Art today can only take into account sport, the true wallpaper of our contemporary societies. At the initiative of the Frac Sud - Cité de l'art contemporain and at the invitation of its director Muriel Enjalran, the curator and art critic Jean-Marc Huitorel designed an exhibition in three flagship cultural institutions in the South Region and the City of Marseille. Exploits, masterpieces aims to question the relationship between art and sport through more than 200 works by nearly 100 French and foreign artists, where fascination, criticism and humor coexist.

There are a thousand ways of approaching the subject of the relationship between art and sport, it being understood that, although both are capable of producing beauty, sport is not art and art is not sport. For Exploits, Masterpieces , the generic title of the project, three entries are proposed as flexible and porous as possible, which correspond to the three exhibition locations.

General Commissioner Jean-Marc Huitorel, Associate General Commissioner Muriel Enjalran.

Frac Sud - City of contemporary art

Under the title The Hour of Glory , in a nod to Warhol's quarter of an hour of fame as well as to the too-ignored heroism of the artists, a space with a variegated atmosphere will be discovered within which will collide cult of performance and art of losing, improbable objects, demands of those who fight to obtain place and justice, all bathed in the spells of literature, laughter and tears, formal rigor and the fantasies of its protest. Throughout this journey, as invigorating as it is iconoclastic, we find monumental sculptures (Jacques Julien, Taro Izumi, Louka Anargyros...), installations (Johanna Cartier, Lieven De Boek, Thomas Wattebled... ), photographs (Camille Hotz, Estelle Hanania, Elina Brotherus...), films (Camille Llobet, Sarah Trouche, Julia Borderie...). Many of these pieces are presented for the first time in France. On the occasion of the exhibition Des exploits, des masterpieces , the Frac Sud invites through a new carte blanche dedicated to young creation, the students from the Aix-en-Provence art school to take over the experimentation platform and present their creations around the theme of sport, accompanied by the curator of the exhibition Jean-Marc Huitorel.

Curator of the exhibition Jean-Marc Huitorel and Muriel Enjalran.
https://fracsud.org/exposition-des-exploits-des-chefs-d-oeuvre

Mucem - Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations

With Trophies and Relics , we will see that sport, like art, is part of a certain number of beliefs, most of them very ancient, where learned and vernacular forms (learned in their time) coexist and that their experience is inseparable of a set of artifacts whose effectiveness rests largely on the faith placed in them. Art then finds itself at the crossroads of the adoration of relics and the fetishism attached to contemporary objects, whether they belong to stars or to obscurities that we want to distinguish in this way. Both art and sport here produce mythology. Thus the works of Thomas Tudoux will interact with cuts from the Mucem collections, the work of Fatima Mazmouz with the gloves of Marcel Cerdan loaned by the National Sports Museum, the skates of Gérard Deschamps, Bruno Peinado with those of Mucem. Likewise, artist balloons (Laurent Perbos or Fabrice Hyber among others) mix with ordinary balloons but also with legendary balloons like the one from the semi-final of the 98 World Cup.

Curator of the exhibition Jean-Marc Huitorel and Jean-Fabien Philippy.
https://www.mucem.org/

[mac], Museum of Contemporary Art of Marseille

To use the title of a composition by Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition , will bring together a set of works such as fine arts museums offer them, paintings certainly, but drawings as well, photographs just as much. Under the appearance of wise arrangements, a panel of objects most often undermined, intended not, we insist, to illustrate some circumstantial theme, but rather, through sport, to question certain regimes of representation, to identify this even as sport can be said to be art. Welcomed outside by the imposing sculptures of Stefan Rinck then, inside by the monumental bronze by Barry Flanagan from the collection of the British Council, partner of the project, the visitor is thus invited to immerse himself in a contemplative mode in a history of modernity (postmodernity) in painting through the prism of sport. The course offers small artist monographs devoted to masters of the genre from Guillaume Bresson to Jean Bedez via Mariam Abouzid-Souali, Adam Adach, Raoul De Keyser or even Guillaume Pinard or Christian Babou.

Curator of the exhibition Jean-Marc Huitorel and Stéphanie Airaud.
https://musees.marseille.fr/musee-dart-contemporain-mac