Plunging into a bath of polystyrene beads, balloons or feathers, getting lost in a maze of mirrors (by Christian Megert) or wandering in an elastic space (designed by Gianni Colombo): this is what the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne offers us, the first to trace the emergence of immersive art between 1949 and 1969, before it became, from the 1990s onwards, one of the main forms of expression in the artistic field.

From Lucio Fontana's Space Environment with black light, inaugurated in 1949, to James Turrell's immaterial spaces (Shallow Space Constructions, 1968-1969), via Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio's Cave of Antimatter (1958-59) or Judy Chicago's Feather Room – a luminous space filled with feathers, created in 1966 to the delight of visitors – these 14 environments allow us to return to the origins of this art form which aims to transcend the materiality of the work.

Transcending genres and related movements (from performance to happening, from Italian spatialism to the American Light and Space movement, via kinetic art or the Zero group), the exhibition allows us to relive the "totalizing experiences" of what Fontana called "spatial art".

With USCO (acronym for Company of Us) and their psychedelic 1968 film Fanflashtic, which blends lights, images and sounds, one can achieve "total sensory stimulation" or, with Bruce Nauman and his 1969 film Sound Breaking Wall, succumb to anguish upon hearing a wall exhale while laughter and the sounds of beating pass through the other walls of an improbable space…

“IMMERSION. THE ORIGINS: 1949-1969”
Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts of Lausanne – Platform 10
16, PLACE DE LA GARE, LAUSANNE (SWITZERLAND)
UNTIL MARCH 3, 2024
MCBA.CH