Forever Sixties At the Couvent des Jacobins

With more than 80 emblematic works, some of which have never previously been exhibited by the Pinault Collection, “Forever Sixties” sheds light on a decisive moment in the history of contemporary art, the visual revolution of the 1960s, and its enduring legacy in the creative movement of the following decades. What were the Sixties all about? Liberation, repression, appropriation? Under Anglo-American influence, this decade was characterised by an unprecedented demographic and economic boom, the emergence of consumer society and the beginnings of the conquest of space. Marked by ideological conflicts, the Cold War and the wars of decolonisation, the violent apogee of the civil rights movement and sexual liberation, the Swinging Sixties – repressive years as described by Richard Hamilton with his play on the words ‘swinging’ and ‘swingeing’ – are also a field of tensions opposing conservatism and democratisation, dominant culture and alternative counter-cultures, mercantile conformism and dreams of escape.
 
Pop Art and New Realism, breaking with abstraction

Between 1956 and 1968 in the United States and Europe, Pop Art, a product and symptom of its times and resolutely committed to the present, shocked by redefining the ideals of a modernity that had run out of steam and by infusing a critical and rebellious spirit that continues to possess contemporary art to this day. Breaking with the Abstraction of the 1950s, Pop, like Nouveau Réalisme in France, overturned hierarchies and brought the issues and objects of everyday life, show-based society and advertising, the reality of political, feminist and racial struggles, and the actuality of the mass media, which was then transforming the Western world into a global village, into the realm of art and thought, as if by collage.

With works by Richard Avedon, Evelyne Axell, John Baldessari, Teresa Burga, Robert Colescott, Llyn Foulkes, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Richard Hamilton, David Hammons, Duane Hanson, Alain Jacquet, Edward Kienholz, Kiki Kogelnik, Barbara Kruger, Christian Marclay, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Raymond Pettibon, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richard Prince, Martial Raysse, Ed Ruscha, Niki de Saint Phalle, Sturtevant, Jerzy Ryszard “Jurry” Zielinski…

The exhibition has been designed to resonate with the exhibitions devoted to the work of the English artist Jeremy Deller at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Rennes, La Criée and the Frac Bretagne, as part of Exporama, a contemporary art event organised by the City and the Metropolis of Rennes.

Curator of the exhibition: Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Pinault Collection, with Tristan Bera, Research Officer