On 18 and 19 June, inside a renovated 250m2 studio on 19 Côté Cour in the 18th arrondissement, artist-theoretician and expert commissioner Franck Ancel will showcase an array of digital artworks that extends through 6 decades. In fact, MAT #1 does not have the bragging rights to be the first auction on digital art. A few years ago, there was a sale exclusively on video art held in France and again, another one in England on a much larger scale. So, what makes this auction special? MAT #1 is, indeed, most unique in its format. It is, at the same time, an auction and an exhibition open to the public, hence the compound noun “exhibit-auction”. The auction is most appropriately located for the occasion as the atelier is situated in a famous artistic neighbourhood, right behind popular art lover dwelling, 104. The space, christened by promising young designer Agathe Occhipinti with her scenography, will display a panorama of artists and creators who look to the expressive function of technology to communicate the social issues raised from modern industrialisation.
Léa Maleh (1983) – « alpha omega » – 2016 – Clé USB – 4 cm x 2 cm – Estimation : 1 600 € – 1 800 €
The exhibit-auction takes the participants in retrospective journey throughout 60 years of digital art. For the first stop of the voyage, we travel back in time with artist Nicolas Schöffer’s robot named Cysp 1 The work, realised in 1956, is a machine assembled by spinning metal plates where light is reflected into uncountable amount of rainbows. The robot will be presented in the format of a photographic triptych at this weekend’s MAT.
Structure gonflables. Another example of these exciting reeditions is the 2008 reproduction of kinetic sculpture Contact Is The Only Love by the collective USCO (The Company of Us).
Nicolas Schöffer (1912-1992) « cysp 1 » – 1956 Photographie H : 60 cm – L : 21 cm Estimation : 4 500 € – 5 500 €
This weekend’s exhibit-auction offers digital art in all its glory, diversity beyond our imagination, ranging from Léa Maleh’s 3D printed sculpture of a USB in the material of Corian to video art. Take the examples of the three-channel projection of Nicolas Tourte’s Passage (2016), Nicolas Schöffer experimentation Variations luminodynamiques 1 at the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) in 1961, which is considered to be the first television clip, Régine Cirotteau’s experimental docu-fiction on the passage to the New Millennium, Zéro (2000), and the four-channel video Four Cardinal Point (2015) by Richard Garet.
MAT #1 is the regarded as a solution to polemic on the conservation of and the construction of a market for digital art since in nature, this genre of art does not strictly follow its business-savvy cousin, contemporary art. On top of that, the range of the starting price is rather reasonable, calculating from the hundreds to around the thousands in Euros. This first edition of MAT exhibit-auction offers diversity in artist and its spectrum of digital art pieces on sale. It aims to be a meeting place for collectors and creators of art of today. MAT will be an annual auction with its next edition already announced for the year 2017, where MAT #2 will focus on the timeline from 1947 to 2017. Ancel reaffirms that the exhibit-auction Mouvement Art Technologie takes the objectives to create a dialogue between generations, techniques, formats, and aesthetics; between geometric art, kinetic, optical, and digital; between the past, the present and the future.