Thierry De Cordier in The never ending horizon
9 May—5 October 2025
Group exhibition at Musée des Beaux-Arts Caen, France
Since the Renaissance, artists have constantly made us sensitive to the many paradoxes of the horizon, involving the question of perception, representation and sharing of space. If it materializes in a line, the horizon moves with us, can dissolve into fog or storm: it tells us that the world continues beyond what we perceive. That it gives the illusion of depth and unifies the space represented, that it seems to open the view to infinity, that it rises like a sharp dam or that it informs us about the relationship between man and another, the horizon provides us with the essential benchmarks that our vision needs and is the basis of our experience of the world.
From the invention of perspective in the Renaissance to the most contemporary digital works, art explores our relationship with the horizon through increasingly diverse media. Opening with the Marriage of the Virgin of Perugin (1504), the exhibition presents some 100 works dating from the 16th to the 21st century. The paintings, drawings, engravings, installations and videographs presented are combined with a unique set of perspective treatises from the 16th to 19th centuries in their rarest editions. Symbolic, plastic, political or poetic, the works presented draw an unprecedented path in the spaces of the museum, from the exhibition rooms to the heart of the permanent collections where abstract developments open up on the horizon.
This exhibition opens in the framework of the Millennium Caen 2025 and with the exceptional participation of the National Library of France.