ABSTRACTION, ABSTRACTIONS!

A chair swivels slowly on a dance floor covered in ink. Ten yellow wooden panels arranged in a row in a grassy field announce in letters: We are Happy. A New York elevator photographed at 1:1 scale becomes a large black monochrome. Welcome to this new group exhibition at the Tanneries d’Amilly which questions what remains, in the 21st century, of the grand narrative of abstraction. The idea is simple, almost provocative: abstraction is not a closed movement, much less an inheritance to be embalmed. It is a living attitude, which has been taking forms for a hundred years that no one could inventory. Hence the plural title. The curator, Thierry Davila, offers a deliberately fragmented cartography: seventeen artists born between 1919 and 1989, from Argentina, Colombia, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, Germany and France, in all imaginable media: painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, video, performance. Here, Katinka Bock's Amnesia brings into dialogue an extended leather and a bronze form placed on the ground; There, the seven steel elements by Franz Erhard Walther create a motionless choreography; the video by Francis Alÿs transforms a man's walk in a city into a pictorial gesture on an urban scale. Four spaces in the art center, from the Grande Halle to the Verrière, and extending to the neighboring park where Christian Robert-Tissot has installed We are Happy, host this sensitive panorama. A living, plural, sensory abstraction