Correspondences Musée d'Orsay / Contemporary Art

The concept is simple: a contemporary artist is invited to present one of their pieces alongside a work which they have selected from the Museum collections.
The resulting dialogue enables the collections to be perceived in a new light and lends a fresh resonance to their lasting modernity.
Gustave Courbet, The Trout
Brice Marden, Extremes
The American artist Brice Marden has chosen The Trout by Gustave Courbet (1873), a painting which evokes the artist's imprisonment following his involvement in the Paris Commune. With its palpable sense of anguish, Courbet's painting far transcends the traditional role of the still-life. Marden, an outstanding figure of minimalist abstraction, is exhibiting his Extremes for the first time, a diptych in which space vibrates with layers of matter in a complex play of linear colour.
Edward Steichen, Balzac
Alain Kirili, One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Sculpture
Fascinated by Rodin's energy; his dazzling sensual vigour and revelation of human passions, Alain Kirili has chosen a series of photographs of Balzac shot in Meudon by that champion of Pictorialism, Edward Steichen, and published in Camera Work in 1911. Finding in them a clear parallel with Rodin's masterpiece, Kirili is exibiting a group of six sculptures from his series Segou and Totems.