Infinite Garden. From Giverny to Amazonia

INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA 18.03 > 28.08.17 PRESS KIT centrepompidou-metz.fr #jardininfini

Some of the creations and proposals of this exhibition were carried out within the framework of the project “NOE-NOAH”.

This operation is supported by the European Union under the INTERREG V Grande Région program (2014-2020).

Ernesto Neto, Flower Crystal Power, 2014. Vue d'installation d'Ernesto Neto : Gratitude à Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2014. Photographe : Tony Prikryl. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

CONTENTS 1. EXHIBITION OVERVIEW.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 2. EXHIBITION LAYOUT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 3. A GARDEN FOR SCENERY. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 4. ARTISTS.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 5. CATALOGUE.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 6. THREE GARDENS OUTDOOR.. . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7 PARTNERS.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 8. PRESS VISUALS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 9. PRESS CONTACT.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

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EXHIBITION OVERVIEW INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA From March the 18th to August the 28th 2017 Gallery 2, Gallery 3, Forum, Studio, Outdoor

František Kupka, Printemps cosmique I, 1913-1914

It was believed that gardens had been buried by modernity under the triumph of green spaces limiting the organic to functional areas. Yet, they remain a source of fertile inspiration all along the 20th century and continue to deeply appeal to many artists. The garden captivates, not only for its nourishing, curative and ornamental virtues but also for its subversion. Beyond the enclosed and organised space, the garden of this exhibition is a harbour for blurred, licentious and undisciplined private passions. A place of resistance and dissidence, of the most exquisite refinement as of the most wild exuberance, it becomes a biological, ethical and political laboratory. Backward intellectual currents such as Mannerism, the Decadent movement or Surrealism invade this space, opened to the incongruous and the irregular. Mostly contemporary, the works gather together for this exhibition draw the outlines of an obscure, chaotic and unpredictable experimental garden.

This exhibition of the Centre Pompidou-Metz depicts nature in the perspective of a metaphorical spring. Germination, blossoming and degeneration suggest the cycles of Earth, where the winter stop is the promise for future revolutions.

Many artists venerate this vital momentum. Around 1912, in his essay about Creation in the Plastic Arts, František Kupka who is fascinated by the sexual reproduction of flowers, worships “a real pollen festival in the gynoecium bathed in sunlight” and translates theses celebrations in the organic impulse of Cosmic Spring (1913-14). Fertile ground of forms, the garden inspires artists with morphologies and fantastic metamorphoses revealing the intelligence of a nonhuman world. The explorations of the Earth lead to the ends of the known nature towards unspoiled territories that become new reserves of forms and motifs. Thus, fantasising the exotic nature, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster creates a tropical diorama, a proliferating garden-library in line with a series of installations inspired from illusionist’s devices of the 19th century. The Brazilian Ernesto Neto takes the Forum of the Centre Pompidou-Metz with a monumental sculpture, Leviathan-Main-Toth (2005), whose membranes take the shape of a biological landscape on a building scale.

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

The garden is also the place of genetic bifurcation which alters determinisms in favour of evolution. While he immortalises in his glass framed herbarium a cherished flora, Émile Gallé takes interest for the anomalies – Are the Orchids wonders or monstrosities? At the same time, Claude Monet creates hybrids and gets plants from all over the world, triggering the ire of the local farmers who fear poisoning by these foreign flowers. A century later, Pierre Huyghe creates “condensates of Giverny” in climate-programmed aquariums. If acclimation awakes the naturalists' curiosity, it also serves the interest of a “botanic of power”, working on the colonisation then the eradication of “green pests”. Yto Barrada, Thu Van Tran and Simon Starling study the problematic of coexistence between “native” and “neophyte” plant species. Beyond the exoticism, the tropical and biomorphic alternatives of Roberto Burle-Marx or Lina Bo Bardi in Latin America and in Brazil revivify the functionalism of the European modernity.

At a time of intense intermixing, melting pot and migration phenomena which constantly reconfigure the biodiversity, the original fence of the garden, being material or conceptual, needs to be revaluated. The exhibition takes the garden out of itself, going beyond the dialectic on which Michel Foucault had articulated during his conference “Of Other Spaces” in 1967, his heterotypic definition of the garden as “the smallest parcel of the world” and as the “totality of the world.” During the symposium Rethinking boundaries: architecture through space, time and disciplines, organised at the INHA (National Institute for Art History) in 2005, the garden historians Monique Mosser and Hervé Brunon postulate that “it is now necessary to think the enclosure as an open, material and living system at the same time.”

Henceforth, the abolition of borders opens on an incessant quest, started as early as in the 16th century with the Dream of Poliphilus, where the garden, ideal place for research and initiation, opens on an infinity of gardens.

For Infinite Garden, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané creates an organic, earthly and solar scenery where he invites the visitor to wander among the immersive installations of the exhibition with the delight of a gardener.

Imagined like a territory without borders, the exhibition expands to the city of Metz through different gardens set up by the artists Peter Hutchinson, François Martig and Loïs Weinberger. A catalogue realised by the graphic designer Fanette Mellier and an anthology of texts from many artists on gardens, first compilation of a new collection launched

by Centre Pompidou-Metz, comes along with the exhibition.

Curators : Emma Lavigne, Director, Centre Pompidou-Metz Hélène Meisel, Research and Exhibition Officer, Centre Pompidou-Metz Research : Tristan Bera

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EXHIBITION LAYOUT I. COSMING SPRING GALLERY 3 At the dawn of the 20th century, the symbolist quest of the origin of the world spreads into the plastic arts. Some artists seek to depict the beginnings of life through botanical perspectives, using abstract shapes. With a few years' intervals, a world in constant metamorphosis appears with František Kupka and Hilma af Klint, both assiduously transcribing in organic or geometric shapes the process of germination, blossom, flowering and pollination.

Hilma af Klint, The Birch [Le Bouleau], 1922

At the beginning of the 16th century, these natural processes become a source of inspiration for the Mannerist artists who adopt its generating capacities. Representing in many myths the principles of origin and of universal mutation, the motif of the garden hosts this first vital impulse. It also evolves into a playground where the distinction between artificial and natural is blurred as much as the boundaries between the reigns of plants, minerals and animals. The garden turns into a place of “indistinctness”, auspicious for oddness, licentiousness and whim.

The gallery “Cosmic Spring” opens on a primary garden that would cease to be Eden-like to become more telluric and geological. This shapeless garden, between sterility and fertility is made of earth, mud, silt and manure: life and death of all things. These elementary forces fascinate the Surrealists at an early stage. In 1935, André Breton was in awe of the “Jurassic fauna” of the botanical garden of Tenerife, whose thousand-year old veteran dragon tree seemed to have its roots plunge into the Prehistory. Source of eroticism and oneirism, this world, continuously gestating in a larva state, dwells upon The Dark Garden (1928) of Yves Tanguy imbued with an uncertain life, while it inspires Max Ernst with ambiguous images such as the enigmatic Shell Flowers (1929).

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

Formulated during the Antiquity, the intuition of the Panspermia theory (from the Greek pan, “all” and sperm “seed”) presumes that the whole universe is crossed by suspended seeds. In the 19th century this hypothesis, retaken and modernized, is seen as a controversial scientific theory which postulates that micro-organisms such as cells, germs and spores, distributed by comets and meteoroids, would be at the origin of life on Earth. The animated film Panspermia (1990) by Karl Sims illustrates this extravagant scenario: a stone fruit coming from space land on a desert planet where it releases thousands of small seeds. Theses multicoloured jewels will then give birth to quantity of plants such as reeled ferns like fractals or branches in the shape of DNA. “In a world with two suns, the vegetation would be black”, Philippe Parreno imagines this scenario to create in 2011 an anti-garden in Portugal, capturing its dark and gleaming essence in his immersive film Continuously Habitable Zone (C.H.Z).

Through botanic, the artists express different life concepts from its beginning to its end. In the 18th century, Carl von Linnaeus established a rational classification system of naming and classifying plants in a scientific manner defending the thesis of different and unchangeable species while other minds embrace a moving conception of the living where it is unpredictable, open to mutation, hybridisation and evolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wanted to become a plant himself, inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with a devouring passion for botany. The latter already senses the abilities of the plants to change and adapt. Charles Darwin's studies of carnivorous plants, climbing plants mobility, fertilisation of orchids and evolution nourish a fecund imaginary where plants are humanised, proving to be, at the same time, one of the possible origins of Mankind. Darwin's reading inspired many artists such as Emile Gallé, Odilon Redon, Eugen Gabritschevsky or Edward Steichen who had a life-long passion for the hybridisation of delphiniums.

Jean Dubuffet, Jardin au sol, 1958

Adepts of shady and depopulated lands, Jean Dubuffet and Thierry de Cordier cultivate “badly treated” gardens left to stones and brambles, which serve as their primordial retreats from the world. In Vence, Dubuffet is absorbed in his contemplation of the soil. During the summer of 1955, he describes his fascination for “sandy and stony soil, twigs and dead leaves, the humus and the tiny plants close to the ground mixed with small stones”. The garden that he creates then, the Ubac, is a small botanical theatre made of “stone brought back from the mountains”, “slabs of grass torn from stony uplands like scraps of skin”. At the end of the 1990's, Thierry de Cordier confided in his writings that he became a gardener in order to flee the world. Ultimately using his various gardens as areas of contemplation and open-air writing, he eventually defines himself to be a “gardener in his mind”.

After a barren winter, spring heralds the renewal of the earth with its power of germination and pollination. Seeds that laid dormant in the wasteland pop up, and just like flowers, the artworks capture light and deck out colours, resolutely exercising their vital power of attraction. Painted motif, the garden turns into an open-air workshop as well as a place for life and regeneration sometimes even mystical. František Kupka does his daily workout sessions in the garden. Naked, he indulges in a ritual facing the sun. “I experience magnificent moments, he waves in his Creation in the pastic arts, bathed by hues flowing from the titanic keyboard of colour.” Inhabited by the same pantheistic feelings, Pierre Bonnard walks the countryside of Cannet every morning. The acid yellow of the mimosa facing his studio invades his canvas, like volatile pollen. This vitality which presides over plant growth and reproduction is embedded in the choreographic and vitalist parades of Max Ernst or Isamu Noguchi who creates a set design for Martha Graham's Embattled Garden (1958).

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

Tetsumi Kudo, Grafted Garden / Pollution-cultivation-nouvelle écologie [Jardin greffé / Pollution-Cultivation-Nouvelle écologie], 1970-1971

In Yayoi Kusama's works, the diversity of plants, their extravagant shapes, sparkling colours and heady fragrances, provokes hallucinogenic effects. She grew up in a family of nursery owners; her childhood is inseparable from the flowery universe in which she evolves. Later, while she is at the heart of the New-York avant-garde of the 1960's, she transcribes her visions in psychedelic and orgiastic Happenings. Then, the fusion with nature heralds the symbolic disappearance of the artist. The immersion in a garden sometimes goes as far as the act of absorption, leading to the culture and consumption of psychotropic plants whose effects are observed by Carsten Höller and Michel François.

Healing, intoxicating or poisoning chemistry, the ingestion of plants produces recreational and toxic uses, leading to new states of consciousness. Alchemy can even go further. In his short story Dysphylaxie, Primo Levi pushes this symbiosis to its utmost limit and imagines a “fantastic universe of seeds, germs and ferments where the human species would have become permeable to the plant and animal kingdoms.”

The Mannerist gardens of the Renaissance, close to sacred woods, turns into places for initiation into the mysteries of nature. The rediscovery of the Garden of Bomarzo by par Salavador Dalí astonishes the Surrealists. In Bomarzo (2011), Laurent Grasso explores the historical legacy of this garden inhabited by deities, stone monsters and haunted by multiple rumours. Corey McCorkle wanders across the Désert de Retz, an Anglo-Chinese garden of the 18th century, peppered with false ancient and Gothic ruins and exotic follies. In her essay Les châteaux de la subversion (1982) the French writer, poet and critic Annie Le Brun points out that, during the 18th century, “it is primarily in the enclosed space of a garden that classical and even encyclopaedic anthropocentrism disappears with the first errands of a quest for nature”. The garden turns into a stage of voyeurism, illusion and hallucination inspired by the synaesthetic and erotic experience of the symbolist literature, from Charles Baudelaire to Joris-Karl Huysmans. It also becomes the scene of fantasy and political metaphors; such as The Torture Garden (1899) by Octave Mirbeau, where refinement is confined to horror as to better express the violence of the colonisation.

The dazzling pantheism of “Cosmic Spring” is completed underground, by a return to burying and decomposition.

Gardens are also cemeteries, where the memories of the bodies are kept and where certain struggles of history are crystallised. Like the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo who incorporates human limbs in his toxic flower beds installation Grafted Garden / Pollution – Cultivation - New Ecology (1970-1971). This grafted, mutant garden embodies the ecological visions of the artist who wrote, in the catalogue of the exhibition "Tetsumi Kudo: pollution" at the Stedelijk Museum in 1972 that: “conquered nature is starting to take its revenge on humanity”. In the same kind of nature “distorted” by history and pollution, between the Channel and a nuclear plant, the British filmmaker Derek Jarman establishes there is last garden, before dying of AIDS. Settled in a territory that seems to be hostile, rocky and windy, it will prove to be astonishingly luxuriant and life-saving for the artist.

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

II. FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA GALLERY 2 “From Giverny to Amazonia”: the second part of the path recalls the irreversible and extensible scale of a garden, microcosm and macrocosm at the same time. To translate this duality, the scenery of the second gallery is completely open and proposes a stroll in immersive installations where the principle of closure is deeply questioned. Just as the edges between garden and forest fade, the distinction between nature and culture is abolished and the difference between native and non-native gets blurry.

Despite Linné's rationalisation attempts, it is very complex today to identify the mutating or endangered species.

The time is now for dispersal, graft and hybridisation. Remnants and symptoms of the colonial empire, the botanical gardens have bet on the acclimatisation of exotic species, transferring in the green sphere, the cultural problem of integration and rejection. When he starts to create his famous garden in Giverny, where he paints his Water Lilies, Claude Monet meets with local resistance, people fear that the specimens imported from Japan would poison the surrounding streams. Far from being anecdotal, this struggle reflects the fantasy of an invasive alterity that foreign plants convey.

Pierre Huyghe, Nymphéas Transplant, (Fall 1917), 2014

Contemporary artists revisit these transplantation and colonisation phenomena, reviewing carefully their underlined economic and political motivations as well as their environmental and human impact. From the relegation of the iris tinigitana to the borders of the city to the invasion of geraniums respecting tourist standards and the overbid of palm trees that have become the insignia of a shoddy exoticism, Yto Barrada explores what she contemplates as the “botany of power”. Thu Van Tran investigates the history of Brazilian rubber trees transplanted by the French in Vietnam to produce rubber at the beginning of the 1930’s. Simon Starling tracks the history of the rhododendron imported to Scotland in the 18th century by a naturalist. The plant has proliferated so well that it is considered a parasite to eliminate.

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INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

At the beginning of the 20th century, public parks, these functional and hygienic green urban spaces of European Modernity, replace the gardens of private passions. It is outside Europe and especially in Latin America that modernity is once again taking roots in natural territories. The tropical metamorphosis of the modernity, phenomena of acculturation and hybridisation, constitute one of the strong focal point of the exhibition. The Cannibalist Manifesto, written by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928, advocates the symbolic consumption of the colonist and the repossession of his culture as a vengeful assimilation. “We never had grammars, nor collections of old plants” claims this manifesto in a struggle against the old “European green elites”. Andrade's companion, the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral paints in 1924 the canvas A Cuca, where she depicts a fantastic flora and fauna, free of any traditions or geographic references. Spreading abroad, the European Modernity finds a new impetus in Brazil in the green works of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx who sublimates a tropical forest paradoxically rediscovered in the greenhouse of the botanical garden of Berlin. This fusion of the avant-garde with indigenous and popular cultures, intensified by the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement in the 1960's, spread out of South America to the counter-culture of North America and then, Europe.

The exhibition Infinite Garden ends by the wideness introduced in its titles, summoning the Amazon Forest. Immense, impenetrable and indomitable, the Amazon seems yet to be the antithesis of the garden. In 2005, the anthropologist Philippe Descolain testifies in Beyond Nature and Culture that scientific studies have shown that “the jungle is a space as domesticated than the gardens”. In 1978 during an expedition with the Brazilian artist Frans Krajcberg, Pierre Restany shares the artist's “Amazonian shocks” and writes the Manifesto of Integral Naturalism. When interviewed on the deforestation of this “ultimate refuge of integral nature” during an exhibition at the gallery of Charles Sablon in 1992, Krajcberg feels that “the Amazonian nature is questioning [his] modern man's sensibility”.

Years later, Ernesto Neto has the same revelation after living with the Amazonian tribes of the Huni Kuin who initiate him into the healing rituals of the forest. Following this experience, he creates immersive and olfactory installations made of lycra net fabric containing flowers and therapeutic stones, such as Flower Crystal Power (2014), half-way between sculpture and architecture. Penetrating in this world of sensations not only allows the viewer to experience a fusion with the organic body but also to interact with others, simultaneously experiencing a social body.

Ernesto NETO, Flower Crystal Power, 2014

Beyond a geographical otherness, the final removal of partition walls disrupts the alterity that orders the realm of the livings in the West: here at the bottom of the ladder, the organic appears as a superior power in the Amazon.

Finally, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's tropical diorama especially revived for the Centre Pompidou-Metz, calls up the literary and fantasised dimension of the virgin forest. This immersive optical device reconstructs an artificial and impenetrable jungle where the artist hides works of her personal library, from Joseph Conrad to J.G Ballard. ,

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A GARDEN FOR SCENERY For the exhibition “Infinite Garden” the artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané creates an unprecedented landscape scenery encompassing the works in a comprehensive environment. The architecture of the exhibition breaks with the usual codes of neutral museum space to become a vast garden, organised in two contrasted times, shadow and light.

The first gallery of the exhibition invites to a walk in a nocturnal garden. The visitor walks in a village-like atmosphere, discovering the “private gardens” of several artists in an alternation of pavilions and courtyards, conveying a sensation of back and forth between indoors and outdoors.

The second gallery is less compartmentalised, allowing light and colour to outburst on its full length. Enclosures marked up with metal curtains host the works and give form to copses among which the visitor can walk. The absence of a didactic route invites the visitor to stroll, open to inspiration and curiosity. Big installations become benches under foliage, sources and fountains, caves or pergolas, all suitable places for contemplation. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané reconfigures the perception of the exhibition space by playing with lighting and materials. This option offers the possibility of a visit under a variable sun, and on a slightly undulating ground: the visitor ventures on “forking paths” to borrow Jorge Luis Borges' expression.

Spanish artist born in 1977 in Barcelona, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.

As a child he wanted to become a biologist. Nature continues to have a significant influence on his work whether it is to film a portion of the Amazonian forest, to follow the mutations of stick insects, or to detect hidden geometrical shapes in the leaf of a tree. The various mediums used by the artist – watercolour, sculpture, installation, video or films etc. – play on the perception and frequently transform space, depicting the research of the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. The social significance of this aesthetic bias is also in line with the Neo-Concrete movement incarnated by Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica since the late 1950s in Brazil.

Several exhibitions have been devoted to him at the CRAC (Centre Rhénan d'Art Contemporain), Altkirch, at the Maison France-Brésil of Rio de Janeiro, at the Halfhouse and at the Foundation La Caixa of Barcelone. He also took part in numerous collective exhibitions, at the New Museum of New York, at the Renaissance Society of Chicago or at Museu de Arte Moderna of São Paulo.

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IN THE FORUM OF CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ ERNESTO NETO, LEVIATHAN-MAIN-TOTH

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After being unfolded at the Panthéon of Paris (2006), then in the patio of the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nantes (2009), the Leviathan-main-toth of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto invades the forum of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Gigantic lycra net fabric equipped with several weighted “legs” the sprawling and organic installation transforms space. Its title brings two mythological beings to minds: Leviathan primary monster of chaos, who also impersonates a united and heterogeneous State body, in Thomas Hobbes' philosophy during the 17th century - and Thoth, the Egyptian god of calculation, writing and occult sciences. Creature, landscape or suspended garden at the same time, this environment lives, only through tension and elasticity. Ernesto Neto alludes to a continual adjustment work that he compares to the phenomenon of “organic mutualism in a tropical forest”.

Ernesto Neto, Leviathan-main-toth, 2006-2007 Billes de polystyrène, billes de polypropylène, sable, lycra et tulle, dimensions variables Paris, Centre national des arts plastiques © Ernesto Neto © Cnap/ photo Yves Chenot

IN THE STUDIO OF THE CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ JEAN-LUC VILMOUTH, JUNGLE SCIENCE 1 In 1996 and 1997, Jean-Luc Vilmouth visited the Amazon in two occasions with an ethnologist. “During my visit to the Amazon jungle”, he recounts, “I intended to make a film that would tell my journey, but I realised that waving a video camera around in this context was not the most appropriate thing to do. So I decide not to film but to record only the sound instead. For me this soundtrack is like a film but a film with no images, it is the viewer that must create the images using the sounds that I make him hear with this device”. During the opening weekend of the exhibition “Infinite Garden”, the 18 and 19 of March, this installation is revived at the Studio of the Centre Pompidou Metz.

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Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Jungle Science 1, 1998 Exposition: Institute of visual arts, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Bande son, Spots, fumée © Adagp, Paris 2017

INFINITE GARDEN FROM GIVERNY TO AMAZONIA

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ARTISTS Hilma af Klint

Derek Jarman

Martha Swope

Laure Albin Guillot

Paul Klee

Yves Tanguy

Giovanni Anselmo

Frans Krajcberg

Wolfgang Tillmans

Laëtitia Badaut-Haussmann

Tetsumi Kudo

Tindersticks

Yto Barrada

František Kupka

Thu Van Tran

Denise Bellon

Yayoi Kusama

Jean-Luc Vilmouth

Joseph Beuys

Félix Labisse

Lois Weinberger

Lina Bo Bardi

Georges-Louis Le Rouge

James Whitney

Pierre Bonnard

Richard Long

David Wojnarowicz

Stan Brakhage

François Martig

Jud Yalkut

Brassaï

Maria Martins

Roberto Burle Marx

André Masson

Avec des documents du la

Salvador Dalí

Corey McCorkle

Fondation Jean Dubuffet

Oswald de Andrade

Sine MacKinnon

John Craven

Thierry De Cordier

David Medalla

Philippe Eggermont

Tarsila do Amaral

Mario Merz

Jean Weber

Óscar Domínguez

Kathryn Miller

Jean Dubuffet

Claude Monet

Avec des ouvrages de la

Buby Durini

Teresa Murak

Bibliothèque

Max Ernst

Ernesto Neto

du Muséum national d’histoire

Öyvind Fahlström

Paul Nicolas

naturelle

Peter Fischli et David Weiss

Isamu Noguchi

Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander

Lucio Fontana

Georgia O'Keeffe

Jacques-Ernest Bulloz

Michel François

Gabriel Orozco

Charles Darwin

Eugen Gabritschevsky

Claudio Parmiggiani

Nehemiah Grew

Émile Gallé

Philippe Parreno

Ernst Haeckel

Charles Gérard / Le Corbusier

Enzo Ragazzini

Charles Lemaire

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Arnulf Rainer

Jacques Elisée Reclus

Félix Gonzalez-Torres

Odilon Redon

Pierre Jean François Turpin

Laurent Grasso

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot

João Maria Gusmão et Pedro Paiva

Lamberto Scipioni

Drakenstein

Hans Haacke

Kazuo Shiraga

Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin

Jim Hodges

Karl Sims

Sur une scénogaphie de

Carsten Höller

Valeska Soares

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Rebecca Horn

Simon Starling

Peter Hutchinson

Dana Steichen

Pierre Huyghe

Edward Steichen

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CATALOGUE CATALOGUE The catalogue of this exhibition, which is also a real multi-sensorial graphic object, is realised by the graphic designer Fanette Mellier in resonance with the immersive dimension of Infinite Garden. This collective work directed by Emma Lavigne and Hélène Meisel submit the imaginary of the garden to the research and thoughts of authors such as Patricia Falguières, Arnauld Pierre, Emanuele Quinz or Bénédicte Ramade.

256 pages, 42 Euro Publication date: March 8, 2017

ANTHOLOGY An anthology of texts on gardens inaugurates a new collection launched by the Centre Pompidou-Metz. It is the opportunity for some thematic exhibitions, to promote pieces of literature and artists' writings linked to the theme.

This array of texts, including passages of fictions letters, interviews poems, essays and autobiographies calls forth the proximity between gardening and writing, walking and reading. Do they not say that the ancestor of pocket format book was design to allow reading in a garden?

260 pages, 22.90 Euro Publication date: March 2017

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THREE OUTDOOR GARDENS As part of the exhibition Infinite Garden. From Giverny to Amazonia, the Centre Pompidou-Metz goes beyond its walls and partners up with the city of Metz to organise “Art in gardens”, an ephemeral implantation of three gardens made by artists who explore the theme of the movement of plants. In addition to the exhibition, the Centre Pompidou-Metz emphasises the gardens planted around its buildings; the southern garden designed by Pascal Cribier, with its low prunus canopy forming a mysterious vegetal ceiling and the garden of Jean-Baptiste Keune, thought by Nicolas Michelin with the agency Paso Doble, whose undulating lawns take the shape of regular waves.

METZ, JARDIN DES RÉGATES PETER HUTCHINSON, THROWN ROPES FOR METZ 2017 Born in 1930, the English-American artist Peter Hutchinson is a major artist of the Land Art movement which is also presented in the exhibition Infinite Garden.

From Giverny to Amazonia. For the “Jardin des Régates”, he revives his work Thrown Ropes : ropes are thrown on the ground to delineate winding and random flowerbeds then planted with flowers and stones.

Peter Hutchinson, Thrown Ropes at Highfield Hall, 2015 Falmouth, MA USA Photo credit: Peter Donnelly © Peter Hutchinson

CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ, PARVIS LOÏS WEINBERGER, GARDEN Born in 1947, the Austrian artist Lois Weinberger defines himself as a field researcher. He takes part in the documenta of Kassel in 1997 with an iconic project, Railway track, neophytes from South and Southeast Europe, where he plants weeds coming from the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe, along an abandoned railway track. In the age of globalisation, the opposition between native and neophyte does not make sense any more. In front of the Centre Pompidou-Metz the artist, interested by the phenomena of spontaneous vegetation, uses anarchic means to create a garden made up of hundreds of plastics pots filled with earth, left in the open air and offered to the spontaneous sowing of wind, insects and birds.

Lois Weinberger, Mobiler Garten, 1994/2014 Seaux plastique, terre, végétation spontanée Merkelpark / Villa Merkel, Esslingen am Neckar (DE) photo: Studio Weinberger / Galerie Salle Principale, Paris

CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ, TRIANGLE NORD FRANÇOIS MARTIG, GLEIS 1 In his films, sound pieces and installations, the young Belgian artist and film-maker François Martig, born in 1978, questions the economic, memorial and aesthetic policies which secretly determine the environment. In the immediate vicinity of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, François Martig creates a garden named Gleis 1. Summoning the history of the Lorraine region, this garden is made up of “obsidional” plants (from the Latin obsis “under state of siege”), which were brought voluntarily or not by enemies or allies during the war and have spread across Lorraine.

These three operations are carried out within the framework of the project “Noe-Noah” which seeks support from the European Union under the INTERREG V Grande Région program (2014-2020). |

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PARTNERS Centre Pompidou-Metz is the first offshoot of a major French cultural institution, Centre Pompidou, in partnership with regional authorities. An independent body, Centre Pompidou-Metz benefits from the experience, expertise and international reputation of Centre Pompidou. It shares with its older sibling values of innovation and generosity, and the same determination to engage a wide public through multi-disciplinary programming.

Centre Pompiou-Metz produces temporary exhibitions which f-draw on loans from the holdings of Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art Moderne. With more than 100,000 works, it is the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe and the second largest in the world.

Centre Pompidou-Metz also develops partnerships with museums around the world. A programme of dance, music, films, lectures and children’s workshop further explore themes raised in the exhibitions.

Financial support is provided by Wendel, its founding sponsor

Patrons

In a media partnership with

VOYAGES SNCF.COM SNC_12_0000_Logo2012 31/08/2012 24, rue Salomon de Rothschild - 92288 Suresnes - FRANCE Tél. : +33 (0)1 57 32 87 00 / Fax : +33 (0)1 57 32 87 87 Web : www.carrenoir.com

ÉQUIVALENCES QUADRI

CYAN MAGENTA JAUNE NOIR

Ce fichier est un document d’exécution créé sur Illustrator version CS3.

FOND BLANC, OMBRE NOIR 30 %

Some of the creations and proposals of this exhibition were carried out within the framework of the project “Noe-Noah”.

This operation is support by the European Union under the INTERREG V Grande Région program (2014-2020).

|

In partnership with “l’Art dans les Jardins” and the “Les 150 ans du Jardin botanique de Metz” organised by the city of Metz.

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Wendel, Founder Patron of centre Pompidou-Metz "Wendel has been commited for five years alongside Centre Pompidou-Metz. Since the opening of the Centre in 2010, Wendel wanted to support a flagship institution whose cultural influence reaches the most people. Thanks to its commitment for many years in"favor of Culture, Wendel received the title of Grand Patron of Culture in 2012."

Wendel is one of the leading quoted investment companies in Europe, acting as an investor and professional shareholder, promoting the long-term development of companies which are global leaders in their sectors: Bureau Veritas, Saint-Gobain, IHS, Materis Paints, Stahl, Mecatherm or CSP Technologies.

Founded in 1704 in Lorraine, Wendel Group was committed during 270 years to the development of various activities, especially of the steel industry, before beginning a longterm investor in the late 1970s.

The Group is supported by its reference family shareholder, made up of more than one thousand Wendel family shareholders, who are united in the family company WendelParticipations, which owns 36% of Wendel.

Press Relations:

Christine Anglade-Pirzadeh : + 33 (0) 1 42 85 63 24 c.angladepirzadeh@wendelgroup.com Caroline Decaux + 33 (0) 1 42 85 91 27 c.decaux@wendelgroup.com www.wendelgroup.

www.wendelgroup.com

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UEM, Patron of Centre Pompidou-Metz since 2010, Partner of the Warhol Underground exhibition Energy provider since 1901, for Metz and 141 surrounding municipalities, UEM is proud to be associated with the Warhol Underground exhibition that highlights part of the high priest of pop art's work through his connections with New York's underground scene, and which is certain to be a great success.

Implicated in the lives of the local population and committed to neighbouring cultural institutions, UEM placed the Warhol Underground exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz on its list of great events to support.

As a sponsor of Centre Pompidou-Metz, UEM has been supporting this nationally and internationally important cultural venue since 2010.

UEM has more specifically decided to commit to workshops for children 5-11 years old with the aim of getting them familiar with modern and contemporary art by combining learning activities with creation and meet-the-artist events.

This goal is part of UEM's commitment to placing its energy in developing pedagogical activities for schools, in particular through its partnership with the local school board, the Inspection Académique de la Moselle, in which over 1000 children take part in a tour of the hydroelectric plant in Argancy or the Museum in Pontiffroy. It further promotes this aim via the learning tools set up on its kid-focused internet site 'Energy Kids'.

This new partnership with Centre Pompidou-Metz provides UEM with the opportunity to continue to work in favour of the distribution of culture and allows its unique contribution to help transform the City of Metz into a capital for Contemporary Art. UEM — Facts and Figures UEM is the first independent Local Power Supplier in France. It provides energy to 160 000 customers including 15 000 professionals.

The company has been dedicated to sustainable development for a number of years and produces renewable electricity in its three hydro-electric plants along the Moselle river and in its biomass unit inaugurated in 2013.

It is part of the UEM group, which is made up of 5 entities (UEM, URM, énergem, énergreen production and efluid) and employs 600 workers.

The UEM group is a vital player in the local and regional economies.

Contacts presse : UEM Claire LARDIN / Valérie COZETTE LE BAIL 2, place du Pontiffroy – 57 000 METZ Tél : +33 (0)3 87 34 45 48 / 03 87 34 37 58 Mail : c-lardin@uem-metz.fr / v-cozette@uem-metz.fr

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PRESS VISUALS The pictures are availables online, at the adress below : centrepompidou-metz.fr/phototheque Login : presse Password : Pomp1d57

Max Ernst, Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie, 1934

Hilma af Klint, The Birch [Le Bouleau], 1922

Huile sur enduit, transférée sur panneaux de bois ; 415 x 531 cm

Järna, The Hilma af Klint Foundation

Aquarelle sur papier, 17,3 × 24,9 cm

Kunsthaus Zürich

HaK 639

© Adagp, Paris, 2016

© The Hilma af Klint Foundation Photo Albin Dahlström / Moderna Museet

Pierre Bonnard, L'atelier au mimosa, hiver 1939, octobre 1946 Peinture, huile sur toile, 127,5 x 127,5 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne © Adagp, Paris 2016 Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat

František Kupka, Printemps cosmique I, 19131914

Jean Dubuffet, Jardin au sol, 1958

Huile sur toile, 115 × 125 cm

Collection Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 34,9 × 27,3 cm

Prague, Národní Galerie v Praze

© Fondation Dubuffet/ADAGP, Paris

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne

Éléments botaniques, 24,5 x 37,5 cm

Edward Steichen, Sunflowers Seeds (« Graines de tournesol »), vers 1925-1930

© Adagp, Paris, 2016

© The estate of Edward Steichen / ADAGP, Paris, 2016

akg-images / Universal Images Group / Sovfoto \ UIG

Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Georges Meguerditchian

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Jean Dubuffet à Vence, 1959 Épreuve photographique, 24 x 18 cm © Archives Fondation Dubuffet / photographie : John Craven

David Wojnarowicz, I Feel a Vague Nausea, 1990 Photographie noir et blanc, acrylique, corde, texte sur panneau,

Albert Renger-Patzsch, Fingerhut [Digitale], 1928

152,4 × 121,92 cm New York, collection Michael Hoeh

Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 23,1 x 16,6 cm

© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz / P.P.O.W. Gallery , New York

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Guy Carrard/Dist. RMN-GP © Albert Renger-Patz-Archiv / Ann und Jürgen Wilde / Adagp, Paris, 2016

Tetsumi Kudo, Grafted Garden / Pollutioncultivation-nouvelle écologie [Jardin greffé / Pollution-Cultivation-Nouvelle écologie], 1970-1971 Installation Métal, contreplaqué, isorel, fleurs plastiques, lumière noire électronique, cheveux artificiels, grillage, ampoules, ficelles, écriteau avec texte, 270 x 430 cm Paris, Centre Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne

Émile Gallé, Pot couvert : Eaux dormantes Paris, musée d'Orsay Photo © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jim Purcell

© Adagp, Paris, 2016

Michel François, L. à la datura, 1998

Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

Affiche, Impression sur papier, 180 x 120 cm

/ Georges Meguerditchian

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne © Adagp, Paris, 2016 Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat

Gabriel Orozco, Color Travels through Flowers, 1995 (détail) Teinture sur papier, dimensions variables Courtesy de l’artiste, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York et Chantal Crousel, Paris © Gabriel Orozco

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Anonyme, L'étang des nymphéas à Giverny Paris, musée d'Orsay Photo © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Hans Haacke, Directed Growth, 1972 Installation, Plants de haricots, fil de nylon et métal. Dimensions variables Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld © Hans Haacke / Adagp, Paris 2016. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Pierre Huyghe, Nymphéas Transplant, (Fall 1917), 2014 Écosystème de l’étang de Giverny, 200,5 × 143,5 × 128,5 cm Courtesy de l’artiste © Adagp, Paris, 2016 Photo credit: Alex Delfanne

João Maria Gusmão et Pedro Paiva, Fruit Polyhedron, 2009 Film cinématographique 35 mm, couleur, silencieux, 2’55’’ Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne Achat, 2015 AM 2015-F8

Peter Hutchinson, Berlin-Aruba, 1992 Photographies couleurs, craies grasses, 102 x 141 cm Collection FRAC Limousin © Peter Hutchinson

© João Maria Gusmão et Pedro Paiva Courtesy des artistes

Mario Merz, Tavolo a Spirale in Tubolare di Ferro per Festino di Giornali Datati il Giorno del Festino, 1976 Métal, verre, pierre, fagot, fruits, légumes Hauteur : 70/200 cm, Ø 630 cm Collection Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg © ADAGP, Paris 2016

Simon Starling, Island For Weeds (Prototype) [« Île pour mauvaises herbes (prototype) »], 2003 Terre, rhododendrons, eau, tuyaux en plastique, métal, système à pression autorégulée, 244 × 610 × 366 cm

Ernesto NETO, Flower Crystal Power, 2014

Vue d'installation au Pavillon Écossais, Biennale de Venise, 2003

Vue d'installation d'Ernesto Neto: Gratitude à Aspen Art

Courtesy de l’artiste et The Modern Institute, Andrew Hamilton /

Museum, Aspen, 2014

Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Photographe : Tony Prikryl

© Simon Starling

Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Photo: Jeremy Hardman-Jones

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PRESS CONTACT CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ Diane Junqua Communication Officer Department of Communications and Development +33 (0)3 87 15 39 66 diane.junqua@centrepompidou-metz.fr International Press Agence Claudine Colin Communication Pénélope Ponchelet + 33 (1) 42 72 60 01 penelope@claudinecolin.com

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