Eye Contact

The thematic exhibition "Eye Contact" ("Les Yeux dans les Yeux") has a title that speaks volumes: over half of all the work in the Pinault Collection centres on the human form. In exploring this theme, the artists present us with our fellow creatures — real or imaginary — and free them from the march of time. Almost 90 oeuvres from the Pinault Collection have been selected for this exhibition, which invites visitors to confront a multitude of faces head on. 

These gazes and demeanours reveal tensions, emotions, feelings, love, personal histories, rebellions and sometimes violence. Each of the portraits conveys a message, and each is a landscape to be explored while looking them in the eye. 

This exhibition spans the history of art, speaking to us about how we relate to the image of ourselves and the other in the age of social media. In addition, it explores the idea of disappearance and the impossibility, on occasion, of capturing a face, an expression, a spirit, a demeanour, a soul. Masked glances mingle with candid gazes, and intimacy ends up brushing against eternity. 

Artists such as Xinyi Cheng, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Annie Leibovitz, Yan Pei Ming, Shirin Neshat, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Luc Tuymans and many others challenge the representation of the self and the other, inviting us to reflect on the individual and contemporary society. Nearly half of the works are being exhibited for the first time by the Pinault Collection to celebrate this event.

See the full archive on the Bourse de Commerce website