Maison Guerlain: “When Material Becomes Art” Exhibition

Maison Guerlain has always encouraged new forms of avant-garde and artistic innovation. This year it invites the public to a new exhibition that explores the question of materiality in art.

Artists are artisans of the senses, drawing on their own flesh and blood to give substance to their emotions, their ideas and their commitments. In this exhibition, the medium, raw material, sometimes natural, organic, mineral, artificial, industrial or digital is transformed, diverted, sublimated … to deliver to the world a perceptible and lasting trace of their critical spirit and their imagination.

From raw material to virtual material, the exhibition, which brings together sculptural works, paintings, photographs, installations, and also NFT (Non-Fungible Token) certified digital works specially created for the occasion, proposes to take a look at the potential of these creative territories, through an itinerary that extends over the three levels of the Maison Guerlain.

In a second phase, the NFT-certified digital works presented in the exhibition will be sold to benefit the GoodPlanet Foundation, chaired by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

Art is sublimating technique through love, said Nuno Oliveira! Beyond the disciplines, it is, in essence, addressed to the senses and, by vocation, produces emotion. This is its purpose, the one that leads it to ultimately free itself from the use-value, which however it does not always ignore! Complex…!

What is certain is that it results from a will and “quintessentializes” the human! For all that, is it antagonistic to nature “conceived as a power-producing without reflection”?

By signing the exhibition “When Material Becomes Art“, Guerlain is asserting the alliance of art and nature. The House is reaffirming the extent to which its art as a perfumer is consubstantial with nature as an essential and fragile source and ecosystem.

For nearly two centuries, Guerlain’s creative audacity has been based on unique know-how, an unwavering commitment to the sublime quality of raw materials, and a constant desire to innovate, resolutely respecting sustainable balances. Combining art and natural materials means taking time by hand to lead it into the future.

We find there tangible works which bring us back to the raw, primary, concrete matter, but also digital works, immaterial, sometimes unfathomable. Behind these creations, the artists explore these questions, driven as they are all in their differences by an intimate vision and their own convictions.

To question materiality as a factor of artistic creation is to question the world, our resources and the dangers that assail them and hurt us.

Art today cannot be dissociated anymore from the world which surrounds it and by the priesthood, it questions itself. Still and always.

The exhibition “When Material Becomes Art” certainly asks more questions than it brings answers. It is its vocation. That of inviting us to put us in a movement to think a conscious truth and respectful of its environment.

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