Jean-Michel Alberola

A major figure on the French art scene since the 1980s, Jean-Michel Alberola works across painting, sculpture, drawing and the moving image. His work explores the relationship between text and image, drawing on mythology, literature, cinema, history and popular culture.   

How does China inhabit the European imagination of the twentieth century? To explore this question, Alberola delved into the collections of the Imec (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) which collects, preserves and showcases the archives of many of the leading French writers, thinkers and publishers of this period. The exhibition brings Alberola’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures into dialogue with a selection of manuscripts, printed works, illustrations and other materials he uncovered at the Imec that reveal China’s presence in twentieth-century French thought and literature. Alberola brings these archival materials together like stars in a constellation through which the past is revealed in flashes and fragments, and remains active in the present.   

This exhibition continues the long-standing collaboration between the Fondation Cartier and the Power Station of Art, opening up a new space for dialogue between European and Chinese cultures through Jean-Michel Alberola’s singular vision.