Le monde comme il va Group show featuring Sturtevant at Bourse de Commerce, Paris

Bringing together works mainly from the 1980s to the present day, the exhibition reveals the heightened awareness of the present that artists express. Le monde comme il va alludes to the tumult and turbulence of current events. Stable reference points everywhere seem to be faltering and slipping away. The title comes from a philosophical tale by Voltaire in which an angel sends an envoy to observe the behaviours of a faraway people, as the Gods no longer know whether they deserve to live or should be destroyed to make way for a newer and better civilisation. Confronted with the paradoxes of humanity and his own hesitation, the narrator ultimately decides to let 'the world go as it goes', trusting that humans will take their destiny into their own hands. The works from the Pinault Collection selected for this show bear witness to this moment of uncertainty, but they also serve to draw visitors into the momentum of this sphere which keeps on turning regardless, and in the sway of whose movements we collectively write our history. 

The American artist Sturtevant is best known for her repetitions of the works of other artists, which she recreated manually from memory after having seen a piece that intrigued her. These can immediately be identified with the original, but they are not copies. The artists with whose work she engaged include her contemporaries in American Pop – Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann – as well as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring and Anselm Kiefer, among others. Her aim was not to achieve an exact replica, but rather to address notions of authorship, authenticity and originality that would later come to the fore in our own digital age, characterised by the endless circulation and recombination of images.