Louvre Abu Dhabi has announced its latest international exhibition, “Stories of Paper”, organised in partnership with Musée du Louvre and France Muséums, in collaboration with 16 French and international institutions and private collections.
To run from April 20 to July 24 the exhibition explores the vast range of artistic expressions of paper, with the aim of cultivating the visitors’ deeper knowledge of a familiar, yet ever more distant material. Approximately 100 artworks and objects, including books, manuscripts, drawings, a reproduction of a house and 13 contemporary artworks and installations made of paper, will be on display, Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported.
These come mainly from the collections of Musée du Louvre, as well as 15 other leading cultural institutions and private collections including Louvre Abu Dhabi, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sharjah Art Foundation and Zayed National Museum.
“Stories of Paper” is curated by General Curator and Director of the Department of Drawings and Prints Xavier Salmon and Curator at the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Musée du Louvre Victor Hundsbuckler with the support of Director of Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management at Louvre Abu Dhabi Dr. Souraya Noujaim.
Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi Manuel Rabaté said, “It is entirely appropriate that paper should be the subject of Louvre Abu Dhabi’s second exhibition of 2022 – exploring a single medium and the specific techniques that encompass it. The history of paper, an invention that transcended geography in its journey from East to West while transforming cultures and societies in the process, exemplifies the stories of cultural interaction and intellectual exchange that the museum is committed to examining.”
The history of paper is spread across 12 sections, all of which highlight the key qualities and its varied use across centuries with immersive scenography. The themed sections include Plant-based origin, A Humble Material, Colour, Movement, Relationship with Light, An Untruthful Material, Memory, Fragility and Resilience, Space, Possibility of a Collection, A Medium for Reproducing Artworks, and A Malleable Medium.
Highlights of the exhibition include a selection of artworks from Louvre Abu Dhabi’s collection including Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of a Woman, 1928, two Japanese prints by artist Katsushika Hokusai, and a 13th-century Double page from De Materia Medica.
Highlights from international lenders include a panorama on seventeen panels of Carmontelle’s Figures Walking in a Parkland, c. 1795 (Musée du Louvre), a 19th-century manuscript folded in the manner of a screen from Burma (Musée des arts asiatiques Guimet) and Munāğāt ʿAlī, a Quran written in fingernail calligraphy (Bibliothèque nationale de France).
