stimulating the perception and interaction of the spectator, himself always moving.

Alexander Calder In 1930, after having discovered Mondrian’s studio in Paris, Calder shifted towards an abstraction that he wanted to put into movement. After his miniature circus statuettes and his wire silhouettes, come the mobiles. Motorised and geometrical, the first ones suggest wellordered worlds. The following ones adopt organic forms, like the Fish Bones, and freely sway under the influence of draughts. Brightly coloured sheets of metal, cut into the shape of leaves or of scales, are used as weights, hung onto the extremities of metallic rods serving as pendulums. Their structures suggest an arborescent form or frameworks. Far from any frenzy, movement with Calder undulates around a point of equilibrium, moving upwards calm and immobility.

Alexander Calder, Fish Bones (Arêtes de poisson), 1939 Tôle, tiges et fils métalliques peints, 207,2 x 192 x 137,1 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Calder Foundation, New York / Adagp, Paris © Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 9 STRUCTURES

In architecture the “structure” designates the elements which make up the framework of the building, leaving to one side any covering. More widely, a structure is an arrangement of the parts of a whole, an organisation, a system. In 1966, the collective exhibition “Primary Structures” assembled in New York diverse three-dimensional objects constituted of geometrical modules, arranged according to the principles of seriality and of permutation. Steel girders, aluminium polyhedrons,

Formica monoliths, glass cubes or lines of bricks, these minimalist works close to industrial design seemed to come out of the factory. Of simple logic and totally neutral, they were described by the American artist Donald Judd as “specific objects”, their specificity being the power to be grasped at the first glance and to not refer to anything other than themselves. But this claimed literality sometimes masked hidden references of interiority, of mystery, of a critical, erotic or humorous tension.

Robert Smithson Fascinated by geology and paleontology, Robert Smithson was inspired as much by natural sciences as he was by science-fiction. Some of his earth moving projects take place at the heart of landscapes sculpted by erosion or by fossil exploitation. Entropy is at the heart of his approach: this law of physics which expresses the irreversible evolution of matter towards the loss of energy and chaos is symbolised, with Smithson, by the vortex or the spiral. Like crystals, the three prisms of Mirror Vortex attract our eyes by shattering any spatial perspective. The iconic work of Land Art Spiral Jetty rolls up on the Great Salt Lake (United States) a whirlpool, suggesting the submersion of the water towards a mythical siphon. Voyages in time therefore correspond to this spatial disorientation, between accelerated ruin and crystalised time.

Robert Smithson, Mirror Vortex, 1964 Acier peint, miroir, 87,5 x 144,8 x 63,5 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2019 © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Jean-Claude Planchet/Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 10 PROCESS

At the end of the 1960’s certain artists rejected the affection for the pure forms of minimalist sculpture, of which the solid matters, made to last, seemed to come from an outdated idealism. The representatives of the antiform on the contrary preferred a supple and movable materiality, the properties of which were not definitively set, but engaged in a process still ongoing, made up of impermanence and of risk. Rubber, string, rope, canvas, felt, sand, plaster, wax, etc.: as many unstable materials likely to be transformed. For the American sculptor Robert

Morris, it was a question of finding the right balance between the tool, the manner of doing and the nature of the material, all “by going beyond the individuality of the hand for a more direct revelation of the matter itself”. In his essay Anti Form (1968), he made Jackson Pollock a precursor: at the end of the 1940’s, the painter had let paint freely run off his paintbrush which was suspended above a canvas placed on the floor, exploring the fluidity specific to its medium.

Robert Morris Profoundly protean, the work of Robert Morris proceeds between conceptual art, minimal art and post-minimalism. His critical essays, mixing the history of art, philosophy and fiction, are considerable. This felt relief is a testimony to his interest for the “phenomenology of doing”, which he theorised in a text in 1970. Blurring in an unprecedented manner the frontiers between a tableau and a sculpture, the work owes its aspect and physical properties to its material and its mode of presentation. The five large parallel incisions, made at regular intervals in the felt, once on the wall, reveal yawning gaps which testify to contradictory forces: the tension of the system of hanging, the weight of the heavy matter and the resistance of the incisions put to the test.

Robert Morris, Wall Hanging (Pièce de feutre suspendu au mur, Felt Piece), 1969 - 1970 Feutre découpé, 250 x 372 x 30 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2019 © Philippe Migeat - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 11 THE IMPRINT OF THE SETTING

Rachel Whiteread produced her first sculpture in 1988 by pouring plaster into the interior of a cabinet tilted horizontally and then broken up to free the solidified cast inside. This technique of hollow casting necessitates destroying the mould in order to take out the negative imprint, which at first served as a means of revealing to her the cavities of domestic objects: the convex container of a hot water bottle or the soft volume of an old mattress. The artist then cast the empty interior of a living room, the whole of a house destined to be demolished. The large piece presented here was

cast at the headquarters of the BBC in London in 1932. Invited to test the memory of the place on the occasion of redecoration work, Whiteread chose to capture the very enigmatic “room 101”, which had become legendary after George Orwell, who had himself worked at the BBC from 1941 to 1943, had used the name to baptise the torture room in his novel 1984. In 2003, the artist turned into an impenetrable bunker this space which had become a technical room, petrifying from the inside all the walls’ irregularities, in an almost archeological approach: “to mummify the air”.

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Room 101) (Sans titre (Chambre 101)), 2003 Jesmonite, revêtement coaxial, contreplaqué, acier nickelé, 300 x 643 x 500 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Rachel Whiteread, courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 12 INSTABILITY

From the hyper-realist moulding to the video performance and the neon, Bruce Nauman has contributed since the middle of the 1960’s to a widened practice of sculpture. Fascinated by mechanisms of control, this artist has called into question the way in which space conditions our behaviour, modelling architectural installations meant to create feelings of disorientation, confinement or instability. As early as 1969, narrow dead-end corridors imposed on visitors the experience of a physical and mental stalemate. From 1977 to 1981, several projects of

tunnels in the shape of rings, lacking an access and a destination, proposed the absurd project of “going around in circles”. Symbol of the infinite and of repetition, this circularity is here doubled up by the title Smoke Rings suggesting the vertical elevation of horizontal forms as much as the transient breath of idle smokers. Created in several segments of plaster – the material of the first draft in sculpture –, simply placed on the floor on wooden blocks, in a precarious equilibrium, these two fragile circles are the models of imaginary monuments.

Bruce Nauman, Smoke Rings (Model for Underground Tunnels) (Ronds de fumée (Modèle de tunnels souterrains)), 1979 Plâtre vert: diam.: 340; h: 35 plâtre blanc: diam.: 330; h.: 50 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2019 © Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 13 THE SKIN OF THINGS

If constructivist sculptors have defended transparent structures, with their works similar to wooden roof frameworks or skeletal structures stripped bare, on the contrary, others have practiced the art of dissimulation and opacity. Envelope, wrap up, bundle up, pocket, box . . . certain artists affiliated to Dada and to surrealism cover up mysterious contents. In 1920, Man Ray swathed in a blanket an object that he did not wish to reveal (l’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse [The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse]). Was it to protect it or to hide it? To create curiosity

or frustration? Produced by artists of different generations, the works in this room cover and preserve domestic objects, sanctified in spite of their banality. Heidi Bucher’s imprints removed from her ancestors’ home have the appearance of shrouds. The sheets of precious metals that Edith Dekyndt applies to woolen blankets make them into abstract icons. Finally, the Grande Chrysocale [Oroide Cocoon] – an alloy of copper, tin and zinc – woven by Guillaume Leblon in the proportions of a sarcophagus encloses everyday objects kept secret.

Guillaume Leblon, Grande Chrysocale, 2006 80 x 370 x 70 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2019 © G. Meguerditchian et Ph. Migeat - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ROOM 14 DECONSTRUCT

Since the beginning of 2000, Monika Sosnowska has been exploring the architectural relics of the communist era, notably in Warsaw, where she lives. “A very chaotic city, she says, being rapidly rebuilt on the ruins of modernism, or rather, coexisting in symbiosis with them.” Guided by functionalist principles as much as a social ideal, some of these buildings from the 1960’s have grown old prematurely, because of an excessive standardisation, of inhuman scales or substandard construction. Fascinated by these defeats, the artist conceived what she

called “psychoactive spaces”: traps which are both physical and logical (a succession of neverending doors, impracticable stairways...). Rubble is presented as an enigma: why does the debris on the floor – apparently due to the collapse of the ceiling – have the charm of precious crystals? Inspired by the brutal vision of a fractured window as much as by the trompe-l’œil of a baroque vault, where painted figures seem to drop, the artist suggests that a hidden order can emerge from the fall, from the accidental and from the destruction.

Monika Sosnowska, Rubble, 2008 Placoplâtre, bois, peinture, 23 x 560 x 900 cm Vue de l’installation dans l’expositions 'Projects 83: Monika Sosnowska'. MoMA, NY, 30 Août 2006 – 27 Novembre 2006 © Monika Sosnowska Photographer: Jonathan Muzikar © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Object Number: IN1979.2. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

3. FIVE QUESTIONS TO BERNARD BLISTÈNE, EXHIBITION CURATOR Centre Pompidou-Metz: After “What is Modern Sculpture?”, the large -scale exhibition which took place at the Centre Pompidou in 1986, directed by Dominique Bozo and Margit Rowell’s commission, why have you chosen yet again to examine sculpture in the collection today?

CP-M: What are the specific features of the sculpture collection of the Museum of Modern Art? BB: A proliferation of multiple groupings, the collection is of an incredible richness. Brancusi’s Workshop, which the artist bequeathed in its entirety to the State in 1956, is a priceless contribution to the understanding of modern sculpture. In recent years, I have endeavoured to create an important position for sculpture in the layout of the permanent collections of the museum in Paris. Such an exercise is not simple, we cannot present sculpture and its developments – the installation or the environment – with as much ease as with other disciplines. For all that, I persist in thinking that it is often in the very radicalness of sculpture, and in the connections it has maintained with other visualart forms, that certain aspects of modernity have been more decisive. This is undoubtedly the reason why the groundwork which presides over the presentation which we are making together today, attempts to propose an interpretation that does not aim to be anthological, but which will follow a governing principle. Through this method, the very notion of sculpture is approached in its historical evolution, which, from Brancusi to minimalism and to the critical perspectives which developed in different regions of the world, reveal perspectives which are currently too often ignored. In a way, this project, by its simplicity, also aims to be a return to the history of forms which have marked me and that I still consider as a valid interpretative framework.

Bernard Blistène: The idea came from your institution and from Emma Lavigne, when she was Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. The exhibition “What is Modern Sculpture?”, which took place thirty-five years ago was undoubtedly for her the first great exhibition by the Centre Pompidou devoted to the subject. It had an anthological ambition which would cover the whole of the century, according to a principally western perspective. This exhibition, was also the point of view of Margit Rowell, a curator with a very specific career path, and whose exhibition in 1979 at the Guggenheim “The planar dimension – Europe, 1912-1932” had revealed the importance of the plane in modernist sculpture, from an authentic historical perspective. It appeared to me legitimate to come back today to history, in a period which claims to overlook it. At the same time, it also seemed to me to be necessary to refuse to show “everything, a little”, with the risk of creating an indecipherable hotchpotch... In addition, it was also necessary to show how much the museum’s collection had developed as much by historical acquisitions as through an attention to modernity “off the beaten track”.

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

CP-M: The exhibition brings together around fifty works all by different artists. This selection enables a wide diversity, nevertheless the governing principle which you mentioned is that of abstraction in sculpture, and at the heart of this, the constructivist approach in particular. The connection to architecture, to the idea of construction and of deconstruction can be found throughout the exhibition. Why have you chosen this axe in particular?

CP-M: As part of this exhibition, you wanted to invite the young Dutch artist, Falke Pisano, to create a new work, likely to reflect this selection of sculptures from the Musée national d’art moderne. Why did you ask her, and what do you expect from such a contemporary commission with regard to the collection? BB: From the beginning of the project, it appeared to us that this linear idea needed to be thought over in all its complexity, in the light of “plural modernities3”. Because for about fifteen years now she is leading a reflection on history, on marginalised aesthetic categories and on the relationship of the work to its context, it appeared to me important to associate Falke Pisano by saying to her: here is what we are showing, bearing in mind that we cannot show everything, what reflection could you construct from this story, from this reality which is a collection, which we know is made up of large groups, but which also has shortcomings? Falke Pisano espoused the story of the collection, but also that of its margins, in order to construct a mechanism which makes us realise that a collection, and even more so, that an exhibition are never closed systems. These are open systems, both through the questions that they generate, by the particularity of the point of view of each one of us has of them; systems in which what makes history cannot have a set form, but a form continually redefining itself.

BB: Sculpture, assemblage, construction… As many paradigms which have been pioneering and productive in the development of XXth and XXIst century sculpture. But I believe that the essential is to show the porosity which can exist between different disciplines and notably, the relationship which was established during the XXth century between sculpture, architecture and public spaces. It is for that matter from this essential relationship that the project is organised at different moments in history. CP-M: Some of the works presented do indeed tend towards the exterior and public spaces, but others also go towards the interior, through the practice of prints (impression of a room for Rachel Whiteread, of a floor for Heidi Bucher). Other works, similar to skins or sheaths are rather at the frontier of the interior and the exterior. The exhibition concludes with the deconstruction of space, with Monika Sosnowska’s installation, simulating the collapse of space. Is it the progressive exit from the museum space which unites these approaches? BB: By simplifying to the extreme, I would willingly say that the principle concern of deconstruction obviously worked on sculpture’s space in the last third of the XXth century and in the XXIst century, but that also sculpture, as Rosalind Krauss said in her day, was thought of as an “expanded field”. We could not mount such a project without opening up a reflection going beyond the museum. It is the case with Robert Smithson and other artists who, after having questioned the museum within its limits, engaged their propositions into an open space, both literally and figuratively, in spite of and at the expense of the museum itself.

3 With reference to the exhibition of the collections of the Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne Modernités plurielles de 1905 to 1970, presented from 23 October 2013 to 26 January 2015.

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

4. LIST OF ARTISTS Carl Andre

Gyula Kosice

Giovanni Anselmo

Berto Lardera

Rasheed Araeen

Guillaume Leblon

Joseph Beuys

Kasimir Malévitch

Max Bill

Etienne-Martin

Constantin Brancusi

Gordon Matta-Clark

Heidi Bucher

Robert Morris

Andre Cadere

Bruno Munari

Marcelle Cahn

Bruce Nauman

Alexander Calder

Antoine Pevsner

Anthony Caro

Falke Pisano

Saloua Raouda Choucair

Gerhard Richter

Edith Dekyndt

Ulrich Rückriem

César Domela

Reiner Ruthenbeck

Barry Flanagan

Richard Serra

Alberto Giacometti

Robert Smithson

Mathias Goeritz

Monika Sosnowska

Julio González

Vladimir A. Stenberg

Jean Gorin

Gueorgii A. Stenberg

Gottfried Honegger

Takis

Francisco Infante-Arana

Jean Tinguely

Enio Iommi

Georges Vantongerloo

Robert Julius Jacobsen

Isabelle Waldberg

Donald Judd

Rachel Whiteread

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

5. RELATED EVENTS YOUNG VISITORS While Centre Pompidou-Metz is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary, the exhibition Constructed Worlds reaffirms the place of mediation at the heart of the institution's cultural project.

the real or fictional world that the children and adults accompanying them create in a collective and/or individual way. This sensitive approach is particularly developed for very young children.Families give themselves, during a visit, the opportunity to discover together that a sculpture can be as graphic as a drawing, as functional as the design, as built up than architecture or as mobile as dance!

Giving as many keys as possible while leaving the visitor free to create their own relation to the artwork, choosing pleasure and play to stimulate the youngest, to create moments of conviviality, dialogue and sharing, within the family or individually, this is how we at Centre Pompidou-Metz define mediation.

At Centre Pompidou-Metz, to experiment is also to be in direct contact with the artworks.The workshop "Sculpture de poche", designed by Camille Renault, offers this unique experience of building and feeling what is creating with a goal of transmission and appropriation. In La Capsule, it is a real story and a fantastic world to build that the young designer Apolline Muet offers. With the interactive installation "Mobile", presented for the first time in Metz, the visitors are actively creating, since everyone is invited to complete the structure imagined by the artist to make it live.

The exhibition route was conceived in its pedagogical approach as a field of experimentation for the visitors, to let them dive into a universe of shapes, materials, solids and voids, lines and curves, playing in turn with the accumulation or simplicity of a module. In (re)visiting the history of sculpture in modern and contemporary art, visitors are led to experiment, to wonder and to create. The scientific content transmission is embodied through the feelings and sensations provided by sculpted materials, through

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

WORKSHOPS 15.02 → 11.05 POCKET SCULPTURE

THE CAPSULE The Capsule is a place of encounters, exchanges and of artistic practices open to everyone.

WORKSHOP 5-12 YEARS OLD Camille Renault SAT. + SUN. + PUBLIC HOLIDAYS (except 1st May) Aged 5-7: 11 AM Aged 8-12: 3 PM 90’ | 5€

WED. + SAT. + SUN. + PUBLIC HOLIDAYS (except 1st May) 2 PM → 6 PM | Landing of Gallery 1 | Continuously Free admission upon presentation of an entrance ticket to the exhibitions, without reservation (subject to availability) Supplementary times during the school holidays for the Zone B: MON + WED + THU. + FRI. – 2 PM → 6 PM

Sign up online or on the spot (subject to availability). Supplementary times during the public holidays for the Zone B: Aged 5-7: WED. | 3 PM Aged 8-12: MON. + THU. + FRI. | 3 PM

15.02 → 11.05 MOBILE!

Camille Renault studied the history of art, painting and space design at the École Duperré. In between time, the numerous shows (theatre, puppets, circus) that she discovered in Paris led her towards light. Fascinated by this so sensitive matter, she began studying management (lighting/sound/flying) at the TNS School and then changed direction towards the visual arts. She finally entered the HEAR in 2013 in the section “book/object” where her artistic work settled into books and Object theatre. Today she pursues her work in Strasburg at the heart of an artists’ collective where she has opened an engraving/screen printing/bookbinding workshop. She is above all interested in the emotion which is created by an object which comes alive. When the living becomes visible or when the visible comes alive. As part of the exhibition Constructed worlds, it has been proposed to Camille to conceive a pocket workshop, to encourage children to think about the very nature of sculpture.

Apolline Muet Apolline Muet, a graduate from the ENSAD in Reims (2017), creates small moving objects. Having always been in awe of the period of childhood, she makes use of it in her design and illustration work, seeing in it as a means of inventing playful objects with a narrative content which make everybody happy. It is the recreational or re-creative experience which will be experienced by users which interests her and not the object in itself, the object being for her a “useful tool”. For la Capsule, the production of a moving materialtheque. Visitors will be able to exchange views and choose the materials which compose a large moving sculpture and thus create their own installation, a tribute to the useless machines imagined by Bruno Murani and presented in the exhibition Constructed worlds.

The workshops for children benefit from the support of the Group UEM and its affiliate efluid:

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

ASSOCIATED PROGRAMMING DES MONDES CONSTRUITS Loïc Guénin / Pascale Berthelot 22.11 | 20:00 | Studio 15€ | 10€ (tarif réduit pour les titulaires du PASS-M, du PASS-M Jeune) At the invitation of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Loïc Guénin is devoting himself to the writing of a cycle of pieces for piano and a few chosen objects. Performed by the pianist Pascale Berthelot, the piece has been conceived in 15 movements, each of which, is devoted to a work, an artist, a process and takes care to follow the layout of the exhibition Constructed Worlds. A choice of Sculptures from the Pompidou Centre.

“Sculpture and music have an intimate relationship. I am not looking to describe or depict in sound a gesture or a material, but to reveal a hidden, buried sound world by working on forms, characteristics, density and even vibration. Each movement becomes a small world of possibles which reveal themselves thanks to the initial sculpture, from where it originates and from where it escapes from with joy and mischievousness.” - Loïc Guénin

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

6. EXHIBITION PARTNERS Le Centre Pompidou-Metz constitutes the first example of decentralisation of a great national cultural institution, the Centre Pompidou, in partnership with the regional authorities. An autonomous institution, the Centre Pompidou-Metz benefits from the experience, skills and international renown of the Centre Pompidou. It shares with its elder the values of innovation, generosity pluridisciplinarity and openness to all audiences. The Centre Pompidou-Metz produces temporary exhibitions based on loans from the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, which is, with more than 120 000 works, the most important collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe and the second in the world. It also develops partnerships with museum institutions over the whole world. As an extension to its exhibitions, the Centre Pompidou-Metz also proposes dance performances, concerts, cinema and conferences. It benefits from the support of Wendel, the founding sponsor.

Mécène fondateur

With the participation of Muse and Vranken-Pommery Monopole.

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

G R A N D M E C E N E D E L A C U LT U R E

WENDEL, FOUNDING SPONSOR OF THE CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ Wendel has been involved with Centre Pompidou-Metz since its opening in 2010. Trough this patronage, Wendelhas wanted to support an emblematic institution with a broad cultural influence. In acknowledgement of its long-standing commitment to cultural development, Wendel was awarded the title of “Grand Sponsor of Culture” in 2012. Wendel is one of Europe’s leading listed investment companies. It operates as a long-term investor and requires a commitment from shareholder which fosters trust, constant attention to innovation, sustainable development and promising diversification opportunities. Wendel excels in the selection of leading companies, such as those in which it currently owns a stake: Bureau Veritas, IHS, Constantia Flexibles, Allied Universal, Cromology, Stahl or Tsebo. Founded in 1704 in the Lorraine region, the Wendel Group expanded for 270 years in various activities, in particular in the steel industry, before becoming a long-term investor in the late 1970s. The Group is supported by its core family shareholder group, which is composed of more than one thousand shareholders of the Wendel family, combined to form the family company Wendel-Participations, which owns 37.7% of the Wendel group’s share capital. CONTACTS: Christine Anglade Pirzadeh + 33 (0) 1 42 85 63 24 c.angladepirzadeh@wendelgroup.com Caroline Decaux + 33 (0) 1 42 85 91 27 c.decaux@wendelgroup.com

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

7. IMAGES AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

Pourquoi as-tu pelé les murs de ta maison de famille ? Est-ce que tu voyais cela comme un nettoyage des surfaces, Heidi ?

Il y a eu quelques peaux que j’ai faites parce que je devais les faire. C’était une urgence...

De prendre le contrôle sur quoi ? Le passé ? Le présent ? Sur ton expérience ?

...d’abandonner et d’avancer, de prendre le contrôle...

Portrait de Falke Pisano

Falke Pisano Nouvelle commande, titre provisoire “The Love for sculpture”

Constantin Brancusi, La Colonne sans fin III, avant 1928 Bois (peuplier) 301,5 x 30 x 30 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Succession Brancusi - All rights reserved (Adagp) © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI /Dist. RMN-GP

Kasimir Malevitch, Gota, 1923 / 1978 Plâtre, 85,2 x 48 x 58 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Jacques Faujour - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

Alberto Giacometti, [Maquette pour "Circuit"] (La piste), [1931 - 1932] Plâtre original, 4,5 x 47,5 x 48 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris et Adagp, Paris) © Adam Rzepka - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Room 101) [Sans titre (Chambre 101)], 2003 Jesmonite, revêtement coaxial, contreplaqué, acier nickelé, 300 x 643 x 500 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne, Paris © Rachel Whiteread, courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery © Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI / Dist. RMN-GP

CONSTRUCTED WORLDS A CHOICE OF SCULPTURES FROM THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

NOTES

LE CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ 1, parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme 57000 Metz +33 (0)3 87 15 39 39 contact@centrepompidou-metz.fr centrepompidou-metz.fr Centre Pompidou-Metz PompidouMetz centrepompidoumetz_

OPENING HOURS Every day except Tuesday and 1st May 01.11 > 31.03 MON. | WED. |THU. | FRI. | SAT. | SUN.: 10 A.M. – 6 P.M. 01.04 > 31.10 MON. | WED. | THU.: 10 A.M. – 6 P.M. FRI. | SAT. | SUN.: 10 A.M. – 7 P.M.

HOW DO YOU GET THERE? The shortest route via the railway network

EXHIBITION PRICES Individual fare: 7€ / 10€ / 12€ according to the number of exhibition spaces open Group fare (starting from 20 persons): 5,50€, 8€, 10€ according to the number of exhibition spaces open Profit from the numerous advantages of the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s partners with the following offers: C.G.O.S. ticket combined offer Centre Pompidou-Metz/SNCF TER Grand Est, combined offer voyage + entrance of the CFL (Chemins de Fer Luxembourgeois- Luxemburg Railways), Pass Lorraine, PassTime, Museums Pass Musées, City Pass. Beneficiaries of free entrance to the exhibitions are: active French teachers (on presentation of their professional card or their education pass duly filled out and currently valid) persons under the age of 26, students, unemployed persons registered in France and those drawing RSA or social benefit (on presentation of documentary proof less than six months old), artists members of the Maison des artistes, handicapped persons and one accompanying person, Holders of the Elderly persons minimum compensatory allowance, interpreter -guides and national lecturers, holders of Icom, Icomos, Aica and Paris Première cards, holders of a press card.

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