It’s a meeting we didn’t expect. The name of Voltaire attached to that of the contemporary art forger Jeff Koons and his gleaming candy pink Balloon Dog or of Maurizio Cattelan, the narcissistic troublemaker of the Italian contemporary scene to whom we owe this truculent puppet of a Pablo Picasso on the verge of implosion. What could the Prince of Enlightenment have thought of all this? No doubt he would have left “The world as it is” with its weaknesses, its strengths and its paradoxes.

Freely inspired by the philosophical tale of the juggler of letters, the Bourse de Commerce imagined this collective exhibition in tune with the contradictions of its time. The opportunity to rediscover early icons of the Pinault Collection, to fantasize a bygone past with the sophisticated and falsely retro photos of Cindy Sherman, to reconnect with nature with the naturalist paintings of Peter Doig before heading straight into the wall with Bertrand Lavier’s “ready-destroyed” car wreck. Damien Hirst, Anne Imhof and Marlene Dumas act here as sometimes whistleblowers, sometimes prophets, while the immense mirror placed on the floor of Kimsooja shows us the real actors of change: ourselves.

Want to go further ? Discover our video of the exhibition.

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BALLOON DOG

Beware of the dog ! The king of kitsch Jeff Koons owes a lot of his fame to him... and many of his detractors. Cast in mirror-polished stainless steel and painted in a neo-pop magenta color, this inflatable giant doggie sculpture immediately evokes the playfulness of childhood and memories of fairgrounds. The mascot has a number of brothers and sisters, one of which, orange, fetched nearly sixty million dollars in 2013.

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CINDY SHERMAN STRIKES

American photographer Cindy Sherman here lends her features to the stereotypical figure of a modern odalisque in decline, languid and mannered, responding in every way to the codes of the photographic portrait of an actress with deliciously old-fashioned charm. His frozen pose with coded, almost obsolete gestures meets the standards found in the clichés of movie stars of the time.

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THE ICON OF EVIL

Rebellious, provocative but also full of humor and a real knowledge of art history, Maurizio Cattelan loves scandal. This shocking work is no exception to the rule. The artist chose to show Adolf Hitler on his knees, possibly praying. All the trouble in this polemical work lies in this terrible paradox, that of a dictator trapped in this seemingly harmless child's body, bearing the face of the greatest war criminal of the 20th century.