Misfits – Memoriam

mfc-michèle didier is pleased to present Misfits – Memoriam an exhibition dedicated to the artist Gustav Metzger, who died in 2017.

It is carried out in partnership with the Gustav Metzger Foundation and under the curatorial supervision of Guillaume Leingre. It will be devoted to two emblematic works, chosen at the beginning and at the end of the artist’s long career, in order to embrace a path too little known.

Gustav Metzger was the creator in the 1960s of a self-destructive art (Destruction in Art Symposium, 1966) but was also the bearer of an ecological thought testifying a global reflection in favor of ethics.
The first part of the exhibition, which will be presented in Paris, is entitled Misfits*. It is the unveiling of a work conceived by the artist but never achieved. Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou, organizers of The Festival of Misfits, rejected Metzger’s proposal, invited to participate in this exhibition, which took place at Gallery One in London from October 23 to November 8, 1962.

The second part of the exhibition presents a work from 2005: In Memoriam. While this installation directly refers to Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – a major figure in architectural deconstruction – built in Berlin, it functionally uses the principles of Machine Art, described by Metzger in 1962. But it also refers to an everyday object by its material: the box of cardboard handkerchiefs that will be duplicated in dozens of enlarged copies, as well as the cardboard of Cardboards, the artist’s first exhibition in 1959.

*Misfits will be published and produced by mfc-michèle didier.