The exhibition of the week:

Coolluster / 2003

From May 24 to September 28, 2003, the Lambert Collection is hosting the third opus of the famous Trilogy Clinic by Éric Troncy. After Dramatically Different and Weather Everything, Coollustre constitutes a sounding board for the affirmation of new ways of conceiving exhibitions at the beginning of the 21st century. Close to the gestures initiated by Harald Szeemann in the 1960s or by Bob Nickas in the early 1980s, Éric Troncy deploys as many sensitive stories there making the curator a full-fledged author of the situations / moments / exhibition that he creates through new display mechanisms.

Photographer: Pascal Martinez

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The exhibition of the week:

The disappearance of fireflies / 2014

In 2014, during the fitting out of the future enlarged Lambert Collection, Éric Mézil (director of the Lambert Collection until 2017) and his team, decided not to stop the artistic activity of the museum and made the crazy bet of ” invest in the old Sainte Anne prison, a stone’s throw from the Palais des Papes.

Photographer: François Halard

The disappearance of the fireflies is an immersive exhibition based on the building, its history and works from the private collection of Enea Righi, whose collections by certain artists are complemented by works from other large public or private collections.

The title which borrows from the famous text that Pasolini published in 1975 in Corriere permeates the journey of the visitor through and through, so that the exhibition is lived as a sensitive experience in which places so charged with memory and works combine so that these fireflies dear to the Italian filmmaker survive. It is about confinement of course, but also about passing time, loneliness and love.

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The exhibition of the week:

The Grand Tour / 2008

Exhibiting the Lambert Collection in Rome in spring 2008, in the famous or unknown spaces of the Villa Medici, was a dream since the installation of the museum in the hotel de Caumont in Avignon, in 2000. It is thanks to the meeting between Richard Peduzzi, then director of the Academy of France in Rome and Yvon Lambert, that this honorary project was made possible. Because if everyone can dream of exhibiting one day at the Villa Medici, this exhibition demonstrates that this wish was the fruit of a reflection in which it seemed obvious that presenting the masterpieces of the Avignon collection in Rome, in one of its most beautiful palaces, had a meaning.

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The Collection Lambert exhibit once again demonstrated that the supposed break between contemporary art and the arts of the past is completely usurped. Better yet, the artistic choices of Yvon Lambert resonate with classical culture: Virgil, Cicero, Heliogabalus, Dante, Goethe, Stendhal on one side, Poussin or Caravaggio, Corot or Uccello, Delacroix or Le Bernin on the other , have always nurtured the orientations of the collection, the oldest acquisitions, those of the 1960s and those which are continuing today.

The exhibition “Le Grand Tour”, in reference to these trips of several months that European intellectuals made in Italy from the 17th century, showed through more than 40 artists this very personal passion that drives the collector for the city. of Rome and its history.

The exhibition photographs were taken by the famous Italian photographer Claudio Abate, who died in Rome in 2017.

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2013

The title of this exhibition refers to the story of Jeanne la Papesse, this incredible medieval legend before the coming of the popes to Avignon. A learned and charismatic figure was elected pope and reigned as such in the 9th century until it was discovered that this representative of God on earth was pregnant. The child was delivered prematurely in childbirth during a public procession at the end of which Jeanne la Papesse and her child died.

Photo credit: Pascal Martinez

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In the exhibition, the works dialogue from one place to another and weave together aesthetic and thematic links: the father / mother / child filiation dear to Camille Claudel, Louise Bourgeois or Kiki Smith, the body in metamorphosis – Berlinde De Bruyckere, Kiki Smith -, medieval alchemy connecting beings and planets – Kiki Smith, Jana Sterbak, Louise Bourgeois…

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The sets of works of these papesses have been selected so that they restore Avignon’s medieval history, a period in which the mysteries were the primitive theaters making it possible to exorcise the fear of the devil and the prophecies dear to our Provencal Nostradamus.

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On the occasion of the ten years of the creation of the Lambert Collection, the City of Avignon wished to organize a large exhibition devoted to the abundant and multifaceted work of Miquel Barceló, artist sharing his life between Paris, his native Mallorca and the Dogon Mali. This exhibition was provided by the Lambert Collection in Avignon and presented in three historic places in the papal city representing the extraordinary heritage and cultural wealth of Avignon.

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The presence of Miquel Barceló in these places echoes the memorable visit that the Kings of Majorca had made in the 14th century to the popes settled in Avignon as well as the event proposed four years before his death by Pablo Picasso who, in 1970, had created one of his last major exhibitions of paintings in the Chapel of the Palace of the Popes.

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From Velimir Khlebnikov to Paul Ceylan, from Wagner to Corneille, Kant and Friedrich to the Queens of Frances, Anselm Kiefer delves into the legacy of the past in a heroic gesture whose strength and erudition are as admirable as disturbing. Violence fights against violence, destructive power against destruction, memory against forgetting.

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2019

The exhibition “Francesco Vezzoli, Le Lacrime dei poeti”, was designed with the artist around a set of around twenty of his recent sculptures, some of which were made especially for Avignon, in dialogue with a series of emblematic works of Cy Twombly, Giulio Paolini or Louise Lawler, all imbued with mythology and classicism.

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Credits :
Alessandro Ciampi
Pascal Martinez
© Cy Twombly Foundation
© Francesco Vezzoli
© Louise Lawler / Metro Pictures, New York

The paintings and drawings of Cy Twombly evoking with grace and the force of a gesture or a word the ancient myths, collages and installations as conceptual as sacred of Giulio Paolini and the photographs of ancient sculptures made with irony by Louise Lawler in the great museums which house them or in private collectors, are here transported in a reflection on the history of art and the contemporary by the daring arrangements or the very sculptures of Francesco Vezzoli.

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Credits :

Matthew Septimus
Pascal Martinez
© Francesco Vezzoli

Through the sensitive and singular dialogues that these radical gestures weave with the classical heritage, through the works of Francesco Vezzoli made of old sculptures bought at auction to be transformed, rearranged, completed, it is not only a question of understanding how different generations of artists have confronted art history and classical representation, but also to draw the contours of the very idea of the contemporary in art.

“As if this invisible light that is the darkness of the present casts its shadow on the past, while the latter, struck by this beam of shadow, acquired the capacity to respond to the darkness of the moment. “(Giorgio Agamben, What is contemporary?, 2008)

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Credits:

Pascal Martinez
Alessandro Ciampi
François Deladerrière
Franck Couvreur
© Francesco Vezzoli
© Cy Twombly Foundation

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Credits:

Pascal Martinez
François Deladerrière
© Francesco Vezzoli
© Cy Twombly Foundation

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Credits:

Pascal Martinez
François Deladerrière
© Francesco Vezzoli
© Louise Lawler / Metro Pictures, New York
© Giulio Paolini

We love art!

A choice by Éric Mézil from the paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs and videos from the collection of agnès b.

July 6 – November 5, 2017

Before the FAB opened in 2020, the Lambert Collection presented a large exhibition of the collection of agnès b.

The idea of creating a multifaceted portrait was never conceived on this scale. At the same time stylist, director of a film selected at the Venice Film Festival, Je m’appelle Hmmm…, intimately linked to the world of music, patron, agnès b. is especially a great discoverer of artists since the opening of the Galerie du Jour agnès b. in 1983.

Credits: Philippe Daval

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Linked with the same passion for art, the same love for creation and the individuals involved in the most sensitive aspects of life, agnès b. and Yvon Lambert come together in many ways, as much by their fusion with the artists for whom they are engaged as by their eclecticism and avant-garde look, making them witnesses of their time.

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It is almost natural that 400 works from the collection of agnès b. came to occupy the spaces of our institution, like so many testimonies which draw a portrait of this woman freed from all convention and from a collection turned towards the avant-garde, whose works were acquired to be shared.

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If commitment and politics permeate the course of agnès b., They leave their mark on the whole of this exceptional presentation. Painting, love, reveries, music, experimental cinema, adolescence, modernity, avant-garde, transcending established borders, whether physical, social or mental, Africa, are so many aesthetic landscapes whose exploration is offered to the visitor through the richness and diversity of the works on display, crossed by the need for a total commitment to the experience of life, the struggle for freedom.

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Roni Horn, 2009

Marine love, earthly love, celestial love: it is around this trilogy of romantic feelings and these aesthetic emotions that the great American artist Roni Horn invites us through a huge retrospective that the Lambert Collection devotes this been in all of the spaces of its mansion, as well as in the Grande Halle of the former SNCF warehouses in Arles, as part of the International Photography Meetings.

Photo credits: Pascal Martinez

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The American artist cites the poetry of Emily Dickinson as a reference that has become a leitmotif of his work, as is his late friend, this celestial love, the great artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, or that becomes Iceland, this island which has become the artist’s second home, its new nest and its open-air studio, between sea and land love.

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Rare, discreet and respected artist, mysterious and yet admired, she had been twice presented in Paris, in 1999 with an exhibition of photographs carried out at the Arc, at the museum of modern art of the City, then in 2004 at the Cabinet of drawings from the national museum of modern art. Because Roni Horn excels as much with the art of photography, that of sculpture as with drawings that almost take the form of huge paintings.

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The exhibition, which then groups together 120 works, most of which have never been shown in France, is the most complete and richest. It must be said that the Lambert Collection was supported by two large prestigious institutions which were able to collect rare loans, as certain works are fragile or difficult to transport: the Tate Modern in London, which hosted the exhibition in spring 2009, then after coming to Avignon, The Withney Museum of American Art in New York, and finally The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

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2017-2018

Djamel Tatah
Echoes with classic and monochrome drawings and paintings from the Collection Lambert

“My painting experience tries to be a sharing experience. A vision that meets another. Perhaps that’s the grace of art: succeeding in doing something that is accessible to someone else. ”
Djamel Tatah

Photo credits: Pascal Martinez

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2019

The exhibition presented at the Lambert Collection returns to the sources of the raw energy of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting, questions the singularity of a work as visceral as it is conscious of itself, which quickly exceeds its own particularities and the radiant talent of a young prodigy, to symbolize alone new ways of considering art in the 80s.

Photo credits: Philippe Daval

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When Jean-Michel Basquiat entered the art world as if he had broken in at the start of the 1980s, he presented himself there with incredible audacity; that of a young artist of Haitian origin who imposed painting as the necessary medium of representation at the very moment when his death was announced. It is with this corpse and its areopagus of sublime ghosts that it invests the walls of the most established galleries, that it opens their doors to new ways of thinking and of making a countercultural generation fed with cultural interbreeding, the appropriation of myths and the great masters of the past, the mixing of references from great art and subcultures, drawing as much from the vernacular as from the great classics with a jubilation and a new energy.

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With Jean-Michel Basquiat, sources mix with intuition and extraordinary knowledge. It is not simply this young man of his time who draws like a DJ from the repertoire of the most interesting forms and moves them to envy in new territories of creation. He is this enlightened artist who, at a time when modernity is almost inexorably dying out, questions its forms and promises in a final gesture as sensitive as it is affected, from the point of view of a young black American who could to be the last smuggler.

It is in priority to Picasso, Matisse then Twombly that he borrows part of their formal vocabulary, especially in their most primitive aspect. The desire to return to a raw and essential feeling led him to summon the interest of Matisse or Picasso for the celebration of original, exotic, regenerative forms. He thus draws from both of them an attachment to primary colors, to the fragmentation of subjects, to disturbing faces, to the dissonance of colors and shapes or to modestly crafted compositions or objects. Even more, like Matisse, Picasso or Twombly, he departs from cold virtuosity to summon naivety and clumsiness and restore art to its pure energy, that which leads to the sublime and shares a work as sensitive as engaged.

By this daring gesture which places him in a most remarkable genealogy, alongside the great names of modern art, Jean-Michel Basquiat also tests the promises of a modernity which is dying out. Through his relationship to art history, to the art world and to America in the 1980s, he questions the political situation of a fragmented and cynical world. Because the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat are so many mixed territories where Matisse, Picasso, Twombly, Charlie Parker, Cassius Clay, Mooglie rub shoulders, street poems and so many other symbolic black figures. They are the promise of new sensitive spaces of representation, at the same time as they fight against their difficulty to exist away from an exoticism which they mythologize with jubilation as if to annihilate it.

2015

This inaugural exhibition is the first tribute dedicated to this sacred monster from the world of theater, opera and cinema, who has become a national icon since his death in October 2013.

Photo credits: Victor Picon

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Associated with the IMEC (Memory Institute of Contemporary Edition) where Patrice Chéreau had deposited his personal archives, Éric Mézil proposed as curator of the exhibition, a route combining his notes, sketches, interviews filmed with works by art of all periods and a predilection for the great masters of romanticism passionate about History, such as Delacroix, Géricault, Ingres, Chassériau or masters of the 20th century, by Giacometti with the Portrait of Jean Genet to Anselm Kiefer to evoke Richard Wagner, from Francis Bacon to Cy Twombly who, like Chéreau, knew how to find the essence of the Greek tragedy.

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Les trois thématiques associées à l’œuvre polymorphe de Chéreau sont bien entendu traitées dans l’exposition et le catalogue : le théâtre, le cinéma, l’opéra. Mais le principe retenu est davantage concentré sur des « plongées » dans son univers où chaque salle est un condensé de ses obsessions, de ses passions, où ses trois domaines artistiques de prédilection sont traités en s’inspirant des écrits de l’homme de théâtre : l’engagement politique, les années sida, le rapport au corps et à l’amour, la passion de l’histoire classique et contemporaine…

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