The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present the exhibition Conversation Pieces – Regards sur la collection du Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (Fmac).

The Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève was founded in 1950. Since then, the invited specialists that form its selection committee have amassed a world-class collection of over 1500 pieces of work. The collection has never been shown in Switzerland, making this exhibition the first opportunity to discover this important patrimony of Geneva. The selection proposed by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève includes works by John M Armleder, Fischli & Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Fabrice Gygi, Alex Hanimann, Urs Lüthi, Christian Marclay, Tony Morgan, Olivier Mosset, Gianni Motti, Claudia & Julia Müller, Shahryar Nashat, Roman Signer, Sidney Stucki, and Vidya Gastaldon.

The exhibition is structured into poles that showcase a number of common interests between the artists of different generations, and catalyse lines of dialogues between the works selected. For example, a sense of the ridiculous and burlesque reigns amongst the grouping of works presented by Fischli & Weiss, Roman Signer, Alex Hanimann and Gianni Motti. Signer and Fischli & Weiss made a name for themselves in the late 1970s. Their works appeared to be made ‘off the cuff’ with a lightness of touch and a humility of means intended to counter the previously held conception of the artist as genius. A jester of our times, Gianni Motti has been working since the late 1980s, deploying the absurd with critical intent. He has created a series of performative works using video, photography and objects in which fiction is often truer than reality.

‘Getting personal’ could well be the spirit that best describes the configuration of works by artists Sylvie Fleury, Urs Lüthi, Fabrice Gygi, Tony Morgan and Shahryar Nashat. The body is treated, at times, as a general category, and at others in a biographic manner. On the one hand, Urs Lüthi’s cross-gender photographs of himself are now historic works in the discussion of identity. On the other hand, as Fleury has commented ‘A woman is always present in my work’. Indeed her large scale mural ‘Obsession ’references a well known perfume brand, as much as it conjures up the woman that wears it, and provokes us into a questioning of the marketing strategies used by these products and the gender stereotypes they allude to. Fabrice Gygi’s drawings, simultaneously dangerous and tender, are one to one copies of the tattoos the artist inscribed on his body as a teenager…

The private view will be held in common with the 50 JPG (50 Jours pour la Photographie) and the Mamco, in parallel with the opening of the new spaces of the bac (bâtiment d’art contemporain).

Curated by Katya García-Antón