OCTOBER 11, 2024 – FEBRUARY 9, 2025
THE ATOMIC AGE: ARTISTS PUT TO THE TEST OF HISTORY
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
11 Avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris
The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is inviting visitors to take a new look at the history of modernity in the 20th century via the imaginary world of the atom in the exhibition The Atomic Age: Artists put to the test of history. The exhibition includes a screening of Doomshow, 1964 by NO!artist Ray Wisniewski.
The exhibition is an opportunity to explore the artistic representations sparked by the scientific discovery of the atom and its applications, in particular the nuclear bomb, whose devastating consequences changed the fate of humanity.
Bringing together some 250 works – paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and installations – as well as documentation that has often been previously unpublished, the exhibition shows, for the first time in a French museum, the widely differing different stances adopted by artists in the face of scientific advances and the controversies they have given rise to.
Dealing with a subject now more topical than ever, the exhibition is in keeping with the museum's desire to reflect contemporary cultural and social concerns in its programming.
The catalogue, which includes numerous essays by specialists – philosophers and historians of art, architecture and science, etc. – explores the subject from the three angles of art, science and politics. It also gives a voice to present-day artists and writers, and brings together documentation and images in many cases on public display for the first time. Last but not least, a comprehensive chronology shows the sequence of scientific, political, cultural and artistic events that have shaped our "Atomic Age".