An exhibition being held at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris is exploring love in all its complexities.
Artists have been exploring love for decades. The De L’amour exhibition represents the line where art meets science through two different galleries. The first gallery, named the Gallery of Attachments, is dedicated to love in the cultural sense, and how it is seen through the eyes of artists. In other words, the ‘romantic’ version of love that we see in films and hear in songs.
The second gallery, the Gallery of Science, is dedicated to love seen through the eyes of scientists and psychoanalysts, building off what we see in the Gallery of Attachments, yet with a scientific definition and explanation.
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The exhibition starts by stating: “Love is a thing that affects us all but seems intangible. In turn fragile, passionate, alarming or an all-powerful driving force behind many affairs, it is actually difficult to define.” The exhibition then goes on to fight against this statement by representing love in a tangible way, and presenting it through different mediums that make it feel accessible and understandable to visitors.
Curator Astrid Aron said: “We aimed to represent love in a tangible way that would present a situation where the artist presented the viewer with things that are very tangible, when trying to define love.”
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A broken plate represents the imperfections of everyday romantic love.
The exhibition uses the four different words for love in the Greek language as a prism for each piece of art.
The words are éros, storgê, agape and philia, meaning love of desire, physical passion, family and friendship.
The exhibition uniquely presents a lot of its art in the form of video or audio. Aron said: “Cinema is such a big ambassador for love, which is why we wanted to use animated decor. Video is a very good medium to actually tell these stories, as well as representing the complexity of the topic. It was a good medium to represent all areas of love.”
The De L’amour exhibition is running at the Palais de la découvert until the 30th August 2020.
A full feature of the exhibition will be appear in the upcoming print magazine of Arts & Collections
