For its part, the contemporary art center, which in 50 years has programmed more than 300 exhibitions, will blow out its candles with an exhibition in feedback and prospective mode, entitled Future is now , which will invite around fifty artists who exhibited from 1974 to 2024 to return to the scene of the crime!
Le Parvis, which is one of the first contemporary art institutions to emerge in France¹, is also one of the most atypical. And it is clear that these past 5 decades have not dampened the enthusiasm of artists and audiences for this intriguing place, located in a shopping center and integrated into a national scene.
Quite the contrary, because even today, artists are particularly inspired by this unusual configuration.
And what the Future is now exhibition demonstrates is their attachment to the place..., so that 40, 30 or 20 years later, they decide to return with the same pleasure!
But this collective exhibition is also a historical and institutional journey through half a century of cultural policies, creation and exhibitions in France:
From the empiricism of the beginnings and the spaces called "exhibitions" or "plastic arts", but not yet called "contemporary". From "amateur" hangings on rickety picture rails to the birth of the great contemporary artistic movements. From the decentralization of the Lang laws to the consideration by artists of political and societal issues. From the freedom that was left to creators as well as to a faltering art ecosystem. From the rejection of painting to the promotion of video art and digital technology. To the years that refocused on the human experience in the era of dematerialization and post-internet. To the artists and the super-mediatized markets then to the return to an art conscious of the other human or not. And, finally, to this groundswell that is gender issues and ecological problems in current creation. These are all subjects addressed or evoked in this 50th anniversary exhibition, through the archives of the place and the recent works of the guest artists who exhibited there from 1974 to 2024.