Sea of Japan, Hokkaido, 1987. Contemporary Art Collection "la Caixa" Foundation © Hiroshi Sugimoto
An exhibition conceived by the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in collaboration with the ”la Caixa” Foundation.
Monet’s Water Lilies series introduced the concept of blurring into art, using the blurred and the imprecise as expressive elements. This exhibition explores how this phenomenon provided a new way of understanding the world for subsequent artists, offering a key to reinterpreting modern and contemporary visual art.
Long regarded as a benchmark of abstract painting, this series has also been a forerunner of large-scale immersive installations. However, the blurred and out-of-focus effect that characterises the vast expanses of water on the canvases had never been analysed and is now seen as a genuine aesthetic choice.
Drawing on the aesthetic roots of blurring in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and following the intellectual, scientific, social and artistic upheavals that gave rise to Impressionism, the exhibition is structured into sections that bring together paintings, videos, photographs and installations by various artists such as William Turner, Alberto Giacometti, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Eva Nielsens, Claude Monet, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, Soledad Sevilla, Christian Boltanski, Mame-Diarra Niang and Bill Viola, amongst others.
More information: CaixaForum