Over the Rainbow

49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine presents its second exhibition at La Grande Place, as the guest institution of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Continuing the first show’s celestial theme, ‘Over the Rainbow’ explores the poetry of meteorology, deliberately ignoring the climatologists’ alarm bells to focus on creative artworks. ‘There is an urgent need for joyous creativity and dreams, right now,’ says Béatrice Josse, curator of the exhibition.

This resolutely positive approach draws on the perspectives of scientists, artists, amateurs and artisans, to reveal the secrets of our weather. At the heart of the Musée du Cristal, Lorraine artist Benoît Billotte continues his Sun line, traced in the first exhibition, while Yona Friedman and young Chinese artists Jingfang Hao & Lingjie Wang (based in nearby Mulhouse) work with a cloud and rainbow respectively.

Accompanying the artists’ work, ‘Over the Rainbow’ features items on exceptional loan from the archives of Météo-France, including remarkable watercolour plates by André des Gachons, painted between 1913 and 1951, representing the sky and cloudscapes at different times of day. Technology and artisanship come together in a theodolite from 1935, used to measure the height of clouds, and a blown-glass Christmas bauble in the form of a cumulus, from the Centre international d’art verrier in Meisenthal. A series of images of Épinal punctuates this unstinting dialogue between technology, art and artisanship, beneath the skies of the French department of Moselle.

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