The Calais Museum of Fine Arts and Museum for Lace and Fashion, in association with the Hélène & Édouard Leclerc Fund for Culture, present Libres Figurations – Années 80, a temporary exhibition that will be presented in the vast spaces of both museums from 11 June 2021. The non-academic art movement, Free Figuration, will be revealed through more than 200 works by 50 international artists and artist collectives who marked those iconic years (1979-1986) with their effervescent, vital creations that rewrote the codes of art.

In Calais, this new iteration of the exhibition staged in the Fonds Hélène&Edouard Leclerc pour la Culture at Landerneau in 2018 boasts the addition of never-before-seen works, in particular from the fashion and design

fields, as well as bringing together paintings, sculptures, films, videos, posters, music and archive documents from this original and provocative artistic movement, inspired by popular culture and born as much in the streets, clubs

and magazines as in studios.

 States (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf...), the painting style François Boisrond, Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa, Richard Di Rosa, Catherine Viollet...), the Graffiti movement in the United States (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf...), the painting style of the Neue Wilde in Germany (Elvira Bach, Luciano Castelli, Milan Kunc, Salomé...), the New Artists in the USSR (Afrika, Timour Novikov, Oleg Kotelnikov...) and the Media Painter collectives (the Ripoulin brothers, Musulmans fumants, Roberto Cabot...).

Curated by Pascale Le Thorel, Libres Figurations – Années 80 celebrates the movement’s 40 years in existence. It is the first international exhibition to cast a retrospective and historical eye over that period, bringing together its stars from all four corners of the world, and it is a reflection of the Calais museums’ drive to stage exhibitions for the general public.