Jeff Koons and Franz West are part of Le monde comme il va, at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, France
Consisting exclusively of works from the Pinault Collection that underscore its breadth, vitality, and diversity, the exhibition Le monde comme il va (The World as It Goes) takes place in all spaces of the Bourse de Commerce, beginning on 20 March 2024. Featuring a vast selection of works made mainly from the 1980s to the present day, half of which the Pinault Collection is showing for the first time, the exhibition highlights François Pinault’s passionate commitment to a contemporary art that directly engages with our era.
In borrowing its title from a philosophical tale by Voltaire, this new exhibition at the Pinault Collection reveals artist’ “heightened awareness of the present”, according to its curator, Jean-Marie Gallais. From established figures (such as Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Sturtevant, and Rosemarie Trockel) to a younger generation of artists (including Anne Imhof, Mohammed Sami, Pol Taburet, and Salman Toor), Fran.ois Pinault’s choices as a collector have always reflected his passion for art that is in sync with its time, be it engaged or simply observing, provocative or more sombre. In the face of the world’s excesses and paradoxes, the turmoil of our time, and a feeling of losing our bearings, artists become prophets, visionaries, and philosophers who are at times cynical and ironic, and often poets and re-enchanters.
Just like the main character in Voltaire’s tale—an observer sent to try to understand humanity—the visitor is confronted with an ambivalent vision that oscillates between the weaknesses and strengths of a world that seems headed for perdition, but which preserves a sense of hope and grace. The artists featured in Le Monde Comme Il Va have produced powerful images of this paradoxical state that are at times ironic, and at others violent. Two generations of works share the stage in this exhibition: those made in the 1980s and 90s, and those created starting in the 2000s. In conjunction with the exhibition, the carte blanche given to Kimsooja in the museum Rotunda, a gesture as monumental as it is sensitive, uses an immense circular mirror placed on the ground to invert the entire architecture of the Bourse de Commerce, and the order of the world with it. The invisibility of the material, which simply reflects its surrounding environment, invites each visitor to realise that they are an actor in this narrative, one which continues in the display cases and on the lower level of the museum.
Le monde comme il va composes a sequence of images taken from the world’s motions, past and present, which resonates with the spirit that has animated the Pinault Collection for more than fifty years.
“Le monde comme il va alludes to the tumult and turbulence of current events. Stable reference points everywhere seem to be faltering and slipping away. Babouc, the narrator of Le monde comme il va, Voltaire’s philosophical tale from which this exhibition season takes its title, asks, ‘Inexplicable humans, how can you hold so much lowliness and grandeur, so much virtue and so much crime?’ Art and artists have long been keen observers of these paradoxical human truths, producing powerful images of this paradoxical situation that are times ironic and, at others, even violent. Bringing together works mainly from the 1980s to the present day, the exhibition reveals this heightened awareness of the present”.
— Jean-Marie Gallais
“It is the complexity of the works, their ability to reflect reality or, to the contrary, to create a mise en abyme around it, to resonate harmoniously or ironically with the past and present, and the flow of the images, more than their uniqueness, that have nourished the Pinault Collection for the last fifty years. In his masterful work Le musée, une histoire mondiale (2020), the historian Krzysztof Pomian emphasises how museums encourage society to look towards the future, but the exhibition orchestrated by Jean-Marie Gallais has delved into the Collection to offer us a kaleidoscopic, unstable vision of the present”.
— Emma Lavigne
