Paint like I move

This exhibition brings together historical works from the collection, recent acquisitions, and the response of artists invited to question the gesture in art today: paint like I move? Like I dance? Like I bleed? Like I live?

"I’m a painter, I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas" explained Carolee Schneemann in 1993 when she talked about experimenting performance art in the 1960s, a kind of art for which she is known as a pioneer. The exhibition “Paint like I move” (“Peindre comme je bouge”) marks the occasion of the recent acquisition of Precarious, an installation by Schneemann, who just won Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement.

he exhibition also shows for the first time in Toulouse a group of Judit Reigl’s paintings which are now on permanent loan at the museum thanks to the generosity of the artist.

This exhibition brings together historical works from the collection, recent acquisitions, and the response of artists invited to question the gesture in art today.

In the wake of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, many American, European, and Japanese artists decided in the 1950s that painting was above all else a physical act – an existential adventure through which the body of the painter is extended into space. The exhibition continues to question the body with works from the gestural hands (and feet...) of artists such as Lee Krasner, Judit Reigl, and Kazuo Shiraga. Contemporary artworks, as Guillaume Bresson’s hyperrealistic painting, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s videos, Làzaro Saavedra’s installation, or even painted vinyls by Corentin Canesson, try to give a contemporary answer to the gesture in art today: paint like I move? Like I dance? Like I bleed? Like I live?