On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, S.M.A.K. is presenting ‘The Collection (I): Highlights for a Future’ which includes about 200 works from the collection and, like the opening in 1999, it will occupy the whole museum. In this exhibition, S.M.A.K. wants to look mainly at the present and the future. Well-known classics, outstanding newer works and also recent additions to the collection are to be used to show the position of the museum and of art in contemporary reality and to make new links with other, sometimes surprising and less well-known works in the collection.

The collection of the ZKM | Karlsruhe is one of the largest media art collections in the world. It exemplifies the transformation of art in the face of changing production, reception and distribution technologies. Artists react to the change in the media and sometimes anticipate developments that will become self-evident for society as a whole only years later: they are the story of the future.

For this exhibition to be presented at three consecutive sites – the LAAC in Dunkirk, the Saint-Roch Museum in Issoudun and finally the Sainte-Croix Abbey Museum in Les Sables-d’Olonne – Daniel Abadie has chosen nearly 150 rarely or never before exhibited works that offer a new perspective on the past century’s artistic movements and their often-surprising inter-relations, while also echoing and shedding light on the LAAC collection.

This project was inspired by Daniel Abadie’s shock discovery in 1991 at the Albright-Knox Museum of Buffalo (New York), when confronted with the juxtaposition of three fundamentally different paintings dating from 1913, by the artists Vassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay. He suddenly understood that what links the painters of any given generation is the lesson drawn from their predecessors, with each artist answering in his or her own manner the questions raised by the previous generation. This new approach to 20th-century painting differs from the established practice of observing multiple incompatible movements in a state of cohabitation.
Indeed, the exhibition underlines this fascinating paradox. “Other eyes, from Apollinaire to today” begins following the Second World War, in resonance with the LAAC collection and evoking the artistic explorations of the early 20th century.

The exhibition shows how successive approaches form unexpected ensembles, when one looks beyond their apparent contradictions. It links the questions raised with the proffered solutions, thereby offering a new view of this so-close century. And it reveals the extent to which each generation – within a context of uncertainties, debates and contradictions – reacts, echoes, resists or pursues the research and searchings of its predecessors.

“The viewer is in the picture” – this formulation coined by the art historian Wolfgang Kemp indicates that the artist considers the viewer in the conception of his work and thus determines his standpoint before the picture. The path of abstraction in the 20th century is accompanied by a concentration on painterly means as well as the handling of the surface of the canvas. It poses the question concerning the impact of foregoing figurative and narrative elements on the perception of the picture. What role is assigned to the viewer when the canvas no longer functions as the ‘open window’ (‘una finestra aperta’) described by the Italian artist and writer Leon Battista Alberti?

For the viewer, focusing on the surface of the canvas – and thus on painting itself – gives rise to varied possibilities. While the strict geometrical areas cast the viewer’s gaze back to his own realm of reality, gestural techniques like those employed by Jackson Pollock generate the illusion of a space behind the canvas. White paintings, which simulate infinity as a targeted depiction of nothingness, have similar effects. Rhythmic structures, by contrast, fix the viewers gaze on the surface of the canvas. Beginning in the 1960s, artists invited the viewer to enter into a direct if not even physical interaction with the work of art.