When an exhibition made you travel from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
The concept, the purpose,
the evolution into modernity
For their first exhibition, they choose a common theme: the trains. With the show titled "Train Zug Treno Tren. Voyages imaginaires", the museums present recent acquisition, well-known oeuvre from their collection and unknown treasure with international loans from all over the world to offer an unexpected twist on the train.
While it's not possible to make an article about all of those artworks, I will focus on five artworks and artistes features in the three different shows and how they interpreted this theme.
1. Evert-Jan Boks
Evert Jan Boks was a Dutch painter who studied at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, where he won a first prize and the Prix de Rome. After study abroad in France and in Italy, he permanently settled in Antwerp, and married Elie Voet.
In this quiet picture, depicting the inside of a train station, you can see a woman, standing on his luggage and looking at the viewer, waiting. Compared to the group of workers at the left of the picture, the women are incredibly richer and full of priceless gowns.
2. Pierre Roy
The French born artist Pierre Roy his known for his realistically painted compositions of ordinary objects in unexpected arrangements. While coming from a rich family and born in the field of art due to his father working at the secretary of the management board of the Musée d'Arts de Nantes, the artist enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
In 1905, he focused his life to painting and exhibit at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and at the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Between the two wars, he took part in the first exhibition by surrealist painters alongside Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso in 1925.
Beside his paintings, the artist created stage sets, several covers for Vogue magazine and advertising posters.
3. Paul Delvaux
Paul Delvaux is an artist influenced by the style of 19th-century French and Belgian such as Ingres and de Chavannes. While his first pictures, made between the two world wars is influenced by the Post-Impressionist, Expressionist and James Ensor, his style shift with the addiction of woman in his picture.
With his nude figures and portraits sited outdoors or in domestic apartment, the artist adopt a new style influence by the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, Balthus and René Magritte. Thus, he joined the surrealist group and the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et d'Architecture de La Cambre, Brussel as a professor of "monumental painting".
At the same time, he turned temporarily from painting nudes to producing a number of night scenes in which trains are observed by a little girl in a dress, viewed from behind. These compositions contained nothing surrealistic, but trains had always been a subject of special interest to Delvaux, who never forgot the wonder he felt as a small child at the sight of the first electric trams in Brussels.
A few years later, the artist joined the 27th Venice Biennale and the Académie Royale de Belgique, where he became vice-director.
4. Jean-Frédéric Schnyder
The Basel born artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder is one of the most influential artists of the Swiss contemporary art scene. While the artist starts out as a photographer, he will explore different styles and movements such as the practice of assemblage, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and finally painting, when he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1993.
At the time painting was said to be dead. With his twist, the use of acrylic and oil paint and expressive movement, his style will shape contemporary painting. By the 80s, he traveled and explored contemporary Switzerland by train, on foot or by bicycle. This trip will lead to the use of small format paintings, organized in series, and which destroy the banality. of everyday life through anonymous landscape and daily scenes.
5. Maxime Drouet
The artist who was born in 1980 in Épinay-sur-Seine, had since his 20s focus on the practice of graffiti under the name of Mank. While many of his works take place on a train, he was arrested in 2011 and sentenced to pay a heavy fine. But has the layer of the artist look at his work, he leads him to exhibit his work and sell it in a gallery.
With this work dating from 2021, the artist focus on two aspects of his oeuvre, the use of natural light and transparency, in the line of contemporary stained glass window and the use of new media, such as video to tell a story, a trip and the journey of this oeuvre.
Informations about the exhibitions
Place: Plateforme 10
Date: 18.6.2022 – 25.9.2022
Curators: Bernard Fibicher, Tatyana Franck, Chantal Prod'Hom, Marco Costantini, Marc Donnadieu and Camille Lévêque-Claudet
Ticket: Available the front desk of the museum
Informations about Plateforme 10
Plateforme 10
Place de la Gare 16
1003 Lausanne
Suisse
Phone: + 41 21 31 84 400