An exhibition-event for the 30th anniversary of MAMAC.
From 03 October 2020 to 28 March 2021.
In France, the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC) of the City of Nice is offering an exhibition-event for its 30th anniversary. “She-Bam Pow POP Wizz! Les Amazones du POP”, retraces, for the first time on this scale, the open history of a generation of European and North American women who have boldly and flamboyantly contributed to another, more little-known facet of international Pop.
These Amazons participated in the invention of a new artistic language – undoubtedly the most popular of the second half of the 20th century: POP. Their works, like comic strips, are full of rainbow colours and vibrant. Through a variety of ways, they envisage a different world, with dreamy forms, and bet on building a better world rather than on an artificial amnesia of the dark hours of the past. Until 1973, the progressive future seemed achievable (sexual emancipation, social rights, pacifism, extraterrestrial imaginings, etc.), and their works proclaim this: Love is all we need! However, the artists are lucid about the obstacles that littered this temporal bubble from 1961 to 1973, notably with the imperialist wars, geopolitical polarities, the unbridled race to consumerism, etc. In this sense, the Pop of the Amazons becomes complex, squeaky…and tinged with raging humour.
For this event the curators of the exhibition Hélène Guenin, Director at MAMAC and Géraldine Gourbe, Art Historian, have chosen a dozen of Evelyne Axell’s most emblematic works such as “Ice Cream 1” (1964) or “Axell-ération” (1965), but also from the collections of major museums such as “Le retour de Tarzan” (1972), Centre Pompidou, Paris , “Le joli mois de mai” (1970), MuZEE, Ostend, and “Erotomobile” (1966), Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels.
MAMAC
Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain
Place Yves Klein
F-06364 Nice cedex 4
Telephone : +33 (0)4 97 13 42 01
E-mail : mamac@ville-nice.fr
Web : https://www.mamac-nice.org
