The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech to hold Cactus exhibition

MARRAKECH - The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech (mYSLm) announced the upcoming opening of Cactus, an exhibition co-curated by Marc Jeanson, botanist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Laurent Le Bon, President of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The exhibition will run from March 2 through July 7, 2024 in the mYSLm’s temporary exhibition gallery.

More than 1,700 species of cacti are known throughout the world; all of them, with one exception, are found in Central America and on the South American continent.

The Jardin Majorelle has one of the largest collections of these plants on the African continent, with more than sixty species inventoried in its collections.

Simple or faceted shapes; pale, neutral or brilliant colours; spiny, fuzzy, smooth or waxy surfaces; fleshy, velvety arms and an extravagant architecture of forms: cacti and succulents have fascinated Europeans for over five centuries.

This exhibition aims to show the extraordinary diversity of cacti and succulent plants through a vast range of artistic expression: examples of their rich iconographic, ornamental and ethnological history will be displayed in dialogue with artworks from the past and with work by contemporary artists such as David Hockney, Lina Ghotmeh and Martin Creed, as well as alongside specimens from natural history collections.

The co-curators

Marc Jeanson is a botanist and agronomist with a degree from the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon and a doctorate in plant systematics from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and the New York Botanical Garden.

He is the author of numerous scientific articles as well as publications intended for the general public, including his book Botaniste, published by Grasset in 2019.

Involved in numerous events linked to the plant world and gardens, Marc Jeanson was associate curator of the Jardins exhibition, held in Paris in 2017 at the Grand Palais National Galleries, and exhibition curator for Végétal, organized by Maison Chaumet at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022.

Laurent Le Bon has been president of the Pompidou Center since 2021.

An art historian with a degree from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Paris and the École du Louvre, Laurent Le Bon was formerly Inspector General of plastic arts at the delegation of the Ministry of Culture and Communication. In 2010, he became director of the Pompidou Center Metz before serving as president of the Musée National Picasso–Paris from 2014 to 2021.

He has curated close to fifty exhibitions and is the author of related works, notably Dada at the Pompidou Center (2005–2006), Jeff Koons Versailles at the Palace of Versailles (2008), Jardins at the Grand Palais National Galleries (2017), Dioramas at the Palais de Tokyo (2017) and Picasso: Blue and Pink at the Musée d’Orsay (2018-2019).

“Scenes in America Deserta”

In conjunction with the exhibition Cactus, the museum will present a film cycle, “Scenes in America Deserta.” Its title makes reference to the eponymous 1982 book by Reyner Banham.

Curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud, head of the film collection at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the film cycle will run from March 9 through June 22, 2024.