This year the EBAG (Ecole des beaux-arts du Genevois) in Annemasse is celebrating the twentieth birthday of its public preparatory class for French and international art schools.

To mark the occasion, the Villa du Parc contemporary art centre is presenting work by fifteen EBAG alumni in an exhibition entitled Voies d’évasion (Escape routes). This project has two goals: to spotlight selected artists, boosting their early careers, and, through the diversity of standpoints manifested in these works on display, to encourage thinking about the reality of professional artists and the challenges they face today. It also underscores the strong links between the EBAG, art schools in the region and the Villa du Parc.

What does it mean to be an artist today, and how, in both personal and educational terms, do you become one? How do you start out on this journey, based on both an excellence in training that can open many paths and a determination to find your own way? How can training allow you to transform your needs, desires and intuitions into an artistic practice that can be shown and shared, one that has real meaning in today’s world?

The works in this exhibition, for the most part produced or selected for this specific context, reveal the trajectories followed by these artists as their practice developed and they grew into full adulthood, the situations and emotions they went through, the critical filter of their reading and encounters, and their close attention to the world, both disquieted and engaged, and ultimately restorative.