ICONES

At Musée des Beaux-Arts de Liège – BAL, the BIP2014 programm will complement the Museum’s permanent collections. Classical and modern paintings, figurative and abstract art, contemporary pieces, treasures of the Wallonia–Brussels Federation and the Graindorge collection will be reorganized to fit the BIP2014 selected theme of ways of distancing, reflecting and resonating. The broad issue of artistic representation, its scope and its impact on the meaning man has given the world throughout the ages will be questioned through photography and video. The pictorial will be replaced by the mechanical image and vice versa through subtle multiplier effects and reversals. The accepted categories of art history, consecrations and achievements will be viewed through the small end of the telescope.

On the 3rd floor, in the presence of a specially-made selection of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century showpieces, the question of portraiture and the body will be put into perspective at the intersection of painting and photography. Mythical symbolic representations, particularly as regards the question of spiritual elevation, will also be brought into reconsideration by the presence of contemporary works that will cause the visitor to re-examine them from a different angle, close and distant at the same time.

The 2nd floor – devoted to the “Treasures”, to modernity and to the contemporary – will also be witness to a unique meeting between current occurrences of photography and reputed artistic movements. Impressionism, surrealism, and abstract and minimalist waves will here discover their future through reinterpretations and continuation that unexpectedly fall within the course of development in the history of art and techniques.

Treasures from the Wallonia–Brussels Federation Collection, including the famous paintings from the sale of Lucerne, will meanwhile be presented in an aloof preamble where the figure of the cursed artist, of the masterpiece, of the original and of the unique will be reinterpreted with humor and yet depth.

Finally, plunged into darkness, the Salle Saint–Georges (groundfloor) will house video installations in which rising and falling, and movement and stillness, will meet in resonance.

The BAL exhibition closes with a presentation in the Young Artists’s Space of two young photographers’ work, especially selected for the occasion.