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Le Méridien Nice | MAMAC

The artistic program of the museum finds its main structure in the relation between the New European Realism and the American Tendency towards the Art of Assembling and Pop Art.

This possibility to confront certifies the big historical complicity of the two artistic waves. The museum collections point out the work of New Realists, which are here justifying their existence from the Parisian manifest to the assessment exhibition in 1970 in Italy. The New York's pop artists are present with significant works.

The symbolic image of the museum about the very important period of the 60's is given by Yves Klein's galleries, which are proposing an exceptional collection of twenty important works of the artist, offered to be exposed on a long term by Rotraut Klein and Daniel Moquay. The defenders of the Painterly Abstraction represent American abstraction with Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, and also by Morris Louis and Frank Stella ; the Minimalism is here represented by Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra's works and the State's deposit of Ellsworth Kelly's paintings. All these collections express also the big development of the movements : Supports-Surfaces in France and more precisely in this area with Claude Viallat's proposal, Bernard Pagès', Nöel Dolla's, Louis Cane's and Vincent Bioulès' involvement. Daniel Dezeuze, Marc Devade are also present. The 70 group is continuing in a certain way the Support-Surfaces' descendants. Simon Hantaï, Olivier Mosset and Martin Barré represent a kind of french abstraction. Figuration is the main preoccupation of the artists in the 80's. As well as German fauvists and Italian avant-garde artists, the Free Figuration artists will try deliberately ironical and naïve themes, comics, graffiti and slogans.