MAXXI, showing for the first time the Lemaître collection, entirely dedicated to video art

On view for the first time at MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts is the Lemaître Collection, one of the rare private collections devoted entirely to video art. From September 16 to 22, 2021, the exhibition Passages. The Lemaître Collection between video art and cinema, curated by Maria Laura Cavaliere, in partnership with the Villa Medici Film Festival. The collection of Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître consists of more than 150 works by international artists from around the world. The Lemaître family has played a very important role in the valorization of video art, thanks to numerous initiatives aimed at promoting the works of young talents, such as the establishment of the Prix Studio Collector, intended to reward the creations of emerging artists, students of Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, France.

The pair began collecting moving images in the 1990s, when a generation of video artists was emerging who found in cinema a new field of action and visual experimentation. Their choices are dictated by enthusiasm and personal taste.

“Video is the medium of our time and we want the collection to reflect our role in this era,” these are the Lemaître’s words.

The selection on view includes both historical works and new acquisitions and traces the recent history of video art, characterized by the influence of cinema as an aesthetic horizon and cultural model.

The screening program of the eighteen video works is divided into two sections: the aesthetics of documentary and the deconstruction of film language.

The revival of the documentary genre characterizes the visual writing of many artists from the late 1990s to the present. Geopolitical and social issues, linked to the effects of globalization, orient video practices toward an aesthetics of documentary, exploring the frontiers of representation, between documentary film and video art, reality and fiction, direct testimony and the creation of fictional archives.

The methodical deconstruction of the codes of film language defines the practice of this second group of artists, who elaborate an experimental research through the mise en abyme of the narrative structures of cinema and the recontextualization of iconic elements belonging to film culture and the collective imagination: appropriation, détournement, remake.

At this link the program.

For info: maxxi.art

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