Manifest Abstraction

Manifest Abstraction – Le Quartier Centre d’Art Contemporain de Quimper

Curator : Keren Detton

Manifest Abstraction

Patrick Bernier et Olive Martin, Julien Bouillon, Isabelle Cornaro, Raffaella della Olga, Chloé Dugit-Gros, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, Jean-Benoit Lallemant, Aurélie Mourier, Alexandre Périgot, Julien Prévieux
This group exhibition is concerned with the forms of abstraction in a contemporary context linked to the dematerialisation of capital and of social ties. The speed of information flow and the sheer quantity of data today imply that we need to structure our exchanges in a more and more elaborate way. Our relationship with the world goes through interfaces and modelling whose different forms (diagrams, portals, platforms, etc.) influence the contemporary vocabulary of geometric abstraction. Here, far from being opposed to representation, abstraction becomes a marker of its ideological context. The artists in the exhibition develop their formal research from existing systems while, at the same time, connecting it to historical and political contingencies. These artists maintain a paradoxical relationship with the autonomous art object in that their preferred approach relates to time and repetition. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, assemblages, weaves, collages and movements, though they are at ease with their physicality, tend to reconfigure social space and show the limits of ideal abstraction.