A collection that has been built up over 50 years and which has favored young talents as well as established artists over a long period, this 6th exhibition at the Château de Nyon offers a selective as well as diversified point of view of the contemporary art scene in the Vaud canton of Switzerland. Since its origins in the early 1970s, the collection has grown through proximity to artists working in the canton. It thus played an interface role between places traditionally devoted to contemporary art and the entrepreneurial world. In addition, the Banque Cantonale de Vaud has chosen to show this intramural and extramural heritage of the Bank in a sustained manner, since 85% of the 2,400 works listed in the inventory are currently on display. This strategy stems from the idea that a private collection only makes sense today if it is decompartmentalised from agreed practices in order to have the opportunity to forge new partnerships, and especially to be visible to a wider audience.
For this exhibition at the Château de Nyon, the choice was made from a selection of photographs and works on paper in order to take a unique look at these practices which have gained recognition since the beginning of the 20th century, while nonetheless standing outside of the old academic divisions of mediums. Today, an artist defines his work more through a protocol or an attitude than through the exclusive use of a technique. This paradigm shift can be understood through drawings dployed in monumental formats, engravings which sometimes proceed from the transfer technique or the watercolor which play with the fabirc paper as with the framing of the motif, to name just a few examples. As for photography, it can be the domain of the digital as well as film, Polaroid as well as small and large format; it has become a non-exclusive expression of photographers, since it is widely practiced by plastic artists, hence the potential for interaction between these different fields. Thus, so-called "classic" mediums are still practiced, but they are most often reinvested in multiple ways by artists, thus freeing themselves from the uses to which these practices were previously assigned.