High Tension: 8 Winners of the Marcel Duchamp Prize

On May 28, 2017, High Tension: 8 Winners of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, will open at Red Brick Art Museum. The exhibition is curated by Alfred Pacquement, hosted by Red Brick Art Museum, and co-organized with the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art (ADIAF). Running through August 27th, 2017, this is an important exhibition linked to the Festival Croisements, the exhibition is supported by the French Embassy in China (IFC) and Institut Français .

The exhibition presents eight internationally acclaimed artists: Kader Attia, Latifa Echakhch, Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Laurent Grasso, Mathieu Mercier, Julien Prévieux and Tatiana Trouvé.

Each of these eight artists has been a winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize. In the words of the exhibition curator Alfred Pacquement, “…a well-renowned initiative which has proven its reputation on the international scene. This prize, created by private collectors through the ADIAF association, aims to show the energy and vitality of art in France and each year distinguishes those artists who are part of that scene. For nearly twenty years, it has become a respected filter for recognizing the most innovative artists of their generation in France. Almost 70 of them have been nominated over the past seventeen years, thereby putting together a comprehensive repertory of a whole generation of contemporary art.”

At Red Brick Art Museum sculptures, videos, 3D projections, installations and paintings, come together to constitute a highly significant exhibition of exciting and foreword thinking art, deserving of the name High Tension. High Tension as expressive, outward energy: the kind that has the potential to be highly influential to a museum audience. High Tension as a position: a conscious antagonism on the part of the eight artists in the unique modalities of their debates with contemporary society and its contradictions.

High Tension: 8 Winners of the Marcel Duchamp Prize brings together a group of markedly unique artworks, in which the artists, for several for the first time in China, have taken the opportunity to present personal yet highly relatable visions of our globalized high voltage world. Collectively forming an exhibition that jumps from oneiric visions of French palatial interiors and of Olympic Stadiums, to artworks which express a more intimate relation to their own history or to the object as Marcel Duchamp was among the first to promote.

This exhibition demonstrates the diversity of French contemporary art and at the same time can also be regarded as a microcosm of the French art scene. In the view of the curator Alfred Pacquement: “There is no French art in the sense that the artists share proven characteristics. But there are artists in France or elsewhere, like China for instance, who immerse themselves in the concerns of the contemporary world and their own history and culture that have forged them in the aim of developing their individual and autonomous projects.”

In combination with the works of the eight artists, Red Brick Art Museum also presents a comprehensive survey of the history of the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Drawing from every year of the Prize’s continued existence, from 2000 to 2017, close to 70 of the previously nominated artists will be introduced to the audience through literature, photographs, catalogues and other archival materials.

High Tension: 8 Winners of the Marcel Duchamp Prize presents the diversity of French contemporary art to a Chinese audience, offering inspiration for today’s art scene in China.

Editorial Contacts:

July Zhang
+86 15655335125
+86 1084573838
zhangcq@redbrickartmuseum.org

Fancy
+86 13716661235
+86 1084573838
yangf@redbrickartmuseum.org