Engravings

Since 1989, the Musée du Louvre and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux have entrusted contemporary artists with the task of producing engraved plates for the Chalcographie, which is responsible for the exclusive printing of the plates, with no limit on the number of prints.

Very different trends in contemporary art are represented. Geneviève Asse rubs shoulders with Georg Baselitz, Pierre Courtin, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Pat Steir, Jean-Michel Alberola, Robert Morris, Louise Bourgeois, Markus Raetz, Pierre Alechinsky or Agathe May.

Jenny Holzer, influenced by minimal and conceptual art, builds her work on writing, sculpture and architecture. She disseminates her own texts in public places, using LEDs in particular. Her media are as diverse as electronic banners, posters, T-shirts, cars and monuments the world over. For her, art must be in the street and accessible: "I use language because I want to offer content that people - and not necessarily people from the art world - can understand". Adopting the form and language of marketing, her texts in the strongest sense push the overly passive public to adopt a critical attitude. Invited to the Automne Festival in Paris in 2001, she created a series of projections on various monuments, including the Louvre. The heliogravure print produced for the occasion bears witness to this, but is above all a work in itself: the artist has retouched the support, notably by adding the moon.