01.29.2025-09.14.2025
Vernissage le mardi 28 janvier
ÉCHOS
Jean-Baptiste Huynh
For its new exhibition, the Barbier-Mueller Museum invites photographer Jean-Baptiste Huynh (Châteauroux, 1966). The result is Échos, a singular exchange between the artist's aesthetic universe and works from the Barbier-Mueller collections.
Known for his pure portraits and nudes, the artist has traveled the globe to capture the beauties of the world. Immersed in the museum's reserves, he selected and photographed a series of works from the collections, which he unveils in dialogue with his own work. The photographs and the works, presented in the exhibition and associated catalog, intertwine to breathe a contemporary aura into the pieces of various periods from Africa, Oceania, Europe and Asia, while highlighting their forms and materials. The meeting of these two worlds reveals formal connivances and thematic similarities that transcend time and space. The face of a Suri child from the Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia, for example, dialogues with a Lukwakongo masquette from the Lega people in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
With Échos, Jean-Baptiste Huynh takes a fresh look at works from the Barbier-Mueller collections that resonate with his own photographic universe.
This conversation, alternately or simultaneously sensitive, intellectual and aesthetic, invites the viewer to reflect on universal themes - such as birth, life, old age and death.
Image
Jean-Baptiste Huynh, Kenya, Mains 8