Beyond the Walls

Extend the experience: Grenoble Art Up! goes Beyond the Walls of Alpexpo.

Grenoble Art Up! aims to be a unifying event in the field of contemporary art, highlighting the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and its cultural structures.

Grenoble Art Up! enriches the visitor experience by orchestrating an exhibition outside the walls. It also puts the spotlight on the abundant offerings of the region’s museums.

For this second edition, 5 museums and art centres from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region are joining us : the CAB (Bastille’s Art Center), the Fonds Glénat, the Point Commun, the VOG and the Salomon Foundation are offering special tours of their temporary and permanent exhibitions to coincide with the fair. These visits will help to ensure that the Grenoble Art Up! experience lasts beyond the fair, as well as raising Grenoble’s profile as an influential cultural and artistic player.

Discover the Beyond the Walls program:

1:00 am – Nicolas Gaillardon

from May 17 to July 5, 2025

Nicolas Gaillardon, born in Orléans in 1983 and currently living in Grenoble, is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the dimensions of drawing, installation and music to create a singular universe, at once familiar and mysterious, akin to contemporary archaeology.

In his works, the artist uses everyday elements that he arranges in such a way as to evoke a scene that occurs after an action, suggesting a world where humans are absent but traces of which persist. These fragments of urban space, often deserted, seem suspended, abandoned to themselves. This apparent emptiness invites viewers to immerse themselves in a narrative they must construct themselves, questioning our relationship with the environment, memory and forgetting.

The transition from drawing to animation amplifies this strange atmosphere, underscored by layers of sound that disrupt perception. The repetition of movement echoes mechanical gestures and behaviors conditioned by a society where artificiality seems to dominate authenticity. The installations he creates often grow out of his drawings, shifting towards an immersive universe where the viewer is confronted with a sense of emptiness and a post-apocalyptic atmosphere.

Through his work, Nicolas Gaillardon questions our contemporary way of life, dominated by artifice and automated routines. He questions the place of the human in a world where the object seems to have taken over, revealing the fragility of our existence and the quest for meaning in a constantly changing environment.

At VOG, he will present his exhibition 1:00 am, featuring drawings and sound installations. He offers us a disturbing reflection on celebration and its ambivalences, exploring the subtle boundary between euphoria and decline. Through works that question our relationship with time, place and the cycles of day and night, he reveals the paradoxes of those celebratory moments when the atmosphere seems to shift. In this strange scenario, sun and darkness become powerful metaphors, inviting us to rethink our collective rituals, the transience of the moment, and our desperate desire to immortalize what, by nature, eludes us.

Vaults – Frederik Exner

from May 23 to July 26, 2025

Vaults offers viewers a strange space that deconstructs the markers of linear time. Future, past or alternative present difficult to say. The exhibition is a journey through three rooms, a movement towards a buried, secret place.

Hanging on the walls are three high-reliefs with similar shapes: a kind of human silhouette, but simplified – in the manner of Egyptian sarcophagi or Russian dolls – to the point of making it unrecognizable, except for the eyes. These hybrid figures oscillate between sculpture and drawing, body and object, organic and architectural. Two meters high, they are reminiscent of envelopes, cocoons, but it seems very strange – almost violent – that they are suspended upside down.

According to Michel Serre, the archaic statue is not just a funerary effigy, a representation of the buried person, but a presentation of the actual mummified body: an object between body and sculpture.

In front of the murals, large hybrid animal figures sit on black protective foam podiums like upturned shipping crates from which they have sprung. On each snout of these frog-like figures, a metal disk floats, defying gravity – is it a physical object? These works play with the interweaving of the figurative and the symbolic, as in medieval Christian imagery, where aureoles sometimes become clumsy objects obstructing the view of sacred figures.

The animal figures seem to contemplate the murals and worship them. Is this ensemble part of a funerary rite or a process of immortalization developed by a future or alternative humanity? Are these statues witnesses to a forgotten civilization, hijacked and venerated by a non-human culture?

Friendship: grief, isolation, madness, taboo, an exhibition by Ferruel & Guédon

from 6 April to 15 June 2025

Aurélie Ferruel and Florentine Guédon work together in sculpture linked to the living world.

Legends, traditions (rituals, costumes), stories of local people and local know-how are the raw material for the work of these two artists of rural origin, whose research prior to the works is part of an anthropological approach. The encounters and shared stories they collect, as well as the worlds and lifestyles they discover, enable them to nourish their sculpture and performance work with new materials and new forms.

Loustal, les Alpes au fil de l’autoroute

du 15 mai au 27 septembre 2025 

Travel writer Jacques de Loustal was commissioned by APRR to create tourist and cultural panels on the freeways that cross Savoie, Haute-Savoie, Isère and Drôme. These images, intended to be seen at high speed, must keep motorists alert without distracting their attention. As a result, numerous technical constraints were imposed on the artist: vertical format, black and white only enhanced by a cameo of brown, simplification of motifs, predefined subjects. And yet, Loustal was able to stamp his style on them with his virtuoso line and distinctive graphic universe.

In all, over a hundred panels measuring 6 meters high by 3.3 meters wide were produced for the APRR and ATMB freeways. A veritable “open-air art gallery”, the illustrations on the freeway panels bring the unexpected irruption of an artistic approach to the landscape of motorists.

And to complete this beautiful escape to Isère through the eyes of artists, Loustal’s viewpoints are set against PLM posters, diversifying the invitations to appropriate the region through the prism of art. Finally, to comment on this encounter, author and critic Jean-Louis Roux offers his original and facetious vision in texts that accompany Loustal’s illustrations.

Roland Topor

from May 16 to August 24, 2025

Roland Topor (1938-1997) was a complete artist, recognized for his talents as a painter, writer, illustrator and filmmaker. His work is distinguished by its black humor and acerbic criticism of social conventions. Influenced by the absurd and the grotesque, he explored the limits of the human imagination. Topor is best known for his unique graphic style, with drawings in distorted, angular forms.

He made his name with the animated film La Planète Sauvage (1973), which tackled themes of difference and oppression. Throughout his career, Topor has blended visual art, literature and cinema, becoming an emblematic figure of the subversive art movement. His work remains a reflection on the absurd, society and its shortcomings.