As New York’s iconic museum MOMA is currently undergoing refurbishment, Paris’s Frank Ghery-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton has stepped in to give the artworks a home in the interim.
With over 200 significant works from their permanent collection— with pieces by Barbara Kruger, Christopher Wool, Feliz Gonzales-Torres, Max Beckman, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol—this makes the exhibition all the more special as it’s the first time that any pieces from MOMA’s archive have been shown in Paris.
The exhibition’s covers a vast time span—from 1880 to 2016—and is exclusive to this show. Spread across four floors, the exhibition, entitled Being Modern: MOMA, not only shows a variety of works from modern to contemporary art, but the mediums are vast and varied (painting, sculpture, photography, print, film, digital art and large-scale installations). The four different micro-rooms create a narrative of what MOMA is and what contemporary art looks like through the eyes of the iconic institution.
As you walk through the exhibition, the first room is dedicated to the opening MOMA in the 1930’s – this is where you’ll catch art-world big-hitters like The Large Bathers by Paul Cézanne. The audience is then invited to explore minimalism and pop art, followed by post-1960’s pieces. The exhibition ends with contemporary art from international artists, with works like The Original Emoji by Shigetaka Kurita.
One of the key highlights from the exhibition is the array of documentaries being shown in each room that were lifted directly from MOMA’s archives –they’ve barely (if ever) been seen so it’s an excellent way to give context to the works and the institution itself.
Being Modern: MOMA in Paris runs until March 5 at Fondation Louis Vuitton
