Consortium Museum

Dijon, BFC, France
Est. --- / 16 mins / Map

ABOUT CONSORTIUM MUSEUMLe Consortium celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year. Established since 2011 in a 4000 square-meter building specifically designed for it by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, the history of this institution of a special kind began in 1977 on the first floor of an alternative bookstore, then in an old appliance store located at the back of a courtyard in the central market place in Dijon, Burgundy. Here young academics carried out their aim to exhibit the art of their time: accompanied by a handful of people passionate about art, its founders Xavier Douroux and Franck Gautherot organized exhibitions, from the late 1970s on, with avant-garde artists: Christian Boltanski in 1978, Hans Peter Feldmann in 1979, Annette Messager in 1980, Cindy Sherman and Daniel Buren in 1982, Carl Andre and Richard Prince in 1983, Bertrand Lavier and Hans Haacke in 1986.

Consortium Museum - Cya On The Road

At the end of the 1980s, Le Consortium questioned the nature and conventions of the exhibition through an exhibition itself, Une Autre Affaire, an “exhibition of exhibitions” reenacting in Dijon and in almost real time the Group Shows organized in the United States by Peter Halley, Bob Nickas, and Steven Parrino. With Le Choix des Femmes in 1990, it also organized an exhibition which led four male curators to each invite four women artists. After exhibiting minimal and conceptual art, the Picture Generation and the abstract experiments deepening work by neo-geo artists in the 1980s, Le Consortium accompanied, in the 1990s, the emergence of a new generation of artists: the Young British Artists – Liam Gillick, Angela Bulloch, and Gillian Wearing – and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Maurizio Cattelan, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Ugo Rondinone, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno.

Recently hailed by The New York Times as “the under-the-radar French museum that quietly predicts art’s next big thing,” since the 2000s, Le Consortium has organized the first exhibitions in France of a number of American artists – Christopher Wool, Kelley Walker, Rachel Feinstein, Josh Smith, Rachel Harrison, Wade Guyton, Joe Bradley, Roe Ethridge, Brian Calvin, Alex Israel, Oscar Tuazon, Lari Pittman – while dedicating retrospectives to the oeuvre of Lynda Benglis, Dadamaino, Luigi Ontani, and Phillip King.

Le Consortium’s Collection, now permanently exhibited on the building’s first floor, includes more than 350 works. Essentially comprised of gifts from the artists who have exhibited there, it forms a true memory of the exhibitions. It includes, among others, works by On Kawara, Cady Noland, Dan Graham, Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Oscar Tuazon, Fredrik Værslev, Michael Williams, as well as important bodies of work by Bertrand Lavier, John Armleder, Steven Parrino, and Olivier Mosset.

Beyond the exhibitions, artists have made Le Consortium an interlocutor, sometimes a producer, and, in the 1980s, inspired the creation of a publishing house for their catalogs (Les Presses du Réel) and, in the 1990s, that of a film production company (Anna Sanders Films) with the aim of inventing a “cinema of exhibition.” Now the most important distributor in France of books devoted to the contemporary arts, over the years, Les Presses du Réel has become an important independent publishing house, publishing both the writings of Charles Fourier, an eighteenth century French philosopher and monographs on contemporary artists and architects. Anna Sanders Films has produced “cinema of exhibition” films by Pierre Huyghe and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and other films such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, and the recent highly successful Le Portrait Interdit by Charles de Meaux.

VISITOR INFORMATIONAdmission fees:General fee: 4 eurosFree admission (on presentation of suitable evidence) :Children under 18 years of age, school groups, job seekers, RSA beneficiaries, disabled persons, specialist students and teachers (art history, fine arts, decorative arts, architecture), accredited journalists, accredited art critics (AICA card), artists (Maison des artistes card).Free entry every friday from 5PM to 8PM.

OPENING HOURSWednesday to Sunday from 2 pm to 6 pmFriday from 2 pm to 8 pmClosed on public holidays

GETTING HEREThe Consortium Museum is at 20 minutes from Dijon railway station.At 200 m from Wilson placeAt 10 min by walk from Musée des beaux-artsFree underground parkingBy bus: lines 5, 6, 11 and 12, stop “Wilson”

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