Centre Georges Pompidou - Magiciens De La Terre - 1989

Magiciens De La Terre
Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National D'art Moderne, La Villette, La Grande Halle

First edition 1989

Magiciens de la Terre is a contemporary art exhibition organized at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989 (18/05-14/08/1989) and curated by Jean-Hubert Martin. Due to its particularly innovative approach, Magiciens de la Terre is one of the most cited exhibitions internationally and is a point of reference for the history of contemporary art.

The exhibition is curated by Jean-Hubert Martin who created a committee composed of Jacques Soulillou, André Magnin and Aline Luque to carry out the research. The conception committee is composed of Jean-Louis Maubant, Mark Francis, Jan Debbaut. The exhibition showcases over 100 artists, combines works from five continents and mixes already famous artists with "discoveries". As Jean-Hubet Marin states in the exhibition catalog[1], the exhibition represents an investigation into today's world and the decision to include international artists is closely linked to the desire to avoid so-called non-Western artists being included in a ghetto. The exhibition therefore, in the intentions of its curator, wants to avoid ethnographic categories inherited from colonial exhibitions and wants to show the existence in the present of artists from all over the world.

For the selection of African artists, Jean-Hubert Martin commissions the curator André Magnin to travel around Africa choosing the works capable of documenting the idea of "magicians of the earth" in the most pertinent way. The selection criteria adopted by André Magnin will become the selection criteria of the Pigozzi Collection, of which André Magnin will subsequently be the curator.