from March 30 to September 4 2016
"Safaris"
Safari seen by 11 contemporary artists
Curator of the exhibition: Claude d'Anthenaise
What would hunting be without hunting stories? The oral tradition has taken charge of this self-promoting narrative since the dawn of time, before being relayed by abundant writings to the point of making it a form of literary genre. The question of the authenticity of the facts recounted does not wait for the publication of the hunting exploits of Tartarin de Tarascon to arise. The sum of the glorious and unverifiable hunting stories published was already impressive when the famous "lion killer" decided to outdo himself!
(Automatically translated with Google Translate)
Safaris transposes the ambivalence of hunting stories to contemporary art and the works of Mark Beard, Joan Fontcuberta or Christian Gonzenbach, gathered for the exhibition, invest the territory of fictional hunts... Mixing paintings with documents, photographs with testimonies, the pieces gathered attest to the immemorial dissatisfaction of the hunter to be satisfied with reality. To embellish or ensauvinate the most banal of hunting grounds, to attribute to the game extreme rarity or threatening appetite, to confer to the hunt impalpable heroic or mystical impulses, isn't it also the function of the hunting stories and images?
Thus, by calling upon styles and techniques inherited from the past for their works, some of the artists gathered for Safaris underline the tension between reality and fiction that characterizes hunting art: between reportage and propaganda, chronicle and decorum... an obsession with rendering an account that cannot be disenchanted.
Artists presented
Richard Barnes, Mark Beard, Ghyslain Bertholon, David Chancellor, Sinje Dillenkofer, Juan Fontcuberta, Christian Gonzenbach, Daniel Horowitz, Agnès Rosse, Nicolas Rubinstein, Dimitri Tsykalov
