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Out of Storage I : Peintures choisies de la Collection

Collection presentation

From March 6th to May 26th 2008, the exhibition Out of Storage I – Chosen Paintings from the Collection is a selection of paintings from the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam Luxembourg).

Produced as a counterpoint to the pre­sentation of a group of recent works by Frédéric Prat, Chosen Paintings from the Collection unveils works of art made between 1987 and 2007 by twelve international artists whose œuvre is situated somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Stretching back over the last twenty years of production, these artworks present the positions of a type of painting which, in the wake of fiercely ideolo­gical aesthetic debates, has found a new freedom in the particular treatment of planes and pictorial space. For the young American artist Rosson Crow, the painting is for the deployment of spaces of superficial ambi­guity from film sets immersed in dazzling lights, while the mental landscapes of Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero represent hard-edge surfaces obscured by subversive interventions. Like the latter, the Brussels painter Jean-Luc Moerman does not restrict himself to canvas. His prolific shapes are often found in the street on large wall spaces. Young German painting has been particularly diverse and fruitful lately and its foremost representative is Albert Oehlen, a tutelary figure for a whole generation of artists who have reformulated the basis of painting. In his wake we find the Luxembourg artist Michel Majerus (who was the subject of a Mudam retrospective in 2006–2007) as well as Thomas Scheibitz and Frank Nitsche from the Dresden school who confront the question of abstraction in a purely pictorial way, drawing on their respective archives of images. British artist Fiona Rae and Spanish artist Juan Uslé play with the self-referential dimension of painting. Finally, in the work of French artist Dominique Gauthier and the American artists Jonathan Lasker and Peter Halley, the limits of gestural and geometric abstraction are explored through very personal methods.