Belmonte

    Attention, collection / Augusta Lardy Micheli / Jonathan Llense

    In 2014, Nathalie Herschdorfer introduced a seasonally rotating program at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, which her successor since 2022, Federica Chiocchetti, has continued to uphold. Now, however, for the first time in a decade, she is once again presenting an overview of the collection, founded in 1862 – trend-conscious, non-hierarchical, and ironic.

    In the museum’s modern main galleries, visitors encounter a casual, algorithmically unrolled cross-section of the roughly 5,000 works, organized with the help of an image-archive algorithm. The collection’s focus since the 1950s — international printmaking — stands equally alongside paintings by local figures such as Marguerite Sandoz-Jeanneret and Alexandre Perrier. Inkjet prints, pasted directly onto the walls, by Plonk et Replonk-Bébert, Ufuoma Essi, and Virginie Delannoy parody iconographic and museological conventions.

    Two “cartes blanches” offer further commentary — on the collection and, surprisingly and cleverly, on the historic museum spaces opened for the occasion:

    In the vaulted library, Geneva-based Augusta Lardy Micheli (*1994) responds to the local landscape tradition with suspended examples of her highly free, climate-anxious painting, hanging from the ceiling.

    In the graphic arts cabinet, dominated by half-height wood paneling and radiators, Paris-based Jonathan Llense (*1984) creates a site-specific assemblage using photographs of bodies and body-like objects, as well as busts from the collection and industrial materials — all arranged around pedestals and, unusually and refreshingly, extending fully into the lower part of the room.

    Jonathan Llense: Par le bias, Ansicht Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle © ProLitteris. Foto: Lucas Olivet

    Info

    Belmonte de Tajo 61

    28019 Madrid

    Miércoles a viernes 

    de 11.00 a 19.00

    Sábados 

    de 11.00 a 14.00

    Info

    Belmonte de Tajo 61
    28019 Madrid

    Wednesday to Friday  
    from 11:00 to 19:00

    Saturdays 
    from 11:00 to 14:00