Thursday 19 December at 5:30 pm: Opening of the exhibition Luc Ming Yan. The turtle and the diver. Visions spanning nature and painting in Palazzo dei Musei.

Constant interplay between archaeology, art, photography and science is one of the main objectives of the new Palazzo dei Musei. The museum collections will be harnessed to open up the endless variety of narrative, poetic and scientific opportunities that they can offer to contemporary culture. Taking the view that artists can use the collections of the City Museums as analytical tools and sources, just like scholars and experts in various other fields, Palazzo dei Musei is promoting forms of collaboration that will inspire breathtaking new outlooks.

On this front, the young French artist Luc Ming Yan’s reaction to our museum – and the zoological, anatomical and Spallanzani natural history collections in particular – immediately sparked a great deal of interest. This subsequently took concrete form in an exhibition that encourages reflection and opens up dialogue between nature and painting.

Curated by Alessandro Gazzotti, the exhibition presents 48 oil paintings on canvas by the artist, who was born in Dijon in 1994 and works in Paris and Shanghai. With his distinctive approach to colour and vast range of styles, Yan is an original player on the contemporary painting scene. There will be direct, thought-provoking interaction between the works and the natural history collections, especially the large fossilized remains of “Valentina” the whale, a key find from the local area that dates back to the Pliocene. A written commentary for the exhibition has been provided by art critic and curator Davide Ferri, who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and has been the curator of the Pittura XXI section at Arte Fiera in Bologna since 2019. Ferri is a huge admirer of Yan’s work. He writes: “Luc Ming Yan’s work is like a musical score that expands from one room to the next and combines two different sides. Some works present a jumbled, erratic kernel of frenzied, lively and contrasting brushstrokes.

Others are clearly figurative works depicting animals (such as rats, birds, monkeys and cats), skulls, metamorphic figures and aliens that have something vaguely grotesque about them and seem to be influenced by manga or pop images. In addition, pre-figural elements and scraps of shapes (such as paws, horns and sharp claws) may appear within abstract paintings, in positions around the edges or just outside the fertile, generative jumbled masses and giving the impression that they are emerging from them. It is as if a battle were taking place in these works. All the shapes and figures in the paintings seem to stem from the nervous energy on the surface”.

Luc Ming Yan (1994, Dijon, France) is a French painter who lives and works in Dijon. He won the Ernest Manganel Award and studied at the ECAL University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since he graduated, his paintings have been displayed internationally. Recent exhibitions include: Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40, Le Consortium, curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim, Dijon, France (2024); The drawing centre show, Le Consortium, curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim, Dijon, France (2022); Ipotesi astronomiche, Villa Flor, S-chanf, Switzerland (2021); Stasi frenetica, Artissima Unplugged, MAO – Asian Art Museum, Turin, Italy (2020). In 2024, Yan’s works Midnight (2023) and Time walk (2023), as featured in the Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40 collective exhibition, became part of Le Consortium’s permanent collection.