Infini

Through some sixty works from the Pinault Collection, the exhibition "Infini" explores this elusive concept, bringing together two generations of artists who question the limits of art and perception.

Drawing on some sixty works from the Pinault Collection, the exhibition "Infini" sets out to probe this universal quest by exploring the elusive concept of infinity. It brings together two generations of artists: the protagonists of the great post-war European and American movements — ZERO, Spatialism, Light and Space… — in dialogue with contemporary artists who extend, shift or reinvent, through installations and environments, this going beyond the limits of art and perception. The exhibition thus highlights the persistence of a single aspiration: to move beyond the boundaries inherited from representation, opening the work to new experiential dimensions, real or imagined.

The theme of infinity runs through the whole history of art, as it does through religion, mathematics, physics and philosophy. From the earliest civilisations to contemporary practices, artists have sought to give form to what exceeds human experience: the immensity of the cosmos, the depth of time, the mystery of the sacred, the invisible or the unknown. At once concept, vertigo and promise, infinity acts as a mirror to the societies that summon it, revealing their aspirations, discoveries and utopias as well as their anxieties. Century after century, it questions the place of the human being in a universe whose limits always seem to slip away.

In the post-war context, marked both by the trauma of nuclear destruction and by the enthusiasm sparked by scientific and technological advances, artists such as Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, Fabio Mauri, Piero Manzoni and Günther Uecker undertook a radical rethinking of the artistic language. Their research explored unprecedented scales, from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the most elementary materiality to the immateriality of light and space.