February 9 - June 3, 2019
The Réattu Museum's mission is to preserve, study and share its collections. Supporting contemporary artistic practices, it’s also a place of creation in perpetual effervescence where many artists meet. Their works stop there for an exhibition, a temporary presentation, and it is their sometimes explosive meetings with the museum that have been born most recent acquisitions. Between 2009 and 2019, more than 1,000 works of all genres were included in the museum's inventories. Whether acquired by purchase, by donations, or in deposits, all these works have been the subject of a reflection on the interest they represent for the History of Art. They also have to interact with the historical collections and vibrate in tune with the "spirit of the place", a subtle blend of architecture, landscape and reinvented stories that is the singularity and poetry of the Réattu museum. The first part of the "10 years of acquisitions" exhibition, conceived in two stages, takes stock of a pivotal period in the history of the museum. It reveals the main lines that underlie his policy of photographic acquisitions - the visual approach to the image, the taste for experimentation, the themes of the body and the landscape - and draws the future contours of the collection. It also highlights the influence of two artists from Arles on the evolution of collections: Lucien Clergue, emblematic artist and visionary defender of the cause of photographers who has continued to enrich the museum of his works, and Christian Lacroix, a protean creator whose photographic culture has enabled the museum to make, since 2008, some of its most beautiful encounters - Nancy Wilson-Pajic, Véronique Ellena, Katerina Jebb ...
