Vidya Gastaldon, Healing painting (motifs & fleurs), 2019. Huile sur peinture trouvé / Oil on vintage paint. 50 × 60 cm (19 ⅝ × 23 ⅝ inches). Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Collection Frac Normandie. Photo Fabrice Gousset.
FRAC (Regional Contemporary Art Fund) Normandy is an institution dedicated to supporting and promoting contemporary art. It has two exhibition venues: one in Caen and one in Sotteville-lès-Rouen, just opposite the Jardin des Plantes. As part of its policy to promote its collection, the Frac organizes numerous exhibitions in various locations throughout the region.
As it does every year at this time, the Jardin des Plantes is hosting an exhibition by the Regional Contemporary Art Fund in its 17th-century pavilion.
Faithful to its programming of major thematic and group exhibitions that promote all art forms, the FHEL invites its audiences to an incredible investigation through more than 150 works from the most prestigious collections.
The “Animal” exhibition, conceived by curator Christian Alandete, takes a cross-disciplinary, transhistorical approach to the place of the animal in artistic representations. Probably one of the earliest subjects in the history of art, the animal appears as early as cave art, and continues to play an equally important role down the centuries. The study of animality over the centuries has contributed to hierarchizing, cataloguing and distinguishing humans from animals, and among humans, the less human, by attributing animal characteristics to them. From physiognomy and its racist by-products, to mimicry and anthropomorphism, artists have contributed through their works to showing the other side of the human from a different angle, and to pointing beyond differences to what brings us together.
