Overview

The Art of Oil in the works of BP group for the Black Gold Museum's inaugural exhibition For its inaugural exhibition, the Black Gold Museum has partnered with curator Christian Janicot in an experiential exhibition on the material nature of petroleum through selected works of the French artist collective BP. Over the last four decades, BP has associated the fetishizing of modern art with the worship of commercial gods in response to the tutelary power of oil. The shifting nature of the dialogue between past and future continues to provide Renaud Layrac - who has continued the collective's legacy since 2008 - with ever-shifting approaches and reactions to petroleum products and industry. This catalogue conceptualizes and contextualizes discourses on the shifting nature of this vital and world-changing material. Founded in the early 1980s, BP is a French artist collective formed by Renaud Layrac, Frédéric Pohl, and Richard Bellon. The group emerged spontaneously after discovering British Petroleum stickers, which they adopted as their signature. Since then, BP has focused exclusively on the petroleum world, creating installations using industrial objects such as barrels, gas pumps, and automotive materials. Their work explores themes of appropriation, reuse, and environmental critique, often incorporating used oil as a medium. BP's distinctive practice challenges the aesthetics and ethics of fossil fuel culture through subversive, site-specific interventions rooted in material transformation.

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Christian Janicot Curator; is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD), Paris. He now works as an art consultant for exhibitions and museums, as a curator, and artistic director. Arnauld Pierre is Professor of Art History at Sorbonne University. His field of research encompasses the sources, and the imaginary of modernity considered in the wider field of scientific and visual culture.

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