HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PINAULT COLLECTION TO MOSCOW

A ground-breaking exhibition of works selected from the François Pinault Foundation’s Collection, one of the world’s most prestigious private collections, will go on show at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (GCCC) in Moscow opening on 19 March 2009.

The show will bring contemporary art to Moscow on a scale that has never been seen before. Taking over most of the 8,500 square metres of the Garage building, the exhibition will be a remarkable installation and an unprecedented event for the city. Representing the work of 32 artists, highlights of the exhibition include works by Jeff Koons, Bill Viola, Dan Flavin, Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Subodh Gupta, Philippe Parreno, Takashi Murakami, and Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

The exhibition’s curator Caroline Bourgeois said: “The exhibition attempts to question the state of the world. The idea of the show is to play with the scale of the Melnikov Garage by selecting some of the large-scale works in the Collection in order to experiment with both the scale of the works and the size of building. The first two parts of the exhibition explore themes about war and humanity and aspects of spectacle and the leisure society. The third part is about our global world and features artists from different continents including America and Europe but also territories new to the art world, Asia, India and the Arab world. This last section speaks about the end of Utopia and throughout the show artists raise questions about the challenges of the new century.”

List of artists: Adel Abdessemed (Algeria/France), Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (USA, Cuba), Francis Alÿs (Belgium, Mexico), Carlos Amorales (Mexico), Cao Fei (China), Maurizio Cattelan (Italy), Liu Dahong (China), Peter Fischli & David Weiss (Switzerland), Dan Flavin (USA), Loris Gréaud (France), Johan Grimonprez (Belgium), Subodh Gupta (India), Pierre Huyghe (France), Y.Z. Kami (Israel), Kimsooja (Korea), Jeff Koons (USA), Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley (USA), Takashi Murakami (Japan), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Philippe Parreno (France), Paul Pfeiffer (USA), Cindy Sherman (USA), Marion Tampon Lajarriette (France), Pascale Marthine Tayou (Cameroon), Tim Noble & Sue Webster (UK), Joana Vasconcelos (Portugal), Francesco Vezzoli (Italy), Bill Viola (USA), Chen Zhen (China).

GCCC, Moscow’s newest contemporary art space, opened in September this year with a major exhibition by Russia’s leading artists, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. GCCC is a unique non-profit venture aimed at the promotion and development of contemporary art and culture in Moscow. It is housed in one of Russia’s architectural masterpieces, the former Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, designed in 1926 by the architect Konstantin Melnikov. It is the largest exhibition venue in the city.

The building includes a large café, cinema and specialised bookshop with a library and member’s room due to open in 2009, transforming GCCC Moscow into much more than just a gallery space, and into a compulsory destination for Russia’s growing art community.

François Pinault is one of the world’s leading private art collectors, twice-named by ArtReview magazine as ‘the most influential figure in contemporary art’.

The François Pinault Foundation Collection comprises more than 2,000 artworks by leading contemporary artists. In June 2009, François Pinault will open his new centre for contemporary art, Punta della Dogana, with the fourth in a series of exhibitions taken from the Collection. Renovated by architect Tadao Ando, Punta della Dogana will provide the permanent base for the collection together with the Palazzo Grassi exhibition space which opened in 2006. The inaugural exhibition from the Collection, Where Are We Going? opened in April 2006 at Palazzo Grassi and was followed by The François Pinault Collection: A Post-Pop Selection in November 2006, and Sequence 1 in May 2007.

In October 2007, Caroline Bourgeois curated an exhibition of works from the collection for Passage du temps, the first exhibition to take place outside Venice. The show comprised 96 works by 39 artists and focused on contemporary film and photography works from 1970 to 2007. Artists included Dan Flavin, Cindy Sherman, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham and Gilbert and George.