Taking a hard turn from its traditional role as the custodian of mainly 19th-century French art, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is staging the first contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ is an exploration of depictions of masculinity by Elmgreen & Dragset that draws on the museum’s collection of figurative sculptures, reinterpreted in new work by the Berlin-based artists. As our newsstand cover suggests (and that’s a silicone model of a small boy, by the way), it’s an audacious and, at times, disorientating undertaking, one that profitably pits the present against the past – a process discernible in work created by other artists that feature in this month’s Art Issue.
Take Rachel Feinstein, for instance. For the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, capturing the wild extremes of her hometown involves creating vast panoramas that are rife with historical rococo and gothic influences. Or this month’s Dakar Biennale, where a new generation of designers in Africa and its diaspora are showing work that links old and new – like the Marrakech-based Younes Duret’s reinterpretation of a teapot that, he says, reflects a fusion between tradition and modernity.
