Curated by Julie Jones, Chloé Goualc’h, Stéphanie Rivoire

Conceived and realised by Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana


The recently renovated spaces of Palazzo Reali are the setting for the retrospective of photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender, who created an invaluable record of the avant-garde art world and its most famous figures – Andy Warhol, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely – in Paris and New York. The exhibition features 450 original photographs and documents selected from among 10,000 donated by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in 2014, now held in the Bibliotèque Kandinsky in Paris. The photographs, grouped into sections entitled Intimities, The Body in Action and New Spaces, plunge viewers into the art scene of the late 1950s to the early 1970s, a period in which artists were particularly interested in experimentalism and sexual and artistic freedom, while also on the constant look-out for alternative spaces in which to create and show their work. Shunk and Kender were observers but also artists and authors of their time. Their images have a dual nature in that they provide an important documentation while being photographic artworks in themselves.