During the Musée d’Art et Histoire’s complicated renovation, the collector and promoter, Dakis Joannou and Massimilano Gioni, curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, imagined Urs Fischer’s monographic exhibition “False Friends” in a new way: face to face with major artists from the collection. Surprising and a wake-up call for the institution with an uncertain future!
At the beginning, an eye is placed as on a door to stare at the visitors, putting us in an ambiguous situation, that of the voyeur. We are certainly attending a strange spectacle. A skeleton stares at his reflection in a mirror below the gaze of a baroque sculpture of Louis XIV (Jeff Koons) and a carnal embrace (“Jeff and Iona”, his wife, a porn star at the time), while Paul MacCarthy’s brown pig or Fischli & Weiss’ falsely archeological animal in the form of a piggybank weave links symbolized by these vanishing lines for a concert tinged with wrong notes and sarcasm. And what about the photography of Cindy Sherman captive in its museum reserve with dubious colors, of a wooden bed vaguely connected to Gober? From a door ajar, Cattelan’s pigeon watches. If it isn’t that a childhood world is filled with ghosts and nightmares!
The knowing deception of broad sham where it is about the looks and regime of images, against a backdrop of great references to art history. Puzzling collisions where the faux pas and pitfalls are numerous, but open new critical perspectives. A fool’s game where you will be tested severely!
EXHIBITION
Faux Amis
Urs Fischer
Until July 17th 2016
Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève
Rue Charles-Galland 2
1206 Geneva
Switzerland
http://institutions.ville-geneve.ch/fr/mah/
