Exhibition admission ticket - Hyperréalisme. Ceci n’est pas un corps

After Bilbao, Canberra, Rotterdam, Liège, Lyon and Brussels, the "Hyperrealism: Ceci n’est pas un corps” travelling exhibition has settled in Paris, at the Musée Maillol, in an enhanced version, parts of which have never been seen before.

Originally designed in the United States in the 1960s as a reaction to the dominant aesthetic of abstract art, hyperrealism is an artistic movement that sought to imitate the shapes, contours and textures of the human body in order to create a perfect illusion. The tiniest details are faithfully reproduced, giving us the sense of being in the presence of an exact replica of reality. Hyperrealist artists turned their backs on abstraction and strived for a meticulous representation of nature to the point where viewers sometimes wonder if they are looking at a living body. Thus, the works generate a sensation of strangeness, but are always meaningful.

The exhibition run at the Musée Maillol from 8 September 2022 to 5 March 2023 presents a series of works that shake up our vision of art. Reality, art or copy? For the first time, the 40 or so sculptures gathered together offer a condensed overview of the hyperrealist movement and reveal the extent to which the representation of humans has always been changing. The varied origins of the artists presented (from the United States, Australia, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Great Britain) underline the international character of the movement, whose ramifications continue to be felt throughout the world to this day. Some of the artists exhibited, including George Segal, Ron Mueck, Maurizio Cattelan, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Duane Hanson, Carole A. Feuerman, and John DeAndrea strive to represent the human body as faithfully and vividly as possible, while others, on the contrary, question the notion of reality with new technologies, hijacked popular representations, deformations and more.

An unexpected and striking exhibition, somewhere between reality and imagination!