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The exhibition
Children of war and true travelers, sculptors, architects and archaeologists, Anne and Patrick Poirier explore the world through sites and vestiges. Their work, nourished by architecture, archaeology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, and continually permeated by great myths, utopias and the fragility of civilizations and nature, gives shape to metaphors of time and memory. Imbued with poetry and humanity, they take the form of monumental installations, spectacular models, drawings and paintings. Their aesthetic of fragment, ruin and catastrophe evokes a history that is both intimate and collective, dreamlike yet very real.
Anne et Patrick Poirier, La Cité des Ombres, 2022, © Anne et Patrick Poirier. Courtesy of Galerie Mitterrand, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole © ADAGP, Paris 2025
The museum's exhibition, with its two contrasting atmospheres of light and shadow, resonates with the upheavals of the contemporary world. On one side, the suspended calm of a labyrinthine, phantasmagorical white city in the Patio, where a violin resonates. On the other, the dramatic tension between the destruction and preservation of knowledge in the Chapel, marked by the vibrations of an electric guitar.
An immersion in the dense, visionary work of Anne and Patrick Poirier, profoundly contemporary and forward-looking, like a new mythology of a world between the real and the imaginary.
Curated by
Marie Dupas, head of contemporary art at the Musée d'arts de Nantes.
Captions and credits
Anne et Patrick Poirier, La Cité des Ombres, 2022, © Anne et Patrick Poirier. Courtesy of Galerie Mitterrand, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole © ADAGP, Paris 2025