Génération !
Curator: Julia Marchand
Selected artworks from the Société Générale Art Collection in Paris La Défense, on display from November 26, 2025 to June 30, 2026 at L’Arsenal, headquarters of Société Générale Luxembourg.
Generation! brings together the works of six artists from different generations and diverse backgrounds. The diversity of practices presented invites an intergenerational reading of the Societe Generale Collection. Three generations converse on the wall of the Arsenal: the Baby Boomers (with David Hockney), Generation X (Julien Prévieux, Anne Neukamp, Françoise Pétrovitch), and the Millennials, themselves divided between Gen Y (Ymane Chabi-Gara) and Gen Z (Juliette Green).
Baby Boomers are said to have frozen their post-war optimism in privilege; Generation X is seen as clear-eyed in the face of the decline of grand narratives; and the youngest are thought to retreat into a form of digital narcissism. But what do these works tell us beyond these clichés?
Juliette Green, the youngest of the exhibited artists, instead addresses the question of transmission: a theme not often expected from a Gen Z artist. Through a diagram composed of drawings, she recounts the improbable journey of a recipe from the 11th century BC, passed down from woman to daughter, eventually reaching the hands of a young father today. The work How does a recipe travel through time? (2022) explores the invisible circulations between generations, between legacies and intimate reinterpretations. This story of passage and reversal of preconceived ideas is also the story of the exhibition: what if we changed perspective?
David Hockney, a major figure notably linked to Pop Art, represents himself through a self-portrait created on an iPad, a tool he has used since their introduction in 2010. His work reflects a constant curiosity, always fueled by technological advances. In contrast, Juliette Green chooses a simple, direct medium that disregards technology.
Ymane Chabi-Gara expresses teenage anguish through the figure of the hikikomoris, in works that blend painting and collage. Her gaze focuses on withdrawn communities, emotionally frozen, while Françoise Pétrovitch’s work questions the melancholic nature of a landscape or a child. Between the two, a shared concern for empathy and representation of individuals both present and absent emerges.
Julien Prévieux and Anne Neukamp, meanwhile, follow a more analytical vein: their works explore schematic, modeled representations as an autonomous language. A kind of extension of the visual experiments initiated by Hockney’s generation—a post-Pop view of our image- and sign-saturated environment.
The exhibition highlights the points of convergence between these artists from different generations: their relationship to technology, forms of storytelling, self-representation and representation of others, observation of daily life… and the emergence of new sensibilities. It offers an unbounded reading of generations and questions the boundaries too often imposed on them. Rather than opposing them, it suggests seeing what is woven between them.
Julia Marchand
