The exhibition Les mues éternelles heralds a new era for the Frac Auvergne, housed in a historic building that has undergone continuous transformation ahead of its long-awaited reopening, nearly thirty years in the making. The labyrinth of exhibition spaces, spread across two floors, reveals a landscape of multiple forms: varying ceiling heights, transparencies, perspectives and viewpoints, passages and unexpected corners, as well as traces that remain visible of the Halle aux Blés’ former bustling lives.

Reflecting the building itself, the inaugural exhibition celebrates metamorphosis as a life-sustaining principle: living beings adapt and reinvent themselves through physical, psychological, societal and environmental transformations. In reference to eternal snow, the title opens up a field of reflection. In reality, this snow is constantly regenerating: the oldest layers of ice are pushed forward by the formation of new ones, a process that has maintained the vital balance of glaciers for millions of years. Today, however, this balance is threatened by profound disruptions caused by climate change. This is the intensity—and above all, the ambiguity—of metamorphosis that the exhibition seeks to reveal: at times joyful and invigorating, at others dark and unsettling.

Each visitor is invited to experience this phenomenon for themselves. The conversations forged between artists from different generations point to the transformations of painting in relation to those of the landscape, History and its fragmented narratives. At the heart of these shifts, painting endures, sometimes in its more classical forms, but often in expanded versions through photographic, video, sculptural and textile works. More than ever, painting is the subject of intense artistic reflection: its remarkable vitality is expressed through the use of materials, forms and narratives skilfully reappropriated through interplay of textures, luminosity and scale. This vitality is also that of the Frac collections, which have been enriched every year for more than forty years through the acquisition of new works. A contemporary art collection is, in turn, a living organism, constantly evolving and redefining itself.

The exhibition thus reveals itself as an image of the surface of the world. Hybrid and ever-changing, it is continually transformed by profound, necessary and vital metamorphoses—sometimes sudden, imposed and harmful—calling upon all of us to adopt a position of humility in the face of what will never be eternal.

Élise Girardot and Laure Forlay, co-curators of the exhibition, would like to thank the artists Caroline Achaintre, Etel Adnan, Jimmy Beauquesne, Léa Belooussovitch, Abdelkader Benchamma, Clément Cogitore, Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Mimosa Echard, Gloria Friedmann, Makiko Furuichi, Agnès Geoffray, Noémie Goudal, Simon Hantaï, Lukas Hoffmann, Nona Inescu, Aneta Kajzer, Kapwani Kiwanga, Tarek Lakhrissi, Natacha Lesueur, Didier Marcel, Maude Maris, Sara Masüger, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Sirous Namazi, Josèfa Ntjam, Patrick Neu, Gloria Oyarzabal, Gerald Petit, Gerhard Richter, James Rielly, Armelle de Sainte Marie, Pierre Saxod, Zineb Sedira, Claire Tabouret, Patrick Tosani, Luc Tuymans, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Jeanne Vicerial.