In the main modern galleries, visitors encounter a relaxed display, laid out using an image-archive algorithm, that offers a cross-section of some 5,000 works. The collection’s focus since the 1950s —international graphic art— appears on an equal footing alongside paintings by local protagonists 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 museum conventions.
Two “cartes blanches” add further commentary, both on the collection and —surprisingly and shrewdly— on the museum’s historic spaces, which have been reopened for the occasion:
In the vaulted library, Geneva-born Augusta Lardy Micheli (*1994) responds to the local landscape tradition with examples of her very free, climate-conscious painting, which hang suspended from the ceiling.
In the print room, dominated by half-height wood panelling and radiators, Paris-based Jonathan Llense (*1984) builds a site-specific installation with his photographs of bodies and bodily objects, along with busts from the collection and industrial objects. It unfolds around the pedestals and —unusually and refreshingly— also in the lower part of the space.
