Naissance et vie des formes.
Dessins contemporains de la collection

This show explores the theme of drawing and the possibilities that lie within the medium, with some 60 works from the MCBA collections by contemporary artists.

MCBA conserves nearly 11 000 works, over half of which are drawings. Featuring some 60 drawings by 33 contemporary artists – many of which have never been shown before – Naissance et vie des formes invites the public to discover a lesser known part of our collection. The exhibition focuses on the question of the medium’s intrinsic potentiality and the inexhaustible vital energy characterizing it. The title points to not only the initial act of drawing on a support, but also the indecision that springs from those first steps, i.e., the suspended state of the resulting forms, the tension between the mark and the support which together make up a single entity, the random outcomes that are part and parcel of techniques involving liquids, and finally the inner motoricity of drawing.

Exhibition curator: Laurence Schmidlin, museum conservator