Louvre Abu Dhabi’s upcoming exhibition explores journey of paper

Abu Dhabi, March 22 (BNA) The Louvre Abu Dhabi announced its latest international exhibition “Stories from Paper”, which is organized in partnership with the Louvre Museum and France Museums, in cooperation with 16 French and international institutions and private collections.

The exhibition, which runs from April 20 to July 24, explores the wide range of artistic expressions of paper, with the goal of developing visitors’ deeper knowledge of materials that are familiar, yet further away than ever before. The Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported that nearly 100 artistic and practical works, including books, manuscripts, drawings, a copy of a house, 13 contemporary artworks and paper installations, will be on display.

These collections come primarily from the collections of the Louvre, as well as 15 other leading cultural institutions and private collections including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the French National Library, Center Georges Pompidou, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Zayed National Museum.

Paper Stories is sponsored by the General Coordinator and Director of the Graphics and Publications Department Xavier Salmon and the Curator in the Graphics and Publications Department at the Louvre, Victor Hundsbechler, with the support of the Director of Scientific, Organizational and Collections Department at the Louvre Abu Dhabi Dr. Soraya Njeim.

Louvre Abu Dhabi Director Manuel Rabaté said: “It is entirely fitting that paper is the theme for the second Louvre Abu Dhabi exhibition 2022 – to explore a single medium and the specific technologies that comprise it. The history of paper, an invention that transcended geography in its journey from East to West while transforming cultures and societies in these process, examples of the stories of cultural interaction and intellectual exchange that the Museum is committed to examining.”

The history of the paper is spread in 12 sections, all highlighting key qualities and their varied use through the centuries with immersive scenography. The themed sections include plant origin, mediocre matter, color, movement, relationship to light, inauthentic matter, memory, fragility and resilience, space, group potential, means of artwork reproduction, and a malleable medium.

Highlights of the exhibition include a selection of artworks from the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection including Pablo Picasso’s Painting of a Woman, 1928, two Japanese prints by Katsushika Hokusai, and a 13th-century double page from De Materia Medica.

Highlights from international lenders include a jigsaw on seventeen portraits of Carmontelle’s Walking in a Parkland, c. 1795 (Musée du Louvre), a 19th-century screen-folded manuscript from Burma (Museum of Asian Arts Guimet) and Munāğāt Alī, the Qur’an is finger-written (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

MI