QUÉBEC CITY, Nov. 22, 2017 /CNW Telbec/ - In 2018 the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) will celebrate its 85th anniversary on June 15, and it promises to be a banner year. The exhibition Alberto Giacometti, presented by Desjardins from February 8 to May 13, 2018, will inaugurate a vibrant year during which international art, through prestigious partnerships, will alternate with extensive exhibitions, which will highlight Québec art of all periods.
The Gérard Morisset Pavilion will also undergo a striking renewal in 2018. The upgrading of the building inaugurated in 1933 now under way completes the third and final phase of the restructuring of the MNBAQ's collections. The makeover will reveal the pavilion's architectural beauty and harmonize it with the museum complex. Teams are renewing five of seven exhibition rooms in the pavilion devoted to ancient and modern art. In November 2018, visitors will be excited to discover a unique panorama of the history of Québec art: 350 years of artistic practice in Québec.
The summer exhibition that will draw visitors to the MNBAQ from June 21 to September 23, 2018, will showcase Berthe Morisot, a founder of impressionism. The MNBAQ is indeed proud to announce it will launch Berthe Morisot, femme impressionniste, an influential monograph devoted to the artist.
Other highlights of the 2018 program include Fait main/Hand made, an exhibition of contemporary art organized by the MNBAQ that will be presented from June 14 to September 16, 2018 in the temporary exhibition rooms in the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion. This colourful, thought-provoking adventure risks astonishing visitors since it will endeavour to demonstrate that contemporary artistic approaches are often linked to popular practices.
To end the year with a flourish, starting on October 11, 2018, the MNBAQ will present Marcel Barbeau. En mouvement, a major exhibition and the biggest one ever mounted, devoted to Marcel Barbeau, a key figure in Canadian contemporary art.
The coming year at the MNBAQ promises numerous, particularly diversified discoveries stemming from prestigious partnerships. It will make the MNBAQ the ideal destination in 2018.
The Exhibitions of 2018
Alberto Giacometti
From February 8 to May 13, 2018
This major retrospective, presented by Desjardins for the first time in North America in Québec City, Canada, will feature the iconic work of one of the 20th century's foremost artists, the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), who lived in Paris.
Among the masterpieces assembled, Suspended Ball, Pointing Man and the celebrated Walking Man are included in the impressive body of nearly 150 works from the varied collection of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris. This spectacular exhibition will highlight roughly 100 sculptures and 50 paintings, ranging from the artist's early work in Paris in the 1920s to his crowning achievements in the 1960s, a brilliant career that spanned five decades.
Giacometti is known for his unique sculptures of inordinately elongated subjects with especially detailed surfaces, but the exhibition will also celebrate the painter. It will feature paintings and original plaster casts, including several never before exhibited. It will also more clearly reveal the artist's interest in Egyptian art and the primitive arts, his fascination with the question of resemblance, and his ties with several leading writers, including Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The MNBAQ is proud to be part of the prestigious circuit of this exhibition, which opened at the Tate Modern in London in the summer of 2017 and will be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the summer of 2018, then at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in the fall of 2018.
Fait main/Hand Made
From June 14 to September 16, 2018
Organized by the MNBAQ, the exhibition seeks to draw visitors' attention to the question of artistic practice as related to popular practices, a recurrent dimension of contemporary art in recent years. Extensive research devoted to current output reveals that contact with popular culture is engendering growing numbers of high-quality works.
Handicrafts, know-how and folklore are notions that are again predominating in contemporary art, as Fait main/Hand made, which will highlight such practices by focusing on popular art, raw art, Pop Surrealism, but also technology, reveals. From Vancouver to Halifax and including Québec City and Montréal, more than 30 Canadian artists will be assembled in this major exhibition, which promises a fresh, revelatory glimpse at an entire segment of contemporary artistic output in Canada.
Fait main/Hand made focuses on five relevant themes and will contrast works by Marie Côté, Jean-Robert Drouillard, Cal Lane, Paryse Martin, Mitch Mitchell, Clint Neufeld and Brendan Lee Satish Tang, to name but a few. While their intentions and content vary fairly markedly, they all focus on popular art.
The varied exhibition, which reflects the time and effort invested by the artists in the works, will span a broad range of practices, from wood carving to quilts, not to mention ceramics and embroidery. It includes a chair sculpted from newspaper, objects covered in knitting, textile videos and 3D printing. The craft-based processes used will highlight the mastery of matter. Ultimately, it will be a question of the transformation of work, politics and labour, but also of leisure activities, such as the model kit and the jigsaw puzzles.
Berthe Morisot. Woman Impressionist
From June 21 to September 23, 2018
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), who is regarded as a preeminent Impressionist painter, produced luminous, refined works displaying considerable freshness of tone that feature her personal and familial universe in an especially captivating manner. The exhibition relates the artist's outstanding career, during which she ran counter to the practices of her time and milieu and became a key figure among the Parisian vanguards in the late 1860s until her death in 1895.
Organized by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), the exhibition, the first one devoted to the artist to be presented in North America since 1987, assembles a selection of some 50 outstanding paintings from several European and American collections.
After her initial training, during which Morisot rejected the amateur practices associated with women of her condition to engage in a professional career, the exhibition explores the artist's basic contribution to Impressionism, through her taste for major themes of "modern life" such as the intimacy of bourgeois life at the time, the penchant for holidaying and gardens, the importance of fashion, or women's domestic work, of which she offers a highly personal interpretation.
The exhibition focuses, in particular, on the portraits and works representing female figures, who dominate Morisot's output. It also emphasizes scenes that blur the boundaries between private and public space and the manner in which a woman artist can develop between the different spheres. The late works display a new expressiveness and musicality and occasionally propose a melancholic meditation on the relationships between art and life.
Marcel Barbeau. In Mouvement
October 11, 2018 to January 6, 2019
A notable figure in contemporary Canadian art, Marcel Barbeau produced an impressive body of more than 4,000 works spanning seven decades. Intersecting several significant periods in the history of recent art, his output provides an overview as singular as it is insightful. Barbeau was at the forefront of numerous avant-garde movements and artistic trends in Canada. He was a leading contributor to the first stirrings of Abstract painting (1940s and 1950s), was renowed internationally for his contribution to OpArt (1960s), and participated in the first generation of transdisciplinary art in Québec (1970s). Even though his work is rigorous and inspiring, there has never been an exhaustive examination that brings the aesthetic engagement of his output fully into focus. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec intends to remedy this through a retrospective exhibition.
This major exhibition, the most ambitious ever dedicated to the artist, will encompass his entire career, from the late 1940s to his last work (2015). It will shed light on the pivotal periods of his artistic journey and the diverse influences and sources of inspiration absorbed by his work, ultimately with a view to a careful and fresh look at his body of work, about which relatively little is known despite its significance. There will be a multi-authored exhibition catalogue chronicling his work, examining more specific components of it (such as its transdisciplinary nature and the artist's treatment of space and movement), and situating it in relation to the international movements that have marked contemporary art. The catalogue will also include a lavishly illustrated biography and hitherto unreleased archival documents.
350 Years of Artistic Practices in Québec
Beginning November 15, 2018
To mark its 85th anniversary in 2018, the MNBAQ will open five new exhibition rooms devoted to ancient and modern art. In keeping with changes in museology and society's current perception of its heritage, the MNBAQ wishes to highlight the individuals who have shaped the history of Québec art. Visitors can follow the careers of the women and men who have made Québec what it is today, from copyists to the Automatists, from the beginnings of the market to the explosion of artistic trends. This major event will encompass nearly 700 works (paintings, sculptures, the work of silversmiths and goldsmiths, furnishings, the graphic arts and photography) that propose a new perspective of several distinctive and occasionally little-known works from the MNBAQ's collection.
The reorganization of the exhibition space and creative, diversified use of digital mediation will offer the public a multidimensional experience. The departure from conventional discourse on the works, emphasis on voices marginalized by classical history, the interlinking of works with visual and media culture, and the integration of the history of photography in Québec are but a few of the innovations that digital mediation facilitates. Sustained by visual culture, the history of cultural life, gender and postcolonial studies, 350 Years of Artistic Practices in Québec seeks to offer a bold synthesis of the history of visual culture, from New France to the counterculture of the 1960s.
The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a state corporation funded by the Gouvernement du Québec.
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