Narrative figuration. Another pop language

Born in Paris in the early 1960s, narrative figuration arose in response to the various abstract trends that dominated the artistic scene at the time. Nourished by the political, social, economic and cultural news, it shared close aesthetic links with Anglo-Saxon pop art, to which it is often associated to this day. The six thematic sections of the exhibition aim to show how the artists belonging to the movement used the images of mass culture to forge a pictorial language that was based on representing daily life and was fuelled by references to comics, photography, movies and advertising, lying at the heart of this new pop culture. 

The artists, mostly from France, Switzerland and the rest of Europe, offer a vision that is both critical and ironic of the two decades shaped by the tumults of the Cold War and the rise of the consumer society following the “Trente Glorieuses” - the "thirty glorious years" of reconstruction following the Second World War. Thanks to their insightful perspective on this often fantasised about period, they injected in their works an authentic reflection on the production and distribution of images in mass media, as well as their impact on contemporary society.