The MuMa’s 2023-2024 winter season will explore its 20th-century collections, focusing on one of the key themes of this fertile century: abstraction.  

The museum is offering a new and original itinerary : “Abstract Itineraries” through its collections. Unprecedented because most of the works on display have rarely been shown before. And because the group of works on display here has never been offered in such a way before.

In dialogue with the avant-garde artistic currents of the late 19th century that form the core of its permanent exhibition, some 80 rarely shown works retrace a subjective, multi-voiced history of non-figuration. 

Since the disappearance of the subject, this exploration invites us to question some of the forms that abstraction may have taken – the dilution of still life forms (André Masson, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes), the erasure of landscape (Nicolas de Staël, Olivier Debré, Geneviève Asse), pure plastic and/or geometric language (Jean Hélion, Maurice Estève, Léon Gischia), the importance of gesture and a sense of informality (CHU Teh-Chun, ZaoWou-ki, Camille Bryen, Albert Féraud, Julius Baltazar), the importance given to materials (Ladislas Kijno, Théo Kerg, Marc Devade)… It’s a sensitive journey that the MuMa is embarking on, an itinerary through universes, sensations and colours that offer themselves to our gaze as another explanation of the world, an opening to perceive it differently.

Image 1 : Lumière – huile sur toile – 162×127 cm – 1975 © ADAGP, Paris, 2023

Image 2 : L’odeur du ciel – huile sur toile – 195×130 cm – 1982  © ADAGP, Paris, 2023

Image 3 : Sans titre – gouache sur papier – 65×50 cm – 1981 © ADAGP, Paris, 2023