Created in 1985, the Musée départemental d'art contemporain is celebrating its twenty five years in 2011 with a series of hanging of the contemporary collection. This will practically be an exhaustive panorama of Rochechouart’s 270 works by 100 artists. Dating from the 1960s and today, the selection shown here particularly reveals the renewal of form, technique and materials in this period. The subjectivity of these choices has always been claimed by the different curators who have acquired work for the collection. But these choices came about in a context drawn out by the works themselves. The three founding collecting strands (landscape, imaginary, history) have remained the guiding themes in the constitution of artistic groupings (interrogating the status of painting, the sculpture revival, the rapport between art and culture, myth and narration, the moving image…). The establishment of the Hausmann Collection (over 700 artworks and the archives) has informed the entire Museum. The Dadaist was one of the main figures of the 20th century in his quest to surpass art and the links between art, personal subjectivities and collective consciousness, characteristics that run from Dada to the most contemporary work.
The first part of this survey is a display gathering all the works bought in 1985, the reinstallation of a work by James Turrell, new acquisitions and a presentation highlighting Raoul Hausman’s use of poetry and lettering.