François Morellet

One of a series of retrospectives the Centre Pompidou is dedicating to major figures in contemporary art, RÉINSTALLATIONS proposes a new look at the work of François Morellet, for the first time emphasizing the installation that has been an original and pioneering aspect of it.

Favouring geometrical forms and aleatory procedures, Morellet has over the last sixty years developed a major body of work in constructive abstraction. A founder member in 1960 of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), he has since then worked in many different forms, from painting on canvas to the urban and architectural projects he calls “disintegrations.” The grid, the systematic development, the irony of the titles, the appeal to chance within codified constraints : these are central features of his work.

In collaboration with exhibition curators Alfred Pacquement and Serge Lemoine, the artist has selected some 25 works of varying scale that retrace the key inflections in his artistic development from 1963 to the present. All different, and of different materials – neon tubes, projected light, pieces of wood, silk-screened paper, adhesive tape on walls, stretched canvas, aluminium bars, metal sheet – they are all arranged in space, that is to say, installed.

These works were produced for different occasions and tailored to the site and circumstances of the intervention. Here they have been “reinstalled” in Galerie 2, on Level 6 of the Centre Pompidou, to create a diverse exhibition full of contrast and surprise, as capable of provoking visual shock as it is of affording pleasure by elegance of concept and beauty of effect.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue whose wealth of essays looks at Morellet’s installations over more than half a century, situating them in relation to the practice of installation that has become a common feature of the work of many later artists.