Invention at the Louvre

With “Invention at the Louvre”, Mark Lewis has created three new films based on the museum collections. Observing 'The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence' by Giovanni Sassetta, 'Child with a Spinning Top' by Chardin, or the gallery of the 'Venus de Milo', the artist rekindles an age-old tradition of artistic literature, that of the imagined movement. In his review of the Salon of 1763, Diderot invited the viewer to look right into the heart of paintings through an opera glass; Goethe recommended rapidly blinking the eyes to watch the Laocoon group at the Vatican flicker to life; in his poem The Painter, Girodet identifies with the myth of Pygmalion, aspiring to breathe life into images. Mark Lewis suggests that film came before cinematographic technology, invented in the eye of the viewer.

The exhibition was due to run until January 2015 but was extended until August 2015. During the exhibition the Louvre staged a three day conference on my Mark Lewis work with talks/papers by Elie During, Philippe Alain Michaud, Laura Mulvey and others.

The exhibition presents the following artworks:
Pyramid (
8 min 18 s)
Child with a Spinning Top 
(Auguste Gabriel Godefroy) (
4 min 39 s)
The Night Gallery
 (4 min 50 s)
In Search of the Blessed Ranieri
 (23 min)

• Organisation