PERSONA
“All the world is a theatre, and all men and women are but actors in it.” To this famous line by William Shakespeare,1 we are tempted to add an existential question that many philosophers and artists have taken up: who are we beyond the role we play and beyond our appearance? The complexity of this […]
KATARZYNA WIESIOLEK
Intimate space Beyond their breathtaking virtuosity, Katarzyna Wiesiolek’s drawings have a disturbing, almost tactile presence. One might be afraid of cutting oneself by grabbing one of her broken glasses or of getting dirty by sitting on her moldy plastic garden chair; one might want to pull on the cord of the blind with its misaligned […]
NADEZDA NIKOLOVA
Elemental Forms Nadezda Nikolova (b. 1978, Serbia) is a Croatian-Bulgarian-American artist based in Oakland, California. She studied 19th-century phototrophic (light energy capturing) printing processes at the University of Kentucky and the George Eastman Museum. Having learned the old photographic techniques so prized and reused today, she produces photograms on wet collodion plates (called tintypes). Imaginary […]
THOMAS DEMAND, THE ART OF TROMPE-L’OEIL
France – Paris The first major retrospective of the German photographer and sculptor is on show at the Jeu de Paume, presenting his photographs of life-size reconstructions. Since the 1990s, Thomas Cyrill Demand has been questioning the viewer’s relationship to the image and to time. His photographs reconstitute places through significant events, media episodes, or […]
THE GATES OF POSSIBILITY, Art & Science Fiction
“Science fiction is the subversive agent of doubt […] Under the guise of anticipation, it sheds light on current societal and scientific developments and trends, holds out the hope of a world re-enchanted by the power of our imagination and makes us dream of transforming utopia into reality.”1 From Sandy Skoglund’s fluorescent green Radioactive […]
GREGORY CHATONSKY, DOUBLE GLOVE
France – Paris Having made the web the breeding ground for new narratives hybridizing the real and the virtual via artificial intelligence, Gregory Chatonsky seems to have opened the Pandora’s box of our post-modern world: delegating to the “artificial imagination” the composition of his dystopian visions, the artist seems to have sold his soul to […]
BRUCE NAUMAN : NEONS, CORRIDORS, ROOMS
5,000 square meters of corridors and lighted rooms, tunnels, neon sculptures… The Pirelli hangar has been transformed into a labyrinth of lights. An ideal place to experiment with the multimedia research initiated by Bruce Nauman in the mid-1960s, interacting with the visual, bodily, luminous, and sound perception of space. Organized in collaboration with the Tate […]
HANS OP DE BEECK : THE QUIET PARADE
After the abandoned campsite frozen in a gangue of grey paint installed in a shed hangar at the last Lyon Biennial (We were the last to stay),1 a new gigantic immersive installation with the appearance of a city by Hans Op de Beeck has taken over the spaces of the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki. […]
SUSA TEMPLIN / NICK DAWES : LAYERS UPON LAYERS
By superimposing photographic images of fragmented architectures assembled by interlocking and misalignment, transparency and chromatic and luminous interference, Susa Templin delivers a kaleidoscopic vision of space. Discovered on the stand of the Anita Beckers gallery in Paris + by Art Basel, her compositions, displayed under plexiglass, have immediately seduced us for the harmonious softness of […]
MATHIAS KISS HAS THE ART OF GETTING OUT OF THE BOX
He frees himself from codes to recompose them as he pleases, creating metaphorical works that reflect his multi-faceted work. Walking on gold leaves in the Gobelins Chapel for the Mobilier National, treading the sky when entering his studio, bathing in the water of a mirror at the Palais des Beaux-arts in Lille… Mathias Kiss takes […]
TRUE STORIES
Would the real not exist outside of its narratives? At a time when our living space is being invaded by videos and series, realities and stories, fake news and scrolling, has storytelling become the beating heart of our lives and of world television news, while the metaverse is preparing us to become avatars? Such is […]
BEFORE THE STORM
“Unstable landscapes, captured in a desynchronized round of time [representing] new ecosystems in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself.”1 Such are the works of the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in its new exhibition, initiated “against the backdrop of climate disruption, in the urgency of our present as in the eye […]
MIN JUNG-YEON : MIRAGE
“What is painting? It plunges the divine into perceptibility, it is an eye – it sees the times, it is abstract thought and makes worlds and inter-worlds conceive.” Markus Luperz1 Two years ago, in the rotunda of the Musée Guimet (Musée National d’Art asiatique Guimet, Paris), Min Jung-Yeon led us into the unfathomable depths of […]
FOCUS / A WORK FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LOUIS VUITTON FOUNDATION ANIMITAS BY CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI
Three hundred Japanese bells suspended from long rods in the immaculate whiteness of a landscape at the end of the world (Ile d’Orléans in Quebec) make us hear, in their soft tinkling, “the music of the stars and the voices of floating souls” (Christian Boltanski, sic). Filmed in a long sequence, from dawn to dusk, […]
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN, PRECURSOR OF PERFORMANCE ART
The Barbican Centre in London is staging another major exhibition, “Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics,” which celebrates the work of the American pioneer of feminist art and performance. With her strong activism, women’s freedom has always been her favorite subject. Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) has never ceased to challenge the diktats of patriarchy, the objectification and erasure […]
TIM BREUER, EN CHUTE LIBRE
From the watery depths seem to emerge impalpable, indecisive forms; floating and transparent bodies, sometimes evoking human plasticity, sometimes that of algae or jellyfish, or of some translucent and luminescent creatures of the abyss… A strange world without bottom and without thickness, that of the young Berlin painter Tim Breuer, who was the pupil of […]
BAO VUONG, BEYOND THE BLACK
“The confrontation with the two infinities [the sky and the sea] humbles us and brings us back to a dialogue with ourselves.” At the end of the 1970s, barely one year old, Bao Vuong, huddled in his parents’ arms, made the long crossing on a makeshift boat, like thousands of other boat people fleeing the […]
DAVID SPRIGGS AUGMENTS REALITY
Space is a visual theater that the Vancouver-based artist explores by layering it to create intangible landscapes that invite us to look beyond form. It’s all about perception. Shaped by juxtaposing several parallel layers of transparent shapes or colors that he suspends, his works provide the illusion of a third dimension, the alternation of layers […]
CYPRIEN GAILLARD : THE DEFENDER OF TIME
While bringing the Defender of Time back to life (at Lafayette Anticipations), Cyprien Gaillard gives us a glimpse of the ruins and disorders of our time (at the Palais de Tokyo). An initiatory exhibition in two parts that says a lot about our breaks and cracks and our dreams of reconstruction and regeneration. Once upon […]
YANN BAGOT : THE ALCHEMY OF NATURE
“Seeking to give body to the organicity of ink, tested by water and salt on paper, I have drawn a breath, immersed in a flow of air, light, matter. Body to body with the lungs of the world, to which our existences are connected. Yann Bagot engages in a real hand-to-hand encounter with the landscape, […]
BEN SLEDSENS
But what makes Ben Sledsens so successful? Spotted by the eminent Antwerp gallery owner Tim Van Laere before he even graduated, the Belgian painter (born in 1991 in Antwerp) cannot satisfy every order he receives – to the point of having a waiting list – while each of his new exhibitions is sold out! Who […]
FOCUS / A WORK FROM THE LOUIS VUITTON FOUNDATION COLLECTION
DAVID CLAERBOUT: The Algiers’ sections of a happy moment moment], 2008, video, 37 minutes (single-channel video projection, black and white, stereo audio, 37 min loop). Ruins, shadows, and smiles… But also the flight of seagulls over the fences and the melodies of a mandolin: David Claerbout takes us to a small football field nestled between […]
PHOTOGRAPHY, DRAWING, AND ABSTRACTION IN A NEW EXHIBITION AT AHAH
The ahah is an association created in 2017 which offers visual artists a personalized accompaniment for a minimum of 5 years and participates in the development of research in the arts. The association puts in abyss the work of Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer, who have invited Simone Holliger to exhibit alongside them. “In the […]
SOHEILA SOKHANVARI’S REBELS
The Iranian painter celebrates the feminist icons of pre-revolutionary Iran in the exhibition “Rebel, Rebel” at the Barbican Centre Art Gallery in London. As thousands of protesters continue to unite for freedom and women’s rights after the death in Tehran of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested by the “vice police,” Soheila Sokhanvari […]