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At Montsoreau Castle, Art & Language turns portraiture into conceptual ground until June 30, 2026
The Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art is devoting the exhibition Art & Language: Portraits to an unexpected question in the work of the British collective: the figure, its critical uses and its limits. The show, announced from November 13, 2025 to June 30, 2026, notably draws on Now They Are II and places portraiture within a set of political, artistic and literary references.
An exhibition that shifts the very idea of portraiture
The Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art is opening the exhibition Art & Language: Portraits to the public, dedicated to the presence of portraiture in the work of Art & Language. The event is announced on the official page under the dates 13.11.2025-30.06.2026, with a publication dated August 20, 2026. The proposal is presented as the continuation of a cycle of tribute exhibitions marking 60 years of Art & Language.
The chosen angle is deliberately surprising: according to the presentation, few museums can turn into a portrait gallery while defining themselves as a museum of contemporary art. This tension sets the tone for the exhibition. The point is not merely to line up faces, but to question what portraiture becomes when it passes through the tools of conceptual art.
A British collective at the heart of the project
The exhibition is devoted to a group of British conceptual artists whose radical approach, according to the presentation text, has constantly pushed toward redefining the limits and framework of the production of the work of art. This clarification is essential: portraiture appears here less as a classical genre than as a motif tested by a theoretical, critical and collective practice.
Montsoreau Castle has a particular grounding for addressing this subject. Its homepage states that the museum holds the world’s largest collection of works from the Art & Language movement. It also recalls that the name Art & Language was adopted in parallel with the creation of the journal Art-Language, founded in 1968, and that the movement is presented as a pioneer of conceptual art.
A museum housed in a Loire château
The setting adds another layer of interpretation. The Château de Montsoreau presents itself as a museum of contemporary art located in the Loire Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Maine-et-Loire, in the commune of Montsoreau, between Angers and Tours. This location gives the exhibition a singular context, between historic architecture and a conceptual collection.
The Château de Montsoreau website also highlights the architectural particularity of the site: it is the only Loire château built in the riverbed. The building, dated to 1450 in the presentation, is associated with Jean II de Chambes, chief adviser to Kings Charles VII and Louis XI, ambassador to Venice and partner of Jacques Cœur.
Now They Are II as a point of support
The exhibition route draws notably on the work Now They Are II, dated 2016. The official presentation states that it consists of more than eight hundred portraits spread across 144 sheets. This scale gives the exhibition a concrete foundation: portraiture is not treated as an isolated image, but as a series, an accumulation and a method of thought.
Starting from this work, the museum also reintroduces historical works from the collaboration between Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin. The official page cites several figures present in this vicinity: John Wayne, Jimmy Carter, Ad Reinhardt, George W. Bush and Wile E. Coyote from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. These references place visual culture, politics and art history side by side.
Portraits connected to music and performance
The presentation also links certain portraits to the production of the album Five American Portraits by the Red Crayola. This indication situates part of the corpus in a circulation between visual arts and music, without reducing Art & Language to a single category. Portraiture then becomes a point of passage between image, text, sound and artistic collaboration.
The exhibition also mentions fifteen portraits of Donald J. Trump made for the script of a performance by the Jackson Pollock Bar. Here again, the portrait is not presented as simple resemblance. It enters a logic of script, performance and critical distance, faithful to the role that the page attributes to the collective’s theoretical and literary foundations.
Beyond the great figures of art history
The official text insists on one point: the exhibition does not present only tutelary figures of Art History. It evokes portraits of places, portraits of landscapes, portraits of politicians and a self-portrait of the collective’s members in disguise, Art & Language in disguise, dated 1980. The word portrait therefore expands to objects and situations that do not always belong to the face.
This expansion of portraiture rests, according to the presentation, on theoretical, critical and literary foundations. The exhibition thus proposes a mise en abyme of the representation of the figure, with its limits and expectations. This vocabulary indicates that the subject is not only iconographic: it also concerns the conditions under which a figure can be produced, recognized or contested.
A contemporary reading of the human figure
Finally, the official page places the exhibition in a highly current context. In the age of social media and the unceasing tsunami of the human figure shared at every hour and every minute, the exercise is described as a refocusing of the discourse on portraiture. The museum thus underlines a gap between today’s massive production of images of people and the analytical slowness of conceptual work.
This gap gives Art & Language: Portraits its clearest reach. In a place that claims the world’s largest collection of works from the movement, the exhibition brings together works in which the human figure, landscape, politics, popular culture and performance become as many ways of testing what a portrait can still mean.
Sources: chateau-montsoreau.com