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 first edition, 3 museums and art centres from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region are joining us. The Fonds Glénat, Magasin-CNAC and the VOG 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 tour:

from 5 December 2024 to 29 March 2025

Passionately, madly… The Glénat collection

What link could there possibly be between an Alpine landscape, a comic strip, a Michelin guide, a Brueghel painting, earthenware from La Tronche, a still life, a bottle of Château Yquem and Le Journal de Mickey? We’d be searching in vain for the reason for such eclecticism, if we didn’t say straight away that this Prévert-like inventory is the fruit of the enthusiasm and determination of one collector: publisher Jacques Glénat.

For decades, Jacques Glénat has been collecting an incredibly diverse range of works and objects that tell the story of his love for all forms of art and creation. Beneath the apparent madness of these collections lies the open-mindedness of a man who places great painting and comics on an equal footing, mountains and gastronomy, regional earthenware and a bottle of a prestigious, out-of-age wine.

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Sainte-Cécile convent, now a major cultural centre in Grenoble, the new exhibition ‘Passionnément, à la folie… la collection Glénat’ (Passionately, madly… the Glénat collection) invites visitors to celebrate the art of yesterday and today in all its forms, through the eyes of an insatiably curious collector and the presentation of more than 150 works.

from 15 March to 31 August 2025

Good service, good performance

Can we still think about the idea of utopia when we live in a world that has been profoundly transformed by hyper-connectivity, the crisis of democracy and the new dynamics of surveillance? What does an iconic project like Utopia Station, designed in 2003 in the post-September 11 era, have to say about this? How should we view the work of British artist Gillian Wearing, dancing in a shopping centre in 1994, in the light of Tik-Tok? In 2025, at a time when big tech and the rise of authoritarianism are overturning our interactions and redefining our relationship with information, these works bear witness to issues that, as far back as the 1980s to 2010, raised questions about the fabrication of narratives, the commodification of language, the staging of the self and the possibility of spaces for dissent. Individually or collectively, the works reveal how our bodies, our desires and our existences participate in these dynamics, adapting to or resisting imposed norms, whether social, media or political.

In this way, the exhibition explores the relationship between the injunction to perform in contemporary society and the rejection of bodies – particularly female bodies – in the face of this demand for (re)productivity. The works in ‘Good Service, Good Performance’ offer an experience made up of screams, lies, absurd recitations, humour and silence… We encounter organic and industrial poultices, sexual organs that have become plants and sculptures that have to be bitten to be heard. Bodies breathe hard, dance, and come to blows in debates about culture and identity that are resolved in wrestling matches.

‘Good Service, Good Performance’ questions these tensions between discipline and overflow, control and abandonment, truth and staging. In a world shaped by algorithms, where public discourse oscillates between one-upmanship and censorship, the works on show are a reminder of the extent to which art illuminates our present and remains essential for thinking about its transformations.