Les Apprentis Collectionneurs 2019

© NMNM

Launched in 2017, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco’s “Les Apprentis Collectionneurs” (“Apprentice Collectors”) educational programme, which enjoys support from SOGEDA, aims to familiarise teenagers with contemporary art and the varied role of an art museum. 

Now in its third year, in 2019 the programme brought together final-year pupils taking art at both Lycée François d’Assise-Nicolas Barré and Lycée Albert I for the first time. Throughout the year, the pupils engaged in a series of meetings, visits, workshops and discussions with professionals in the field of contemporary art. 

The 4^th artmonte-carlo exhibition of contemporary art, offering the students access to an international creative and art market panel, provided an opportunity for them to select relevant works in the context of the Museum’s collections. 

At Villa Sauber on 16 May, “Les Apprentis Collectionneurs” exhibited works by several artists to a special acquisitions committee made up of Marie-Claude Beaud, the Director of the NMNM, Cécile Mouly, Extracurricular Activities Manager (representing Isabelle Bonnal, Director of Education, Youth and Sport), Françoise Gamerdinger, Deputy Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Secretary-General of SOGEDA, Daniel Soutif, art critic, and Oriol Villanova, artist in residence at the NMNM.

 This year, the jury selected three drawings by Mika Rottenberg, which will be added to the NMNM’s collections:

© - DR

© - DR

© - DR

For Mika Rottenberg (Buenos Aires, 1976; lives and works in New York, USA), the entire body serves as a drawing implement, creating expressive graphical elements and material effects which both record and play with the microcosmic scenes. The drawings, expressive yet methodical, start out from a vocabulary of pictorial signs that the artist is continually reworking. These vibrant symbols make light of the concept of clarity and, like worker bees, organise themselves into structures that are reminiscent of factories or the infernal machines of Rube Goldberg. Through a quasi-biological phenomenon, the drawing becomes thicker to the point of fullness, as if it were devouring and regurgitating itself in each variation. The squirts of acidic colour and dense motifs are counterbalanced by vast areas of white and opaque zones which resemble puddles or holes. The rough handling of the pencil, paper and paint reunites the body of the artist and the act of drawing in a dynamic that is at once aesthetic and personal. 

Mika Rottenberg indirectly explores the themes of the body, work and production systems in works which echo the primitive and yet fabulous staging of the videos which brought her fame, while remaining precisely rooted in the art of drawing and the possibilities it offers.