Miquel Barceló, Antony Gormley, Elizabeth Peyton, Sturtevant, Yan Pei-Ming | Group show at Centre Pompidou-Metz

The fruit of a collaboration between the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Musée du Louvre, this unusual exhibition, featuring works by artists including Miquel Barceló, Antony Gormley, Elizabeth Peyton, Sturtevant and Yan Pei-Ming, is dedicated to the creativity of copyists. Copying the works of great artists is a tool for learning about the canons, techniques and stories. Absorbing their expertise and adopting their mastery is a pathway to knowledge and artistic creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary.

A number of artists have received the following invitation from the two curators: ‘Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre.’ The guests invited to perform this act of decoding, investigation and understanding, juggling old forms and new, include painters, draughtsmen sculptors, video artists, designers and writers. They offer different ways of copying and different conceptions of the copy and of the status of the works exhibited, in a tension between originality and duplication.

This exhibition brings together this form of artistic creation and this heritage, revealing them in a fresh light. Contemporary art does not necessarily seek to break with history but, on the contrary, to draw on it and be enriched by it, to understand it and understand itself. This project, which is both a continuation of history (in the copy’s very form) and radically new (through the works created), is also a meditation on the current state of life. At the same time, it is a meditation on creation, in this ‘unseparated’ world, in which the power of works must contend with with the power of images.