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.
