Visitors Series: Paul Ardenne

Ecological Art: A Legitimate and Essential Creation

Paul Ardenne will lecture on “ecological art,” its foundations, its developments, and its current reality between aestheticization, denunciation, activism, and concern for universal care. Ecological art, an art of the present and even more so of the future, will get an overview from its roots to its current developments, in order on the one hand to give a glimpse of its favorite forms and on the other hand to discuss its henceforth well-established legitimacy. Indeed, the forms of artistic creation that deal with environmental issues may well be today, with respect to urgency and necessity, the most important of all forms of art.

Paul Ardenne is a writer, an art historian, and a curator. Agrégé in History and Doctor of History and Sciences of Art, he is Professor of History of Art and Aesthetics at Jules Verne University in Amiens (Hauts-de-France). He has published numerous works in the field of contemporary art, contemporary culture, and architecture. He has also conceived many exhibitions including Spring of September in Toulouse in 2012, Motopoétique at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal in 2014, and La Biennale d’Art Contemporain d’Anglet in 2016. Among his best-known essays on art are “Art, Contemporary Age” (1997); “Contextual Art” (2002); “Body Image” (2001); “Extreme” (2006); “Art the Present” (2009); and “An Ecological Art” (2018).