Lionel Bovier (b. 1970) is a Swiss curator, editor, and museum director, based in Geneva. He took the direction of MAMCO, Geneva’s modern and contemporary art museum, in 2016. His aim was to propose a narrative, renewed two or three times a year, of recent art history. He has thus developed a unique programming system: a “total exhibition” of sort, where temporary exhibitions interact with each other and the collection. He has also led the museum to be as much a conservatory of objects as of practices, making MAMCO quite an unusual museum in the process. Bovier has previously worked as an art critic and curator, starting his career by laying the foundation of an independent art space in Geneva in the 1990s (Forde) and curating
in various institutions (notably Le Magasin in Grenoble and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne). In 2004, he cofounded the publishing house JRP|Ringier, quickly establishing it as an essential platform weighing in the cultural debate, by allowing exchanges of ideas between major participants of the international art world. By postulating MAMCO as a laboratory and ambitioning to a collective rewriting of the history of the short period of time envisioned, Bovier somehow found a way to prolong his editorial activity in a museum. MAMCO, under Bovier’s direction, has in fact examined the various returns of expressivity since the 1970s; questioned the circulation of images and the different strategies that led to their transformation into an informational surface in the 2000s; analyzed the role of narrativity in the visual arts; experienced de-centering and the emergence of a world art history; envisioned decoration as a true repressed of modernism; and, lastly, explored a dialectic between how the figurative image can also question representative form, and how an abstract image may also derive from sensory experience (demanding a phenomenological response).
