Mitchell Anderson | Nouvelles Images | MAMCO Genève

Nouvelles Images

group show

February 28 - April 22, 2018

The reunion of works recently acquired by or donated to the MAMCO on an entire museum floor attests to the collection development policy initiated by the new management in 2016. Indeed, it is exhibitions that transform and enrich the collection, which is seen as the museum's alpha and omega, the real place for developing its projects and the desired horizon for them.
As the museum has no acquisition budget of its own, it is mainly donations, based on the generosity of artists and collectors - first and foremost members of the Museum Council - that enable the collections to grow. The annual contribution of the Association of Friends of MAMCO, notably through its Cercle, enables us to plan one major acquisition per year, and recurring partnerships, such as the one with the Coromandel Foundation or the artgenève project with Banque Mirabaud & Cie, have been set up to compensate for this lack of resources. Finally, in 2016 and 2017, the museum received two important bequests: the former Claudine and Sven Widgren collection and several important works from the Marika Malacorda estate. During this period, more than 500 pieces worth around CHF 5 million entered the MAMCO collections.

The group of minimal and conceptual works assembled by Ghislain Mollet-Viéville and presented in the Appartement, on the museum's third floor, does not form part of this calculation, as it is an acquisition made by the MAMCO Private Foundation.
The process leading to the acceptance of a donation is no different from that of an acquisition: it involves assessing the work's relevance to the collection, its development prospects and its potential for regular exhibition.
The presence of several works from the collections of the FMAC (Fonds municipal d'art contemporain) and the FCAC (Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain) also attests to a willingness to collaborate with other heritage structures dedicated to contemporary art in Geneva, which ultimately belong to the same public domain.
The exhibition was built around the principle of showing only the additions made in 2016 and 2017, and was structured around the different periods considered, in order to make it clear which decades the effort was focused on. This included additions to the historiography of the 1960s-1970s and 1980s, two nodal points in the museum's collection, as well as the desire to readjust the representation of the 1990s and 2000s within these collections. Finally, the last room brought together artists from the Swiss contemporary scene, to which MAMCO pays particular attention.

C’est un paradoxe du contemporain que d’être inévitablement le futur de l’histoire : ainsi, la collection du MAMCO, réunie uniquement grâce à des fonds privés mais inscrite, année après année, au patrimoine public, se révèle être le creuset des historiens de demain et la ressource de futures expositions dédiées à l’histoire récente de l’art.

Artists