EMMANUEL GUIGON

In this conference on the surrealist object, Emmanuel Guigon will explore how poets such as Aragon, Breton, and Crevel, and the artists like Bellmer, Cornell, Dalí, and Giacometti, reimagined new arrangements and connections, following a path that is both poetic and playful.

A crisis of the object emerges when commodities and artifacts, stamped with utility, come to invade and shape society. Marcel Duchamp responds to this “ready-made” world with the ironic choice of the readymade. The Surrealists did things differently: they brought the object to life through a flurry of actions, inventions, and diversions: mannequin-objects, dream-objects, found objects, symbolic-function objects, poem-objects, and so on. For them, imagination tends to become real. It is no coincidence that dream intersects with the day before, and that desire meets chance. The marvellous can appear—and take form.

Emmanuel Guigon is Director of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. He holds a PhD in contemporary art history from the Sorbonne and is a specialist in the historical avant-garde, post-war European art, surrealism and modern and contemporary Spanish art.

He directed the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie and the Musée du Temps Besançon from 2007 to 2016. He was chief curator and director of the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg from 2001–2006. Emmanuel Guigon has led seminars and conferences in several museums and universities and has supervised lessons and doctoral theses.

CHF 10.– | Free for Friends of Fondation Opale, members of Club de la Toula, and with Abobo
Booking required: online ticketing