Lorenzo Benedetti On Site

Bertrand Lavier, etc. The second is that we have to deal with the vastness of the Petit Palais, which is not divided into small spaces as the Grand Palais is for the fair. The specific qualities of the space guide our choice of artworks. For example, Not Vital’s heads, which produce a distorted reflection of everything around them, will act like a black hole sucking up the museum’s galleries. This will also be an occasion to create a conversation between contemporary pieces and the works in the collection. The idea of realism in Courbet’s paintings, this desire to confront reality, will resonate with the work of Lavier, who uses thick coats of paint to cover ordinary objects, as in Gaveau, the grand piano we are showing. both. Brian Griffith’s models of buildings from different architectural periods, from Tudor to Art Deco, deconstruct the idea of architecture by interrogating the question of scale, especially the scale of history and that of memory. His structures are associated with personalities, like the actor Bill Murray whose portrait is reproduced on a building façade.

The question of scale seems important in how we apprehend the architectural theme of this exhibition, especially in light of the monumentality of the Petit Palais.

The interplay of scales and proportions plays a very important role in these galleries with their nine meter-high ceilings. Theymake it possible to show very large works, but don’t require it. Rather, they pose the question of the relationship between the piece and the space surrounding it. For instance, one of our selections was Silver Lamento by Gonzalo Lebrija, a silver-plated statue of a man leaning on a wall, which is just sixty centimeters high. But we’re also showing monumental works such as Manfred Pernice’s Teile & peile, a pile of very simple architectural shapes, like a set of basic