Vegetal Passion sees the exhibition space as the natural milieu of works of art. The artist and curator duo It’s Our Playground (Camille Le Houezec & Jocelyn Villemont) has imagined this 5th installment of Royal Garden as an ambiguous jungle in which visitors will find artists’ pieces, archival photographs and images gleaned from the internet, all shown side by side without any obvious hierarchy.

Deftly mixing plants and works of art, works that involve plants and «exhibition plants», this curatorial project takes a new look at gardening practices in institutional settings, which is increasingly a part of today’s reality. Indeed, while blogs are replete with images of plants, which are adopted for their graphic qualities, they have also invaded art galleries, for artists appreciate their formal values as well as their reference to both a domesticated nature and a questioning of the decorative function of artworks.
Originally this project was based on exhibition photos (notably from the Marc Vaux and the Cahiers d’Art collections, which are conserved at the Kandinsky Library) from the 1940s to 1960s, an age of pre-standardized museum and exhibition design, when decorative plants seemed to naturally punctuate exhibition galleries.

This show also takes into account the recent proliferation of indoor plants in contemporary artists’ work. The images of plants and archival images of art exhibitions are thus mixed with images of recent works of art and specific projects by contemporaries, including Laura Aldridge, Ditte Gantriis, Hayley Tompkins, Travess Smalley and Pedro Wirz, who were invited to produce series of images that resonate with their usual art practice.

Vegetal Passion looks like a tame digital jungle in which all these images of a different nature are there to be discovered and ferreted out. The show will later change with the seasons, and like a winter garden we will follow its evolution for a year to observe the various proposed works by invited artists and the selections made by the two curators.


With special projects by Laura Aldridge, Ditte Gantriis, Hayley Tompkins, Travess Smalley and Pedro Wirz.
Texts by Dorothée Dupuis and Aurélien Mole.