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Copyists - Exhibition

at 56 KM
Centre Pompidou-Metz
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In exceptional collaboration with the Louvre Museum.

In exceptional collaboration with the Louvre Museum, from June 14, 2025 to January 12, 2026, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is dedicating a unique exhibition of copyists' creations. Copying is at the heart of the classical tradition: copying from the masters, learning from them techniques, canons, stories, absorbing their expertise, is to make their mastery our own, it is a path to knowledge and creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary.

Several artists received an invitation from the two associate curators, which read: "Based on the work of your choice held in the collections of the Louvre Museum, imagine its copy."

In the form of a free tour, whose scenography reconnects with the forms of museum presentation, all eras are combined – from Antiquity to the 19th century – demonstrating the coexistence of all times at the Louvre.

Even though many masters, from Matisse to Picasso, have copied, modern art seems to have preferred an ethic where the model of copying is downgraded, replacing continuity with rupture, figuration with abstraction, painting and freehand sketching with the multiplication of possible forms.

Today, however, the question of copying seems to be able to be asked again. First of all, contemporary painting is returning to figuration and many painters, among the youngest, are taking up figures from old works to give them a new life. Then, the very question of copying is re-arranged by means of the digital world: the multiplication of images, their abstraction, their absence of support, their availability make them so many matrices for copying. Finally, the multiplication of available creation methods now seems to represent so many extensions of what copying can mean: from 3D scanning used in sculpture to make the most accurate copy, to video games, to the copy of existence in the digital world.

In this centuries-old history of copying, which is also a history of art in the modern period (from the 15th century), the Louvre Museum and its collections play an essential role. "Great book in which we learn to read", in the words of Paul Cézanne, but also the last museum to have a copyists' office, existing since the opening of the institution in 1793, it has been and remains at the heart of copying systems in France and the West. For its two hundredth anniversary, the museum organized a famous exhibition, entitled "Copier-Créer", which intended to highlight the role of copying at a time when it was ideologically called into question.

Copyists is born from a different era, and constitutes a completely different project: it is now about inviting several figures of creation to come and copy at the Louvre Museum, like so many of their famous and unknown predecessors. Among the invited painters and designers who accomplish this gesture of decoding, investigation and understanding, but also among the sculptors, videographers, designers and writers who lend themselves to the exercise through ancient and new forms, these are all ways of copying and thinking about copying, the status of the works that are exhibited, in a tension between original and duplication.

This exhibition therefore provides an unprecedented view of this state of creation and heritage that are now intertwined: the most recent creation does not necessarily seek to break with history but, quite the contrary, to draw from it, to draw on it, to understand and to understand itself. This project, both inscribed in the continuity of history – with the very form of the copy – and radically new – through the works conceived – is also a meditation on the current state of existence, at the same time as creation, in this “inseparate” world, where the power of works must debate with the power of images.

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