During the renovation period of MAMCO Geneva, the availability of works from the collection enables the launch of off-site projects conceived as spaces for dialogue between Swiss museums. In 2026, MAMCO continues its Tour de Suisse in partnership with the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds, presenting an exhibition dedicated to Marcia Hafif (1929–2018), a pivotal figure of radical painting in the 1970s.

Born in California, Hafif began her career within the movement of Abstract Expressionism before settling in Rome between 1961 and 1969. There, she was deeply influenced by architecture, urban signage, and everyday forms—elements that nourished a pictorial vocabulary grounded in symmetry, repetition, and vibrant colors. Her Roman paintings, traversed by soft curves, evoke both feminine bodies and the silhouettes of Etruscan ceramics, without ever fixing their meaning.

Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she confronted the exhaustion of abstraction. To continue painting, she chose to begin anew: eliminating motifs and subjectivity to focus on the very essence of painting—pigments, gestures, tools. It is in this quest that she explored monochrome, not as an end, but as “a new beginning.” She recorded each series in an inventory, a true laboratory of pictorial material. In 1978, she co-founded the Radical Painting group with Olivier Mosset, bringing together artists committed to a radical rethinking of painting.

MAMCO has lent approximately forty works by the artist, enabling the exhibition’s curators—Kahina Hamlaoui and David Lemaire—to present a chronological and analytical journey through the work of an artist who made painting its own subject: a continuous reflection on the very conditions of her practice.

For more information, please visit the website of the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds.