In a travelling exhibition previously shown at the contemporary art museum LAAC Dunkerque and the Saint Roch Museum in Issoudun, the Abbaye Sainte Croix in Sables-d’Olonne presents art historian and curator Daniel Abadie’s selection of 150 rarely or never seen works, including pieces from the institutions’ permanent collections, providing fresh insight into and between modern artistic movements.

This group exhibition, Un Autre Oeil: d’Apollinaire à aujourd’hui, begins post-World War II by evoking artistic questions from the early part of the century. The exhibition highlights how successive artistic approaches formed, beyond their initial apparent contradictions, unexpected links between questions and responses, thus offering a new perspective on the recently closed 20^th century. It shows to what extent, between incertitude, debates and contradictions, each generation reacts to, echoes, resists or chooses to pursue the artistic research of those who came before.

The exhibition, organized around five themes (Art Abstrait/Art Concret, Se Figurer une Autre Réalité, Le Poids du Monde, Support et Surfaces, and Minuscule/Majuscule), presents works from nearly 50 artists, including Jean Dubuffet, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Alberto Magnelli, Gaston Chaissac, Pierre Alechinsky, François Morellet, Germaine Richier, Pierre Soulages and Zao Wou-Ki.