Author Description

Placed under the joint curatorship of the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art and the Mémorial de Caen, this exhibition continues the artistic and historical exploration initiated in 2020 with The Liberation of Painting, 1945-1962. This first collaboration recalled how abstract art imposed itself immediately after the war, faced with the impossibility for artists like Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung or Pierre Soulages to continue to represent the world with the traditional means of paint. This second cycle allows us to understand how, at the turn of the 1960s young artists turned away from the then dominant abstraction to propose a return to the image and the figure. Through cross-examinations between works of art, archives and period objects, the exhibition invites the public to immerse themselves in this period of history as complex as it is striking. -- From publisher's website.