Worlds in Motion

Žilvinas Kempinas / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents Worlds in Motion, a thematic presentation of works by nine contemporary artists from the Mudam Collection that address or embody movement as a physical and perceptual event.

Dominique Gauthier / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Miguel Ângelo Rocha / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Robert Breer / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

The phenomenon of movement – be it performed by a body or an object; witnessed by the eye or recorded by a camera – is an important theme within modern and contemporary art. Worlds in Motion draws on Mudam’s Collection, bringing together nine artists from different generations to explore this subject. Jochen Lempert (b. 1958, Moers) employs photographic media to depict apparently timeless subjects from nature. Thus an image of a glow worm evokes early twentieth-century experiments in photography, capturing its presence as an abstract trace of light. Jack Goldstein (b. 1945, Montreal; d. 2003, San Bernardino) uses rotoscopy, an animation technique invented in the 1890’s to produce motion-picture footage by tracing over the image frame by frame. The Jump (1978) employs this technique to transform a mechanically filmed image of a diver’s jump, removing the figure from its context to draw attention to the diver’s movement through space. A rapid succession of drawings and other images in the animated films of Robert Breer (b. 1926, Detroit; d. 2011, Tucson) tests the limits of visual perception and cognition.

Conrad Shawcross, Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, 2009 / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Miguel Ângelo Rocha / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Attila Csörgő / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Jack Goldstein, The Jump / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Jochen Lempert / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Michel Paysant / Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

A series of works recall kinetic art experiments from the 1950s. Conrad Shawcross’ (b. 1977, London) hypnotic light installation produces a geometric pattern on the walls of the gallery. Žilvinas Kempinas’ (b. 1969, Plungė) animate sculpture appears to defy the laws of gravity. Beyond a sense of optical or physical movement, it is the motion of the world and by extension, the cosmos that links sculpture by Miguel Ângelo Rocha (b. 1965, Lisbon) with painting by Dominique Gauthier (b. 1953, Paris) and other works by Attila Csörgő (b. 1965, Budapest). Traversing the boundaries between science and art, Csörgő creates his own unique form of puppetry in which various geometric forms – that symbolize various physical elements and those of the cosmos – appear and disappear in a carefully choreographed order.

Artists include Robert Breer, Attila Csörgő, Dominique Gauthier, Jack Goldstein, Žilvinas Kempinas, Jochen Lempert, Michel Paysant, Miguel Ângelo Rocha, Conrad Shawcross.

Worlds in Motion / Collection Presentation
Curators: Lisa Baldelli and Marie-Noëlle Farcy
September 21, 2019 – April 13, 2020 / Mudam Luxembourg
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