The Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC Lyon) has launched a major seasonal program featuring three distinct exhibitions that explore memory, archives, and the evolution of contemporary media. Central to the program is Giulia Andreani’s solo exhibition, "Cold Painting," which presents sixty canvases created between 2011 and 2025 that interrogate historical power structures and the erasure of women from art history. Complementing this is a significant showcase of video art drawn from a massive donation by collectors Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître, alongside a retrospective dedicated to Jean-Claude Guillaumon.
This programming highlights the critical role of private patronage in shaping public museum collections, specifically through the Lemaîtres' donation of 170 video works which doubles the museum's holdings in that medium. By pairing Andreani’s research-heavy figurative painting with a historical survey of video art, MAC Lyon positions itself as a site for both the recovery of marginalized histories and the preservation of time-based media. The exhibitions underscore a broader institutional trend of using archives to challenge traditional historical narratives and explore human empathy through visual resistance.