>> Contemporary Art Collection
      Christian Boltanski, Le grenier du chateau (Castle Garret), 1990
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Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art was established by Haute-Vienne district council in 1985 and today, over 25 years later, it boasts a world-class collection of international artworks. Three principal themes - history, landscape and imagination - have guided the growth of the collection. A central core quickly developed around major movements such as Arte Povera and Land Art or pinpointed significant 20th century artists (eg., Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke), creating a body of works relevant to vital issues in the vanguard of contemporary art. Instead of seeking to constitute a complete collection of any one artist or movement, the museum has aimed to provide a balanced vision of different currents in creative practices today. |
Notable themes in the collection include British sculpture (Richard Long, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Gary Webb…), approaches to reconstructing the past and storytelling (Tacita Dean, Ian Hamilton Finlay…), questions of time and movement (Thierry Kuntzel, Philippe Decrauzat, Anthony McCall, Robert Breer…), representation of movement (Rineke Dijkstra, Douglas Gordon, Mathias Poledna…), landscape and its immediacy (Valérie Jouve, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Sophie Ristelhueber…), invented worlds of action (Julius Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Gabriel Orozco…). The museum organizes several exhibitions a year on chosen subjects or specific artists, permuting works and ideas from the collection as well as drawing on outside sources such as the Fonds national d'art contemporain, a large national collection of contemporary artworks.
Since the late 1980s, in parallel to its contemporary collection, the museum has inaugurated and undertaken development of the Raoul Hausmann Archive, dedicated to this important founder of Berlin Dada, who pioneered new fields of perception and set out to remove barriers between art and life. His spirit and vision live on in much of the museum's contemporary collection.
Since the late 1980s, in parallel to its contemporary collection, the museum has inaugurated and undertaken development of the Raoul Hausmann Archive, dedicated to this important founder of Berlin Dada, who pioneered new fields of perception and set out to remove barriers between art and life. His spirit and vision live on in much of the museum's contemporary collection.