close
close

10 highlights of the Fondation Louis Vuitton Collection

Fondation Louis Vuitton is a private cultural institution that opened its doors to the public in 2014. It houses large collections of modern and contemporary art, which belong to the luxurious goods conglomerate LVMH and his founder Bernard Arnault. The Fondation Louis Vuitton Collection contains works of the most important names in the history of modern and contemporary art and is often updated. Read on to learn more about Fondation Louis Vuitton and ten outstanding works from his collection.

1. Fondation Louis Vuitton Highlight: The building of Frank Gehry

Gehry Fondation Louis Vuitton Building
Fondation Louis Vuitton Building, designed by Frank Gehry. Source: Archdaily

The first and most obvious highlight of the Fondation Louis Vuitton collection is the building in which it houses it. The famous architect Frank Gehry designed the building in relation to the Grand Palais, the glass exhibition pavilion built in Central -Paris in 1900. Nevertheless, the building had to represent the era that belonged to, so Gehry used modern forms. The building is compiled from twelve glass gates that resemble yacht gel. These “sails” create experience for visitors both within and outside of the structure. During the design of the shape, Gehry folded and crumpled paper leaves as its models.

2. “Ant-104” by Yves Klein

Fondation Louis Vuitton Klein Ants painting
Ant-104, by Yves Klein, 1960. Source: My Virtual Museum

Yves Klein was a famous French artist who was known as the leader of the new realism movement. In 1960 Klein patented a blue color entitled IKB or International Klein Blue. Klein believed that the color blue was the abstract of all, since it was more of association with the vastness of the sky and the sea than with certain objects. Klein monochrome works created with this color.

Another of his innovations used Live brush Or naked models that are covered with blue color that rolled over the extended canvases or were pulled over them. Klein himself stood next to the canvas with a white suit and white gloves and commanded the process, never touching the color with his hands. Some critics saw this technique as the remains of patriarchal modernism, with the female body being used as a silent and engraving artistic instrument.

3. “Zinathi I” by Zanele Muholi

Muholi Zinathi Photo
Zinathi I, Johannesburg, by Zanele Muholi, 2015. Source: Mutual art

Zanele Muholi is a South African contemporary artist who focused on the nature of the black queer identities. You often work with self -portraits, as in the case of the Zinathi Series. There Muholi creates Alter Egos and dresses them in costumes that are inspired by the traditional South African culture. Muholi deliberately emphasizes the darkness of her skin and manipulates stereotypes of the black body and beauty.

In addition to the creation of art, Zanele Muholi also works with activist projects in relation to queer women and non-binary people in South Africa. In 2012, her apartment was robbed with an obvious political undertone of the crime. The main goal of the perpetrators was Muholi's evidence archive for South African lesbians who were murdered in Hass crimes.

V.

Abramovic Balance installation
Rejuvenator the astral compensation by Marina Abramovic, 2000. Source: LV Foundation, Paris

Marina Abramovic is perhaps the most famous performance artist in the world, who defines the framework of the entire discipline. She started her work in the 1970s and manipulated her body as the main instrument. Many of her work included elements of ritual action that often involve the audience. Villey of the astral beam is an interactive installation that invites the viewers to interact with the sound and movement of metronome. According to the Abramovic idea, the spectators should sit next to one of the metronomists in a chair, close their eyes and concentrate on the sound for 45 minutes. Such meditation is intended to compensate for and revive your cosmic energies.

5. “The ballad of Trotsky” by Maurizio Cattelan

Cattelan Trotsky installation
The ballad of Trotsky, Maurizio Cattelan, 1996. Source: Artnet

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian conceptual artist who is known for his provocative and sometimes questionable works. He often works with taxididmia, which inflamed debates about the ethical limits of contemporary art. In the 1990s and 2000s, Cattelan was particularly obsessed with dead horses, and he created installations with animals with their heads in walls or simply on blankets.

Such an installation was The Ballad of TrotskyNamed after Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary and the famous opponent by Joseph Stalin, who was killed in Mexico in 1940. In this context, the horse is the tragic failure of the Russian revolution in the middle of the air, which undertook a leap of faith but was never actually landed everywhere. The picture is confusing, tragic, absurd and slightly annoying and expresses the complex feelings of the first decades of the past century.

6. “Mrs. Venice III” by Alberto Giacometti

Giacometti Venice Sculpture
Mrs. von Venice III, by Alberto Giacometti, 1958. Source: Christie's

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor who was famous for his extended characters who reflected the fear and horror of his time. He worked with the personal and interdisciplinary trauma caused by the two world wars. Giacometti started as a surrealist, but later he distanced himself from the movement. Woman of Venice III. is part of a series of naked female figures that Giacometti created in the 1950s. It formed all fifteen figures from a single piece of sound and the same anchor base. After Giacometti had shaped one and made it, she smashed the tap base to transform her into the next figure. All of these numbers were similar, but had characteristic physical differences. Nevertheless, there was no number of more sophisticated or more expression than others.

7. “Animitas” by Christian Boltanski

Boltanski Animitas Photo
Animitas, by Christian Boltanski, 2014. Source: Sedition Art

Christian Boltanski was a famous French conceptual artist who was born to a Jewish family just a few days after the liberation of Paris. The memory and trauma of his family of the Holocaust defined his artistic oeuvre. The most important artistic interests of Boltanski were memories, their transformation and construction. He was also interested in the concept of a monument.

His famous work Animitas, This is an unusual form of commemoration structure in the Fondation Louis Vuitton collection. Boltanski traveled to the Atacama desert in Chile, where the local provisional monuments had left for those who were killed during Augusto Pinochet's regime. There Boltanski installed 800 Japanese bells on metal poles. Shaked by the wind and fill the wide space of the desert with its music as a form of memory. Boltanski placed the bells to imitate the position of stars on the day of his birth. He then continuously filmed the installation for 24 hours and created a meditative work, grief, memory and the continuous presence of that died.

8. “Bouquet” by Isa Genzken

Genzken Bouquet Fondation Louis Vuitton Installation
Bouquet, by Isa Genzken, 2004. Source: Albert Ploeger Art Meditacy

Isa Genzken is a German concept artist who mainly works with sculptures, reinvented it and experimented with formats and materials. In addition to conventional metal and concrete structures, it uses plastic, glass, mirrors and found objects. The sculptures of Genzken are deliberately not monumental and question our relationship with art objects.

bouquet is one of her most famous works, compiled made of plastic flowers, cheap toys and decorative materials that are wrapped around a concrete sculpture. The sculpture has several layers of meaning. On the one hand, it is a monument to mass consumption and the overwhelming variety of cheaper but tempting objects that are outstanding through consumers. Another dimension of work, a darker and tragic, in relation to the tragedy of September 11, refers to the shape of a concrete tower. As an artist, which was not born in Germany for as long after the end of the Second World War, Genzken with the destruction of cities and the way in which ruins become part of their landscapes is both physically and metaphorically familiar.

9. “The honeymoon” by Annette Messager & Christian Boltanski

Messager honeymoon installation
The honeymoon of Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski, 1975. Source: La Biennale de Lyon

Annette Messager is a conceptual artist and Christian Boltanski's widow. Messager undermines the stereotypes of traditional femininity and cultural norms. Like Boltanski, she also examined the concept of memory and its production. The couple went to Venice for their honeymoon trip and later transformed this event into a collaborative work. The autobiographical installation The honeymoonConsisting of 86 photographs and 21 drawings, presenting a curated and somewhat idealized retelling of this trip. The postcard-like pictures of the city and tourist photos became a fairly significant event in a cheesy romantic cliché of both artists without having personal experiences. The audience of the installation did not even have to examine it in its entirety, since it had already seen most of the pictures (with the exception of several small, intimate photographs) as a stereotypical representations of the city.

10. “Napoleonic stereotype” by Jean-Michel Basquiat in Fondation Louis Vuitton's collection

Basquiat Napoleonic paintings
Napoleonic stereotype circa '44, by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983. Source: The Art Districts

The works of Jean-Michel Basquiat are important highlights of the Louis Vuitton collection. Such a painting with the title ” Napoleonic stereotype about '44 is a complex and detailed work that focuses on the career of Joe Lewis, an African -American boxer and one of Basquiat's heroes. Lewis was not just a professional athlete, but an important personality in the era of racial regulation. In 1936 Lewis fought Max Schmeling, a white boxer who represented Nazi Germany. Lewis lost the fight and gave the German press obvious evidence of this superiority of white Germans. Two years later, the boxers agreed to a rematch, in which Lewis finally won. This victory became a symbol of American stand against fascism. Even more important for Basquiat was the first case of a wider mass of white Americans, who cheered openly for a black athlete who fought against a white opponent.

Leave a Comment