Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi) opened Louvre Abu Dhabi’s second international exhibition of the year, ”Stories of Paper”.
The exhibition will open to the public on April 20 and will run until July 24, 2022.
From the first century to the present and from ancient Asia to Europe and contemporary Arabia, Stories of Paper examines the rich artistic legacy of this fragile material that not only became indispensable for record keeping and trade but has proved essential to cultural interaction and intellectual exchange for two millennia.
Created in partnership with the Musée du Louvre and in collaboration with France-Muséums as well as several leading international institutions and private collections, Stories of Paper explores the special material’s qualities: uniquely suited to recording, remembering and re-production, paper manages to be simultaneously fragile and malleable, light-sensitive and resilient.
About 100 artworks and objects from 16 museums, cultural institutions and private collections will be on display. These include books, manuscripts, drawings, a reproduction of a house and 13 contemporary artworks and installations made of paper.
Stories of Paper includes Katsushika Hokusai’s renowned Kanagawa-oki Nami Ura (The Great Wave off Kanagawa), The Labyrinth, a colossal maze made from sinuous ribbons of corrugated cardboard by the Italian conceptual artist Michelan-gelo Pistoletto, traditional paper clothing and a reconstruction of a room from a Korean paper house, masterworks by Antonio Pisanello and Pablo Picasso, alongside paper-based artworks by Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi and Mohammed Kazem, pioneers of Emirati conceptual art.
The exhibition will take visitors on a journey through time to discover the various ways in which paper was utilised across cultures.
Visitors will also be able to enjoy a diverse public programme of wide-ranging cultural activities.
Manuel Rabaté, Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, said: “With the emergence of digital transformation and the dematerialisation of our haptic experiences, it makes sense for Louvre Abu Dhabi to celebrate paper as a common yet precious good. From books, manuscripts and drawings to contemporary art works or installations made of paper, Stories of Paper retraces a chronological history of this single universal medium, considering the usage and key characteristics of paper such as transparency and robustness to provide an original perspective on the use of paper throughout time and across the different regions.” “We are also very pleased to invite prominent Emirati artists to be part of this shared dialogue with works on display by Hassan Sharif, Abdullah Al Saadi and Mohammed Kazem, all of whom are considered pioneers of Emirati conceptual art.”
Laurence des Cars, Director of Musée du Louvre, said: “Stories of Paper fuses contemporary works from Arab and European art scenes, such as Labyrinth by the great Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto a piece which confirms paper’s perpetual importance to mankind.”
The exhibition is curated by the Musee du Louvre’s Xavier Salmon, general curator and director of the Department of Drawings and Prints, and Victor Hundsbuckler, curator at the Department of Drawings and Prints, with the support of Souraya Noujaim, director of Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management at Louvre Abu Dhabi.
