Bodies at stake

Exhibition Catalogue Bodies at stake, presented at MO.CO. Hôtel des collections, Montpellier (13 november 2021 - 13 february 2022).

The body is political, social, sexualized, fantasized, performed, controlled. It’s the reflect of our fears, of our aspirations, of our time; its representations depict celebrated bodies, probations, challenged bodies, in which technological developments allow making exoskeletons and artificial corporality, and in which the body becomes stretch and adjustable over and over again, but stays an indicator of differences.

The representation of the body goes through the whole history of art. How the current artists, following Michel Ange, Rubens, Courbet, Alberto Giacometti or Francis Bacon (to mention only few artists who work from the flesh) appropriate the idea of the body? How to depict the human being nowadays?

This is not a matter of showing autopsied bodies, but to conceive an accurate examination of the human figure such as it is represented by the artists, the body as a means of expression, experimentations, and formal and esthetical research, inextricably tied up with social, political and cultural evolutions.

58 artworks created between 1977 and 2020 take possession of the body. With Ed Atkins, Lina Bertucci, Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Cuoghi, Enrico David, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Michael Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Douglas Gordon, GORDON_PARRENO, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sanya Kantarovsky, Josh Kline, Elena Kovylina, Barbara Kruger, Zoe Leonard, Sarah Lucas, Mark Manders, Nathaniel Mellors, Senga Nengudi, Cady Noland, Catherine Opie, Michele Rizzo, Thomas Ruff, Wael Shawky, Cindy Sherman, Andra Ursuta, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.