A selection of works from the Frac Bretagne and Fonds départemental d’art contemporain d’Ille-et-Vilaine collections

Does talking about the sea when you live on the coast produce the same message as when you’re there temporarily on vacation?
Do vacations by the sea, with my brother, my sister, my mother, have the same flavor as a daily life lived on the coast?
This is the question raised by the theme of this exhibition, like a challenge to the works.
Through a multi-faceted selection of sculptures and installations, drawings, paintings, films and photographs, works from the collections of the Frac Bretagne and the Fonds départemental d’art contemporain d’Ille-et-Vilaine, invite us to reflect on how we write the story of our lives.
From gentle sunsets under Sugar and Cream to introspective moments of meditation on the course of things, from mad surfing sessions to long, leisurely strolls along the “chemin des douaniers”, life by the sea is a mix of unforgettable memories and simple moments of bliss.
From the top of an observatory or low on the sand, the story is there, accessible to everyone, within reach of experience, ready to emerge from our simplest and wildest feelings.

Get out your pens and smartphones! Start writing postcards and other text messages, and let your inspiration flow from your visit to this travel exhibition.

A French-born performer and designer who passed away in 2018, Nicola L. moved from the Académie Julian to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she worked in the studio of painter Jean Souverbie. She discovered New York in 1966, on the invitation of the experimental theater La MaMa, and settled there permanently in the late 1970s. Her conceptual work is based on two approaches that open up multiple possibilities: making bodies and making bodies. “Faire corps”, i.e. bringing bodies together in the same skin, to inhabit space together, more organically, from the inside of a second skin. Le Manteau rouge, une même peau pour tout le monde (1969) is a huge stretcherless canvas with 11 empty pockets adapted to the dimensions of 11 human bodies. The coat was designed for a performance to accompany Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso at the Isle of Wight pop music festival. Since 2002, the artist has been touring the world with his “art-skins” (Cuba, Paris, Los Angeles, the Great Wall of China, and as far afield as the European Parliament in Brussels), inviting bodies to share in his performances “the odyssey of the flesh”, as Michel Onfray puts it.

Already part of the Frac Bretagne collection with the work Tapis gris pour cinq personnes, 1975, this wide-ranging exhibition, conceived in partnership and touring with the Camden Art Center in London (UK), the Kunsthalle in Vienna (Austria) and the Museion in Bolzano (Italy), will trace the artist’s fantastic career and combine it with works by other figures from the artistic scenes she has traversed.

Curated by Géraldine Gourbe