Dear visitors,
We look forward to welcoming you to the MBAL from 11 October 2025 to 1 March 2026 to discover the museum’s new exhibition cycle. Four internationally renowned artists and two curators will joyfully take over the museum’s galleries with their sculptures, paintings, photographs and designs. For autumn 2025, the MBAL is hosting a dialogue between technical experiments, contemporary creations, reflections and works from the museum’s collection.
Koenraad Dedobbeleer opens this series of exhibitions with a project previewed at the 13th edition of Art Genève in January 2025. The artist pursues a diverse artistic approach that combines sculptures, objects, in situ installations and photographs. After immersing himself in the MBAL collection, the artist was struck by its richness, as well as by the presence of numerous works whose authors are anonymous.
As part of his exhibition Decorative Chaos Dress, to Impress, he chose anonymity as his guiding thread. By transforming the use or environment of the works, he reinterprets and recontextualises them to give them new visibility and offer a resolutely contemporary reading. In this way, Dedobeleer blurs the boundaries between use and contemplation, everyday life and art, history and the present, constructing a subtle network of correspondences and tensions.
With Toutes le savent, même les anges (Everyone knows, even the angels), Swiss artist Klodin Erb, winner of the 2022 Meret Oppenheim Prize, unveils a unique pictorial universe, where expression, fantasy and references to popular and digital culture intertwine. With an open and experimental artistic approach, the artist uses a variety of techniques that transform to suit the content.
The exhibition is a reflection in images that questions the fragile balance of our world between essential polarities such as heaven and earth, knowledge and belief, playfulness and seriousness. Inspired by horoscopes and astrological charts, Erb sees in them the expression of a deep desire to seek something greater than oneself that provides a sense of belonging.
This exhibition is in dialogue with Vorhang fällt Hund bellt, presented at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau.
In co-production with the Rencontres d’Arles festival, French artist Agnès Geoffray and curator Vanessa Desclaux present Elles obliquent elles obstinent elles tempêtent (They deviate, they persist, they rage). This project was developed from institutional archives concerning the ‘preservation schools’ of Cadillac, Doullens and Clermont de l’Oise, public institutions for the placement of underage girls in France from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. The exploration of the lives of young girls labelled ‘deviant’ or ‘uneducable’ and locked up for several years has given rise to an installation that celebrates their forms of rebellion and their aspirations for emancipation.
Both poetic and political, the exhibition creates a dialogue between documents from various archives and photographs by Agnès Geoffray based on the themes of dissent (they deviate), rebellion (they rage) and escape (they flee).
With L’une ou l’autre vérité (One Truth or the Other), Urs Lüthi weaves a visual narrative around his legendary series and invites the public to let themselves be carried away by the intimate and universal contradiction of human emotions. The exhibition spans 55 years of creation, from the artist’s very first self-portrait in the midst of an existential crisis in Ibiza in 1969, to his more recent reflections on the constant movement of self-effacement, via the sensual and ironic multiplicity of The Numbergirl Seen Through the Pink Glasses of Desire, his legendary series from 1973.
By playing on the ambiguities of emotions, the body and the image, the artist highlights the complexity of what we, or society, consider to be “true”. He states categorically: ‘I don’t believe in objectivity at all; the only filter between the world and me is my personal truth…’
Far from a static, autobiographical self-portrait, Lüthi declares that everything is ephemeral and destined to disappear. He encourages the public to find a form of solace in a world riddled with discomfort.
Théophile Calot, director of the Delpire & Co bookshop (Paris), is transforming the museum’s new library space with the exhibition Books and Bookends, which pays tribute to a fascinating object: the bookend. For this occasion, artisans and designers Elvire Bonduelle, Dieudonné Cartier, Atelier Jonathan Cohen, Cléo Charuet, Nathalie Dewez, Atelier Laisser Passer, Louis Lefebvre, Jeanne Tresvaux Du Fraval and Laure Gremion reveal their original creations in dialogue with a selection of books from the MBAL collection.
Each of these pieces is unique or produced in very small series using traditional methods and a wide variety of materials: ceramic, metal, stone or recycled materials. They mainly function in pairs but can also stand alone as sculptures.