Featured Events in Paris in April, 2024 (May Updated)

celebrates the dynamic relationship between photography and the writing of Annie Ernaux. Winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature, Annie Ernaux is known for her social and feminist commitment, particularly to the younger generation, and for her ability to explore universal themes such as memory, identity and the human condition. Her precise style and emotional analysis have made her a major figure in contemporary literature. It combines texts from Ernaux’s book , 1993 – a record of happenings on trains, shops and streets in-and-around Cergy-Pontoise between 1985 and 1992 – with more than one hundred and fifty images from the MEP collection by major photographers such as Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, Daido Moriyama, Janine Niepce, Issei Suda, Henry Wessel and Bernard Pierre Wolff, amongst others. The image selection covers the second half of 20th century and includes photographs mostly taken in France but also in England, Japan, USA and other countries. Photography has long been an interest of Annie Ernaux’s and references to childhood photographs appear across her work. In she takes a new approach, by directly attempting to write as if making images: “To describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.” The exhibition pays homage to Annie Ernaux's objective, by treating her words as photographs, displaying them on the walls of the museum. The diverse photographs that appear alongside her texts reveal a shared interest in the role of place and space in how modern life unfolds. Both images and texts unveil how ordinary and insignificant events we observe in the city reflects back at us broader societal inequalities and stereotypes. The exhibition is grouped around themes that underpin Ernaux’s observations – from the daily rituals of travel and consumption, to the performances of class and gender performance that underpin society’s hierarchies. Also considered are the feelings of fear and loneliness prevalent in the modern city, and the fine lines between what is public and private, shared and separate. The exhibition is the product of a residency conducted by the curator and writer Lou Stoppard in April 2022, which focused on using the MEP collection as a catalyst for new research and for linking photography to other mediums. To coincide with the exhibition, a catalogue will be published in French and in English by Éditions MACK in partnership with the MEP. Curator: Lou Stoppard Curator for the MEP: Victoria Aresheva

Tom Penn, son of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn and Irving Penn, proposed this exhibition project to the MEP. He has generously donated part of this remarkable collection to the MEP. Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn (1911-1992), dancer, model, photographer, stylist and sculptor, is considered to be the first ‘supermodel’ in history. For 20 years, she was frequently featured in and , appearing on around 200 covers of the leading fashion magazines of her time. In 1949, at the age of 38, she was at the height of her career, and appeared on the cover of magazine. A much sought-after model, she collaborated with the greatest fashion photographers of the period: Fernand Fonssagrives, her first husband; Horst P. Horst, whose favourite model she was; George Hoyningen-Huene, George Platt Lynes, Erwin Blumenfeld, who famously photographed her hanging from the Eiffel Tower in a dress by Lucien Lelong; Louise Dahl- Wolfe, whose resolutely modern style suited Lisa perfectly; Irving Penn, whom she married in 1950, and who made her his partner in his greatest photographs, Richard Avedon, her friend Frances McLaughlin-Gill, the first woman photographer to be signed by ; and many others, including Kathryn Abbe, James Abbe Jr., Gene Fenn, Otto Fenn, Toni Frissell, Harold Halma, Genevieve Naylor, John Rawlings and Lillian Bassman. More than just a model, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn contributed extensively to the creative process. Most of the photographs were taken in the studio and required long hours of preparation and a real connection between photographer and model.

Son titre, Small is “still” beautiful, est un clin d’œil à l’exposition inaugurale de la galerie présentée en mars 2021, intitulée Small is beautiful. Comme trois ans auparavant, Clavé Fine Art met à l’honneur le petit format dans toute sa grandeur, mais elle invite cette fois-ci des artistes contemporains à se prêter au jeu. Des œuvres inédites de Léo Nataf, Claudine Drai, Pauline Guerrier, Sacha Floch Poliakoff, Félix Beausoleil, François Réau et Virgile Belaval, tous exposés dans la galerie depuis sa création, côtoient ainsi pendant deux mois des pièces de petite taille d’artistes majeurs du XXe siècle tels que César Baldaccini, Antoni Clavé, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Germaine Richier, Pablo Picasso ou encore Zao Wou-Ki. En mars 2021, la galerie Clavé Fine Art ouvre ses portes au cœur du 14e arrondissement de Paris, nichée dans l’ancien atelier de César redessiné par l’architecte japonais Kengo Kuma. Durant ces trois années, des œuvres de maîtres modernes et celles d’artistes contemporains ont tour à tour dialogué à leur manière avec le volume et la lumière qui émanent de l’intérieur de la galerie et le délicat washi de Kengo Kuma qui en recouvre ses murs. Du 11 mars au 11 mai 2021, la galerie inaugure son espace avec l’exposition Small is beautiful, présentant un ensemble de 16 œuvres de petits formats d’Alexander Calder, César, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Clavé, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Zoran Music, Germaine Richier, Pierre Soulages et Antoni Tàpies. Le principe est de ne présenter que des pièces de petite taille, comme l’eut fait Ernst Beyeler, qui par trois fois (en 1954-55, 1967-68 et 1978) organisa des expositions de petits formats, présentant des oeuvres « aussi grandes qu’il le faut, et pas plus ». En mars 2024, à l’aune de son troisième anniversaire, Clavé Fine Art organise une exposition clin d’œil à son inauguration et invite tous les artistes contemporains qui ont exposé depuis 2021 dans la galerie à créer pour l’occasion des œuvres de petite taille. Elle présente ainsi les créations immaculées en papier mâché de Claudine Drai, les céramiques telluriques de Léo Nataf, des tissages de la série des Minimes de Sheila Hicks et les créations à la mine de plomb ou en bronze de François Réau, aux côtés de l’univers pop de Sacha Floch Poliakoff, des créations colorées de Félix Beausoleil et Virgile Belaval et du travail inspiré des savoir-faire traditionnels et techniques ancestrales de Pauline Guerrier. L’accrochage mêle ces productions inédites à de petites œuvres d’artistes majeurs du XXe siècle, tels que César Baldaccini, Antoni Clavé, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Giorgio Morandi, Claude de Soria, Jean Paul Riopelle, Pablo Picasso ou encore Zao Wou-Ki. Ce sont ainsi autant d’artistes, de techniques et de matières différents qui sont réunis chez Clavé Fine Art, avec un point commun : le dévoilement de la splendeur du petit format, sous toutes ses formes.

In the early 1990s, while studying at the famous Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, Atul Dodiya spent a year at the Paris École des Beaux Arts. The experience proved decisive in the career of an artist who has been building bridges between the history of Indian and Western art ever since. Passionate about literature and film, he uses a unique language, fluctuating between the figurative and the abstract, where he incorporates references to popular culture, poetry and modern art masters, from Matisse to Motherwell, Picabia to Mondrian. Atul Dodiya possesses an astonishing capacity to reinvent himself and his style, equally happy to draw on photorealism or symbolism. He paints on metal roller shutters, creates photographic assemblages and devises largescale installations combining object and painting. Embedded in his works is a reflection on the history of India and emergence of new political aspirations. The exhibition’s entry point is the Mumbai movie world of the 1960s that marked the artist’s childhood. The title “I know you. I do. O’ stranger” is inspired by the film Charulata (1964) by Satyajit Ray. The deceptively ordinary chosen scenes are the fruit of complex compositions where the actor’s fame takes a back seat to anonymity. “A recurring theme in my cinematographic stories,” explains the artist, “the characters encounter each other just like strangers.” Liberated from all narrative context, their mysterious beauty is revealed, leaving the viewer free to interpret their meaning. In the manner of a filmmaker, Atul Dodiya directs our gaze through space, from one canvas to the next. Certain fragments of a roll of film seemingly pay tribute to the technical feats of cinema. Others highlight the emergence of a new consumer society, with hand-crafted movie sets becoming, in the artist’s hands, some sophisticated furnishings and interiors. The outward appearance of an economy of means conceals a demanding and meticulous painting technique. Atul Dodiya transforms freeze frame photographs in a preliminary monochrome print. Projected onto the canvas, he goes over the scene in black and white until chiaroscuro transcends movement. He completes the image’s metamorphosis by covering it in translucent oil paint, swapping the vibrant palette favoured by Bollywood films for a pastel, almost ephemeral, colour range. This transformation of the image as it is filmed, photographed, illuminated and colourised becomes a metaphor for the impact of modernity and globalisation on perception and traditions. “In this very personal selection of moments frozen in time,” he continues, “the unreal becomes a new story, another truth.” Atul Dodiya was born in 1959 in Mumbai where he lives and works. His work features in the collections of a host of international museums, including the Mnam-Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London and Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has taken part in most major exhibitions of Indian art held in the USA, Europe and Asia over the last twenty years: Atul Dodiya, Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit, USA (2020), After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India at Queens Museum in New York (2015), India: Art Now at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2012), La Route de la soie at Tri Postal in Lille and Paris Delhi Bombay at the Centre Pompidou (2011), Inside India at Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana Turin and The Empire Strikes Back at the Saatchi Gallery in London (2010), and Indian Summer at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris (2000). He also participated in Documenta 12 in Kassel (curated by Roger Buergel) in 2007, the Gwangju Biennale (curated by Okwui Enwezor) in 2008, Moscow Biennale (curated by Jean-Hubert Martin) in 2009, Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012, and 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7) in Brisbane in 2012. In 2013, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi organised the first retrospective of his work in India (curated by Ranjit Hoskote). In 2014, Bhau Daji Lad in Mumbai paid tribute to his work with a major exhibition: 7000 Museums. In 2019, he was among the artists showcased at India’s Venice Biennale participation, with a largescale installation dedicated to Gandhi. This is the fourth exhibition of Atul Dodiya’s work at Galerie Templon.

Artists whose work, unique and profound, made by and for human beings, is fundamentally visionary and inherently valuable. At a time when we are facing fundamental questions for the future of humanity, including Artificial Intelligence with all its advantages and dangers, global warming and the urbanization of cities transformed into megacities, the gallery is more than ever committed to defending artists who propose a world based on notions of sustainable development, balance and peace, combining in their works past, present and future visions, a world that embodies the major challenges of the 21st century. The cycle of exhibitions entitled , inaugurated in February 2023 with the exhibition by Dani Karavan and Jean-Paul Philippe, continued in mid-September 2023 with by Antoine Grumbach, and closes with the exhibition by Susumu Shingu, sculptor of water and wind with whom the gallery has been collaborating since 2006, who created a Wind Museum in Japan and recently exhibited at the Château de Chambord to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. Susumu Shingu has exhibited recently with Renzo Piano at the Nakanoshima Art Museum in Osaka, Japan, entitled ( July- September 2023); they have completed over a dozen projects together. The exhibition also provided an opportunity to delve deeper into Susumu Shingu’s research into perpetual movement based on the natural energies that drive his sculpture, with drawings, paintings, sculptures and models of his major projects.

Mesoamerica is a personal reflection inspired by Daniel Dezeuze's travels to Mexico and local Maya architecture. Daniel Dezeuze visited Mexico for the first time in the mid-1960s. The year he spent there proved to be a lasting influence. His latest works, wall assemblages made using offcuts of painted wood, hark back to the pivotal experience in the jungle, home to long-gone civilisations. The ground floor of the exhibition features a "negotiating table" surrounded by an installation of "weapons" and "shields", evoking the tensions between nature and culture, indigenous people and colonisers. The simplicity of the artist's chosen materials - wood, mesh and corks - and the delicacy of the way he combines them offer a disturbing exploration of the frontiers between art and crafts, the untouched and the policed, as well as the fragility of civilisations and modernity. In contrast, the gallery basement is inhabited by a collection of drawings Daniel Dezeuze has put together, a jungle of flowers, insects, mosquitoes and snails. Bordering on the abstract, the series of pieces depicts fragile yet untameable nature, illustrating the artist's obsession with "capturing the uncapturable”. Daniel Dezeuze has spent almost fifty years deconstructing the notion of painting, exploring its traditional techniques and materials in a quest to delve into the role, history and practice of painting. The impulse to spurn the canvas began very early on his career: he flipped stretchers against the wall, playing with empty spaces and three-dimensionality to push the boundaries of artistic traditions. His work is steeped in craftwork practices and anthropology, reflecting his interest in nomadic and non-European cultures. His remarkable journey has led him to experiment with what are seen as “poor”materials—wood, gauze, net and fabric, as well as subverted objects. His oeuvre has heavily influenced new generations of European artists, and features in numerous public collections, including at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musée Fabre in Montpellier, Carré d’Art in Nîmes and Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC) in Marseille. Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in the southern French port town of Sète. His work has been widely exhibited since the 1970s in France and internationally. The Musée de Grenoble held a retrospective of his art in 2017 while the FRAC Occitanie in Montpellier held an exhibition of his drawings in 2015. MAMAC in Nice (2012), Centrale Electrique in Brussels (2009) and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2009) have also shown his work. In 2008, he exhibited his entire oeuvre at the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète.

Marshaling a dizzying variety of materials and methods both established and unconventional, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation, distorting scale and reimagining common objects and images through technological intervention. By evoking and reworking historical genres and motifs, he embraces transformation and decay, producing art that inhabits a space between the real and the imagined. The series represents a conscious flattening out and forcing together of disparate categories and associations, calling the status and relationship of each image’s components into question. While earlier foreground food and manufactured objects, the paintings on view in Paris feature enlarged vintage publicity headshots of popular film actors Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Gene Tierney, partially obscured by silkscreened images of flowers. The subjects’ eyes gleam with mystery, while the vibrant colors of the blooms reflect the women’s enigmatic hidden depths. Fischer’s witty clash of images summons the romantic and sexual associations of flowers while hinting at the ephemeral character of glamour and fame; it also evokes the mustache that Marcel Duchamp penciled onto a postcard reproduction of the in or (1919). The tense face-off between obfuscation and potential enacted by the works on view gives rise to the formal “problems” referenced in their collective title, while the masking of their subjects’ facial features hints at psychic and conceptual erasure. The blooms evoke floriography (the use of flowers as a coded poetic language), their pink, white, and blue colors echoing the symbolic colors of the . And while their large scale suggests power and strength, they also serve as a metaphor for the women’s emergence into the sometimes harsh light of fame.

His pictures, often taken in his time off while working on films, many directed by Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, were, at first, not intended to be displayed. These intimate, personal snapshots, captured in moments of solitude, contextualize the world through his eyes. As a cinematographer, Müller chose to work with film directors who had something to say about life; his Polaroids bear witness to his humble and poetic outlook on life. The original Polaroids and prints on display show an amalgamation of cinematic still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes as well as interior views, mainly shot in different cities in the United States. From neon signage on a motel in Santa Fe, street lamps in Los Angeles, the play of shadows on a wall in Memphis to the illuminated Eiffel Tower in Paris, these eclectic images interpret varying degrees of luminosity. In an essay written about his Polaroids, Bianca Stigter notes: “Robby Müller is often compared to Vermeer, because they are both Dutch and because they both handle light in a reverent way. They do not use light to convey a scene; they use a scene to convey the light. Light is not what makes things visible; things are what makes light visible. The Polaroids, especially as seen in series, are preoccupied with light, how it shines through a curtain or a shirt, how daylight gives over to artificial light, how light can have color and give color, how different light sources compete and fade.” While working on long-feature films, Müller spent months on the road, sleeping in hotel rooms where he observed reflections on mirrors, windows or TV screens, noticing the particularities of light cast from a table lamp, and discerning the sun’s rays descending on a coffee maker or piercing through shutters. As Bianca Stigter tells it: “It is possible to see a picture of a hotel room and not think of hotel rooms, especially if that picture is taken by Robby Müller, cinematographer extraordinaire, who manages to do away with the useful categories children spend a lifetime learning only later to find solace when they do not apply, to see walls and faces just as things for the light to play upon. Sartre’s protagonist in Nausea felt disgust confronted by familiar things he suddenly could not name, but in the works of Robby Müller it becomes a liberation. There is freedom in this ignorance, like a precious gift; in a world where everything is weighed down by meaning the sudden absence is strange and exhilarating.” Robby Müller (Curaçao, 1940 – Amsterdam, 2018) was a cinematographer and a photographer. Throughout his fifty-year long artistic career as a cinematographer, Müller collaborated with the most talented and renowned film directors such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Barbet Schroeder, Andrzej Wajda, Lars von Trier and Raoul Ruiz. The more than 60 feature films he worked on include: (1977) and (1984) by Wim Wenders; (1986), (1989) and (1999) by Jim Jarmusch; (1996) and (2000) by Lars von Trier. In 2002 he also filmed (2002) in collaboration with his long-time friend Steve McQueen on the Caribbean island of Grenada; Müller’s luminous footage subsequently also became a central part of McQueen’s (2002-2015). Robby Müller’s extensive archive of Polaroid photographs have been shown in several exhibitions since 2016: in the retrospective , at the EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2016) and at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin (2017); , curated by Andrea Müller-Schirmer, in Arles (2019), at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (2020). In remembrance of Robby Müller, the Netherlands Society of Cinematographers, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Andrea Müller-Schirmer established the annual Robby Müller Award in 2020. The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Andrea Müller-Schirmer, founder of the Robby Müller Archive, and Annet Gelink Gallery.

Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager's wide range of hybrid forms has had an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, the phantasmagoric. Through an embrace of everyday materials, and principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical display, her diverse media has included construction, documents, language, objects, taxidermy, drawings, photographs, fabric, embroidery, image collections, albums, sculpture and installation. Messager has explored fairy tales, mythology and doppelgangers throughout her œuvre. Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration.

Au printemps 2024, l'Institut suédois présente « Suivre les ondes », une sélection d’œuvres de Lars Fredrikson, en dialogue avec deux artistes contemporaines, Anastasia Ax et Christine Ödlund. Dans cette exposition, présentée du 8 mars au 16 juin, se mêlent images et sculptures, poésie et lectures, mais aussi objets animés, mouvement et son. Au milieu des années 1940, Lars Fredrikson, jeune ingénieur radio, tente avec un ami de réaliser des sculptures à l’explosif sur une plage en Suède. La démarche artistique est pour le moins sensationnelle pour son temps et ouvre la voie à une œuvre singulière et variée. Bientôt, Lars Fredrikson se rend à Paris pour étudier l’art et restera en France jusqu’à la fin de sa vie. Principalement installé dans le sud, il crée une œuvre que l’on peut qualifier de révolutionnaire dans les domaines de la sculpture cinétique, de l’image, du son et des nouvelles technologies. Une œuvre qui implique de nombreuses collaborations novatrices à la croisée du son et de la poésie, de la sculpture et du mouvement, ainsi que d’importantes avancées technologiques au service de l’art. Devenu professeur à la Villa Arson de Nice, il consacre également une grande partie de sa vie à la pédagogie innovante, en tant que fondateur et directeur du premier département de son et de recherches électro-acoustiques et visuelles. Malgré ces percées importantes, Lars Fredrikson est pratiquement inconnu en Suède et guère plus connu en France, à l’exception d’un petit cercle d’historiens de l’art, de conservateurs et d’artistes. Au printemps 2024, l’Institut suédois présente une sélection d’œuvres de Lars Fredrikson, en dialogue avec deux artistes contemporaines, Anastasia Ax et Christine Ödlund. Toutes deux ont une pratique polyvalente qui évolue librement dans un large et riche champ d’expressions : la sculpture et diverses formes d’images, la performance, le mouvement et le son. Elles partagent aussi avec Lars Fredrikson une grande fascination pour la façon dont l’énergie circule et se transforme à travers différents matériaux et pour la manière dont la communication opère entre diverses formes de vie et d’états. Ainsi, dans l’exposition se côtoient les larges feuilles en inox martelé et plié, sculptures électro-mécaniques, toiles motorisées, pièces sonores et « écritures subversives » de Lars Fredrikson, les aquarelles ésotériques et installations électro-acoustiques de plantes de Christine Ödlund, et les plâtres lacérés et installations performatives d’Anastasia Ax. L’exposition est activée par un riche programme de performances, concerts, rencontres et lectures dans l’esprit de Lars Fredrikson. Deux concerts sont organisés avec les compositeurs Tarek Atoui et Hampus Lindwall et en collaboration avec l’EMS (Elektronmusikstudion, ou Studio de musique électronique) à Stockholm qui, depuis soixante ans, constitue un important point de rencontre entre musique électronique contemporaine et art sonore. Il y aura aussi des événements autour de la poésie sonore, une forme d’art que Lars Fredrikson, ami et collaborateur de nombreux poètes, affectionnait particulièrement. Suivre les ondes est la première d’une série d’expositions de l’Institut suédois qui se propose de mettre en dialogue des artistes historiquement importants et des artistes contemporains, afin de faire valoir l’impact des premiers sur les seconds, de même que leur pertinence actuelle.

Au printemps 2024, l'Institut suédois présente « Suivre les ondes », une sélection d’œuvres de Lars Fredrikson, en dialogue avec deux artistes contemporaines, Anastasia Ax et Christine Ödlund. Dans cette exposition, présentée du 8 mars au 16 juin, se mêlent images et sculptures, poésie et lectures, mais aussi objets animés, mouvement et son. Au milieu des années 1940, Lars Fredrikson, jeune ingénieur radio, tente avec un ami de réaliser des sculptures à l’explosif sur une plage en Suède. La démarche artistique est pour le moins sensationnelle pour son temps et ouvre la voie à une œuvre singulière et variée. Bientôt, Lars Fredrikson se rend à Paris pour étudier l’art et restera en France jusqu’à la fin de sa vie. Principalement installé dans le sud, il crée une œuvre que l’on peut qualifier de révolutionnaire dans les domaines de la sculpture cinétique, de l’image, du son et des nouvelles technologies. Une œuvre qui implique de nombreuses collaborations novatrices à la croisée du son et de la poésie, de la sculpture et du mouvement, ainsi que d’importantes avancées technologiques au service de l’art. Devenu professeur à la Villa Arson de Nice, il consacre également une grande partie de sa vie à la pédagogie innovante, en tant que fondateur et directeur du premier département de son et de recherches électro-acoustiques et visuelles. Malgré ces percées importantes, Lars Fredrikson est pratiquement inconnu en Suède et guère plus connu en France, à l’exception d’un petit cercle d’historiens de l’art, de conservateurs et d’artistes. Au printemps 2024, l’Institut suédois présente une sélection d’œuvres de Lars Fredrikson, en dialogue avec deux artistes contemporaines, Anastasia Ax et Christine Ödlund. Toutes deux ont une pratique polyvalente qui évolue librement dans un large et riche champ d’expressions : la sculpture et diverses formes d’images, la performance, le mouvement et le son. Elles partagent aussi avec Lars Fredrikson une grande fascination pour la façon dont l’énergie circule et se transforme à travers différents matériaux et pour la manière dont la communication opère entre diverses formes de vie et d’états. Ainsi, dans l’exposition se côtoient les larges feuilles en inox martelé et plié, sculptures électro-mécaniques, toiles motorisées, pièces sonores et « écritures subversives » de Lars Fredrikson, les aquarelles ésotériques et installations électro-acoustiques de plantes de Christine Ödlund, et les plâtres lacérés et installations performatives d’Anastasia Ax. L’exposition est activée par un riche programme de performances, concerts, rencontres et lectures dans l’esprit de Lars Fredrikson. Deux concerts sont organisés avec les compositeurs Tarek Atoui et Hampus Lindwall et en collaboration avec l’EMS (Elektronmusikstudion, ou Studio de musique électronique) à Stockholm qui, depuis soixante ans, constitue un important point de rencontre entre musique électronique contemporaine et art sonore. Il y aura aussi des événements autour de la poésie sonore, une forme d’art que Lars Fredrikson, ami et collaborateur de nombreux poètes, affectionnait particulièrement. Suivre les ondes est la première d’une série d’expositions de l’Institut suédois qui se propose de mettre en dialogue des artistes historiquement importants et des artistes contemporains, afin de faire valoir l’impact des premiers sur les seconds, de même que leur pertinence actuelle.

Dans la continuité de la thématique qu’il privilégie et qu’il nomme la fin du banal, il présentera un ensemble de peintures et de dessins, sur notre monde contemporain. « Après L’asphyxie, il y a quatre ans, je propose ma deuxième exposition personnelle à la galerie Les Filles du Calvaire dans leur nouvel espace : L’impuissance, à la recherche d’une esthétique adaptée au temps de la dérive climatique, désanthropocentré et sensible à la perte tragique de ce qui est encore là. Dans le cadre de la fin du banal, il s’agira d’une exposition aux thématiques éclatées, en lambeau, avec un titre faisant office de parfum. Celui-ci renvoie, encore aujourd’hui, de manière symptomatique, à une problématique sexuelle alors qu’il sera ici question d’impuissance politique et existentielle ainsi que de peinture, par des expériences limitées. Mais aussi d’une impuissance désirée : moins de puissance dans la dévastation, dans l’accaparement, dans l’emprise, plus de soin, plus de douceur, plus d’attention humble et de dignité au trésor quotidien qu’est le monde des apparences. On retrouvera ainsi des policiers allemands virilistes embourbés dans la gadoue, un coucher de soleil sur la mer que contemple une poubelle plastique, la plage d’Ostende ultra urbanisée rendue caduque par une montée des eaux, un mur frontal de briques couvertes de tags amoureux comme autant de traces publiques d’une existence étroite. « Dans la serre », une peinture qui m’a pris deux ans à élaborer, représente une foule faisant la queue dans un jardin artificiel. En pleine contre-productivité humaine et disharmonie du biotope, le traitement pictural du fourmillement des plantes est aussi précis que celui des humains. La multitude des sujets et la variété des vitesses d’exécution permettent également un déploiement de texture : peau, poil, gluant, visqueux, poisseux, ; il ne s’agit pas d’abandonner la joie de peindre. En témoigne un bestiaire comme un cul de vache, une coccinelle, un coq, un autoportrait ou un chat assoupi. L’exposition sera de plus ponctuée de petits formats à échelle de plantes saxicoles, cette verdure sans nom, trésor de vitalité, qui pousse vaillamment dans les interstices minéraux de nos villes et les rafraîchit. Encore prenant la forme d’une technique inventée : des gravures tirées à partir de dessin numérique sur iPad, permettant une finesse de trait inédite. On retrouvera, par ailleurs, ma série des « Distanciels » : des portraits au fusain exécutés par zoom pendant la pandémie, des visages rétro-éclairés par leur écran d’ordinateur dans l’ambiance et la qualité de connexion de leur confinement. Au sous-sol, une vidéo conceptuelle anxiogène « Vous êtes ici » contaminera l’ensemble de l’accrochage. Une réflexion frontale sur notre mode de vie présent, la part de violence et de poison qu’elle nécessite. Enfin dans l’attitude qui est la mienne depuis trois ans, chaque samedi de l’exposition à 17h, j’animerai en public un épisode des « Apparences », une chaîne YouTube et Twitch autour de la vitalité de la peinture contemporaine sur la scène française. » Thomas Lévy-Lasne

The sculptor, who used to say, “painting doesn't exist for me”, has nevertheless always been strongly atached to the engraved or drawn image. She recorded in her diaries the visual ideas that appeared to her and which, in her own words, she caught . Like her sculptures, with their shapeless, organic materials, her engraved work explores the ambiguity of the forms issuing from her fantasy-laced memories. She collects, skins, deconstructs, models and assembles. This interplay of back and forth, conducive to the engraver's art, is particularly evident in her , a feminine reinterpretation of the figure of the famous martyr pierced by arrows. In 1990, Bourgeois began the first version and would return to it several times, cropping the image, even using photocopying to develop her composition and/or transfer it to a copper plate. Born in France in 1911 and deceased in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the major artists of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Discovered late, her work, which eludes any artistic classification, has been the subject of major exhibitions and retrospectives around the world over the last 30 years. Her work was first presented in France in 1985 by Galerie Lelong. In 2000, Galerie Lelong & Co. published a volume of writings and interviews by Louise Bourgeois entitled, .

Jan Voss himself presents the new exhibition: Duo sur scène (Duo on Stage) “Monsieur Carton Plume (“Feather Board”) is a character who is entirely devoid of feathers, yet without having been plucked. He has a soft foam heart and a white skin that protects his heart. Lightweight, he presents himself well, despite his stiffness. And everyone knows Monsieur Papier, so he needs no introduction. I chose these two actors to appear on stage at 38, avenue Matignon because of their strong personalities, their distinction and their presence. They don't speak or write to us (although Monsieur Papier learnt this a long time ago), but through their poses, their way of being, of appearing, and, of course, through the colours of their appearance. A silent show, but not necessarily a mute one. The colours are bold, robust and contained within limits that Monsieur Plume has carefully controlled; he balances them on relatively stable grid-based scaffolding. We suspect that he’s got a thing for architecture. Monsieur Papier, on the other hand, prefers the same intense accoutrement of colours, sometimes exclusive, but with multiple tonal interferences. In his case, the contours are less clear-cut, the boundaries between different territories less controlled, with intrusions allowed. We suspect that he’s got a libertarian streak. Architects, libertarians, immigrants from who knows where, welcome all of you. Your residence permit on these walls is valid.” Jan Voss was born in Hamburg (Germany) in 1936. He lives and works between Paris and Berlin. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich between 1956 and 1960, the artist permanently settled in Paris. He was a professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he taught from 1987 to 1992. He has been the subject of major exhibitions, including at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dunkirk in 2002, the Palais Synodal in Sens, France in 2008, the Museum Arnhem in the Netherlands in 2010, the Espace d'art contemporain André Malraux in Colmar, France in 2021, and Château Lynch-Bages in Pauillac, France in 2022. His works now feature in the collections of many museums: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Moderna Musset in Stockholm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dunkerque, Centre Pompidou in Paris. From now until 2025, the Musée d'art moderne de Céret will be presenting major works on paper as part of a group exhibition marking the reopening of the museum. A monograph on Voss by Yves Michaud was published in 2001 and a second by Anne Tronche in 2015.

Since the 1980s, Galerie Lelong has regularly presented Richard Serra's etchings in its Paris space, building up a remarkable body of work over the years. (2022) is a suite of six graphic works produced in close collaboration with master printer Xavier Fumat at the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles. These prints are spectacular in their size and sculptural quality, which can only be appreciated by seeing them in person. The artist and the workshop have pushed the limits of what a large, thick sheet of paper, almost entirely covered in black matter, can bear. Playing with the idea of weight and balance on paper, these monumental etchings are presented in a frame designed by the artist, without glass or plexiglass; the first five of them measure 153 x 168 cm (roughly 5’ x 6’), and the sixth 183 x 213 cm (roughly 6’ x 7’). More than their size, it is their exceptional material that impresses and even fascinates. Highly textured, made with a mixture of hand-applied oil-based ink, etching ink and silica, they are, from a sculptor’s perspective, another facet of the (“beyond black”) experiment conducted by the painter Pierre Soulages. Serra began work on this project in early 2020, just before the first pandemic-induced lockdown, which seriously disrupted the workshop's activity. As the work was carried out intermittently, the trial prints were sent back and forth to the artist in New York until the final proof of each print was signed. Obtaining the quantities of ink and paper required for the project presented its own challenges. Consequently, from start to finish, this project took almost three years to complete. Here it is, shown in Paris for the first time. Richard Serra (born 1939 in San Francisco) is one of the most important sculptors of the 21st century. He has exhibited in major museums and created site-specific works for public and private spaces around the world. His work has been the subject of two retrospectives at MoMA, in 1986 and 2007. Other major recent exhibitions have been held at the Guggenheim in Bilbao (1999), the Museum of Art in Saint-Louis, Missouri (2003, 2014) and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (2004). His drawings have been exhibited at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011-12). Those familiar with his work will remember the spectacular , as part of Monumenta at the Grand Palais, Paris (2008); his work was permanently installed in 2014 in the desert, 70 km from Doha in Qatar. Serra has participated in Documenta four times (1972, 1977, 1982 and 1987), and in the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984, 2001, 2013). The artist lives and works in New York.

Reconnue d’utilité publique par décret en Conseil d’État le 22 novembre 1974, la Fondation est l’une des rares institutions en France dont le fondateur fut l’artiste lui-même. Si l’histoire des dix premières années était étroitement liée aux activités de l’artiste, elle demeure, depuis le décès de Jean Dubuffet, très vivante et active. Les années « anniversaires » sont autant d’occasions de faire le point sur les activités passées que sur l’avenir d’une institution. En 1994, les vingt ans avaient donné lieu à des expositions axées sur les collections de la Fondation. En 2004, les trente ans avaient été marqués par l’exposition de l’important legs de la fille de l’artiste, Isalmina Dubuffet et par l’achèvement de la restauration de la Closerie Falbala, classée monument historique en 1998. Enfin, en 2014, les quarante ans avaient été l’occasion de présenter les acquisitions de la Fondation depuis le décès de Jean Dubuffet. En 2024, la Fondation organise une exposition scénographiée en trois temps. Une salle est consacrée à une chronologie visuelle (timeline) chroniquant les 50 ans d’activités de la fondation. Deux salles sont dédiées à des œuvres majeures de la collection, axées sur le portrait et la figure : dons de l’artiste, legs de sa fille et acquisitions plus récentes. Une dernière salle évoquant l’atelier de la Cartoucherie de Vincennes met un coup de projecteur sur la dotation initiale, apport essentiel lors de la constitution de la Fondation. En effet, l’un des principes permettant la reconnaissance d’utilité publique d’une fondation est l’apport d’une dotation initiale devant permettre le financement de l’objet social de celle-ci. Quand Jean Dubuffet crée sa fondation, il a d’abord dans l’esprit de préserver deux de ses réalisations terminées dans l’année : la Closerie Falbala à Périgny-sur-Yerres et les éléments de son spectacle Coucou Bazar, produit récemment à New York et Paris. Si ces deux œuvres uniques font naturellement partie de la dotation initiale, Dubuffet, soucieux de l’avenir de sa fondation, va la doter de toutes ses maquettes d’architecture et projets de monuments afin de lui permettre de réaliser des sculptures pour des collections privées, des institutions ou des lieux publics. Les droits qui en découlent constituent donc l’une de ses principales ressources. L’objectif de Dubuffet était que ces projets, puissent, après son décès et dans le respect de son œuvre, devenir réalité. Les agrandissements ne sont plus réalisés dans les ateliers de Périgny-sur-Yerres, transformés en salles d’exposition, mais sont toujours réalisés sous le contrôle de la Fondation qui supervise chaque étape, du moulage de la maquette à l’installation finale sur le site. La Fondation conserve aujourd’hui plus de 2500 œuvres, peintures, sculptures, maquettes d’architecture et projets de monuments, gouaches, dessins et estampes. Rares aussi sont les artistes qui ont, de leur vivant, entrepris d’organiser leurs propres archives. La richesse de la Fondation n’est pas uniquement constituée de son patrimoine artistique mais également de cet extraordinaire fonds de documentation, source inépuisable pour la connaissance de l’homme, de sa pensée et de son œuvre artistique, littéraire et musicale. Toutes les activités de la Fondation se développent à partir de cet inestimable fonds patrimonial.

Around the table to which Amy Bravo invites us, we are confronted with the large, somewhat hieratic figures, more or less avatars of the artist, who inhabit her works. These figures, whose bodies are sparsely sketched out, and which the artist describes as female, do not correspond to anything definite, neither in terms of gender, species or status: they wear braids, have nipples yet no breasts or are almost flat-chested; they have no genitals, their eyes are mask-like and their faces are sometimes hybridized with roosters. These bodies are in a state of metamorphosis, imposing figures like trees or monuments, sometimes endowed with multiple arms or wings; body-figures that navigate an indeterminate space, where the landscapes are reduced to signs and symbols. The works, in the same manner as these mute bodies with their pupil-less eyes, are not very talkative, yet they brim over with meaning, encompassing intimacy, myth and family history, set somewhere between reconstruction and fiction. The artist embraces a certain vagueness in the story of her Cuban roots, transmitted orally for the most part, and which she makes no attempt to explore in depth: memory and intimacy are conjured through objects, often personal in nature, while any archive material is either absent, dreamt up or fabricated. The archive feeds the narratives that unfold within her works and from one work to another in a subterranean manner. This willful vagueness, like her use of myths and archetypes (the figure of the ferryman transporting souls to the underworld, or the rooster as an archetype of dominant power) allows the individual to connect with the collective, the community of “”: “”, as in Monique Wittig’s [Warrior-Women] (1969), but also “” for all the lesbians, the gays, the transgender community, the Latinos, the Afros, the roosters, the bitches or the palm trees. For here, it’s about collectives and communities, genetic family and chosen siblinghood, love and fury, the unspoken and the shared obvious, living in the here and now, while also existing elsewhere, where magic takes place, where art is invented / created, and where the voices of the disappeared are heard. Around the table to which Amy Bravo invites us, we are confronted with large-format, assembled, mounted canvasses, adorned with scraps of fabric, lace, hair, structures made of plaster, alters-installations-assemblages of found objects. Assemblages? The term is employed by the artist herself and is worthy of further attention. She cites the artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) as an ally, which opens up a whole chapter of Californian assemblage. It is perhaps less heroic than the East Coast version, but is clearly more political, connected to the African-American, feminist and anti-racist militancy of LA’s Black Art Movement, which in addition to Betye Saar, includes artists such as John Outterbridge (1933-2020), Noah Purifoy (1917-2004), David Hammons (b. 1943), Senga Nengudi (b. 1943) etc. Furthermore, if we look closely, Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925-2008) Combines might come to mind, or certain of Jasper John’s (b. 1930) canvases. Not in terms of perceiving a direct line of descent—that would amount to teleological art history and would invoke models that have never been part of Amy Bravo’s thinking—but in looking at them through the prism of inversion. Amy Bravo plays with the heroization and a certain masculinization of some of her figures: a superheroine pulled by (flaming) roosters, warrior women planting their flag in virgin territory, mimicking an act of conquest seen so many times before, a woman becoming a rooster to decline / ward off in the same act the male ego. Appropriating the ego in order to better crush it. In (2024), the artist’s grandfather’s moustache, shaved off following his death, serves to expose, in a deeply erotic manner, the construction of gender and sexuality in the family’s unconscious. Faced with this self-portrait with moustache—in which the artist has included her own razor and scattered body hair—one cannot help thinking of Ana Mendieta transplanting a friend’s moustache, hair by hair, onto her own face in the 1972 performance , in response to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) “sticking” a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa in (1919), playing on the androgyny of Leonardo da Vinci’s model. Through the incorporation of the great narratives of domineering, white, male art history, the grand narratives of her own family history and of those from the margins of society, of American and Afro-Latin American gay and lesbian cultures, through her attempts to bring her ancestors and her own community of guerilla women onto dialog, by trying to make the and coincide and finally, by attempting to depict possible bodies that are by no means incarnations of normalized social bodies, Amy Bravo has produced a body of radical art (1). Around the table to which Amy Bravo invites us, love and family ties coalesce alongside acts of nurturing, consoling and caring; but also, unspoken conflicts and occasionally, even the settling of scores. : the territories through which the artist leads us are those on the margins, those of hybridity and of contagion, of crossroads and lands watched over by spirits, goddesses and virgins—, Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, protector of Cuba is, in the Santeria religion of the Caribbean, syncretized with Oshun, a Yoruba deity. Territories haunted by black dogs, symbols in certain Celtic and Anglo-Saxon legends of depression and vulnerability, but which also have the capacity to connect with the beyond and with the invisible. “Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems (2)” Amy Bravo’s works are daughters of , the “new consciousness” described by the Latino American author Gloria Anzaldúa: “ undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. […] As a I have no country, my homeland has cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I’m every woman’s sister or potential lover. […] I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races. I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural / religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; […] I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that has not only produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.”(3) Amélie Lavin (1) In reference to Renate Lorenz, who contrasts recognition—the identification and perpetuation of normative systems—with contagion, where reproduction, engenders deviation and difference. She theorizes this difference in the form of what she terms : “drag can refer to the productive relationship between the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate, as well as to clothing, hair or legs, and to anything that has a tendency to create relationships with others and with other things rather than just represent them.” These processes of “drag contagion” do not lend visibility to “people, individuals subjects or identities, but rather to assemblages—assemblages that don’t strive to categorize gender, sexuality and race, but rather to “undo” these categories.” , éditions B42, Paris, 2018. (2) Gloria Anzaldúa, , Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987, p. 78-81. (3) Ibid.

The Shigaraki ceramic artist Yasuhisa Kohyama mines clay’s potential. He pulls apart mounds of earth, builds it up, sculpts it, cuts it, incises it, and ultimately fires it. His highly refined approach to creating unglazed, sensual forms is about extending traditions rather than a radical departure. The work’s final transformation is determined by placement of the vessels inside the kiln and the intense heat of the wood-burning process. These elements of chance are collaborators in Kohyama’s perpetual honing of his craft in search for ever more powerful, elegant sculpture. Paintings by Robert Storr are intimate inquiries into shape, color and grid templates. Experimenting with the qualities of different paints, he investigates subtle fluctuations in placement and execution of similar images and layering of blocks of color. Hard-edge boundaries and marks soften into textured, painterly statements with rapid improvisations using looser brushstrokes and fast-drying paint. He chooses not to title his works to avoid influencing the viewer’s perception. Sheila Hicks leverages the inexhaustible possibilities of fiber and color. Her constant explorations with pliable lines and linear thinking surprise and delight. How do you negotiate and connect lines? Oftentimes, the investigations involve taking the material into space or sculpting soft masses of fiber before it is turned into a linear, weavable element. The seductive physicality and familiarity of humble threads beckon one to get closer much like a welcoming hand. Stéphane Henry creates evocative universes of material transformations. Establishing rigorous parameters, he layers mixtures of minerals, colors, chemicals and other materials that interact and morph into sculptural records of movement. These compressed fragments of alchemy appear simultaneously microscopic and cosmic. Despite the artist’s experiments with his capacity to control the process, he benefits from the inevitable accidents that occur along the way enabling new environments to emerge. When showing these four artists’ work in proximity, the gallery opens the door to discovery. Their art are provocations, invitations to look, compare and to see. As with most abstraction, interpretations are open ended, one suggestion leading to something else. Sometimes, we must lose ourselves (to find ourselves). Cara McCarty Paris, March 2024

Going under a pseudonym borrowed from a comic character in a US TV show, Ernest T. is a French artist whose work follows on in the tradition of Dadaism and the Incoherents. His sparse biography tells us that he worked in advertising before fully devoting himself to art in the 1980s. His provocative oeuvre takes a swipe at the overwhelmingly coded and serious world of contemporary art, in a subversive and ironic conceptual manner. Through the use of hoaxes, misappropriation, image manipulation and even plagiarism, enhanced by linguistic games and caricatured drawings, the artist examines the world of art from the perspective of its moral turpitude, greed and other pretentions. He ridicules the obsessive attachment to signatures and authenticity, the hidden meaning and artistic trends etc., by putting his faith in the critical power of humor rather than taking a self-righteous, moralizing stance. Ernest T. began his artistic experimentation in the 1960s with a collection of small, comic calendars, which eventually ended up as a series under the name . During the 1980s, he created his pseudonym and began to work on his well-known series that followed the narcissistic principal of depicting his repeated signature on canvas using interlocking Ts painted in primary colors. In reaction to the phenomenon of the idolization of the artist, where the signature is valued more than the work itself, Ernest T. produced offbeat sketches, such as (1990) or (1989). The written press was a medium of choice for Ernest T., whose interventions included both hijacking already printed pieces or publishing his own. Between December 1985 and January 1988, for example, he published texts from irreverent pamphlets and reviews taken from early 20th century newspapers in the advertising sections of art magazines such as and (1). The exhibition in Semiose’s Project Room brings together works based on engravings and press cuttings. (1990) is a large format photographic print of an engraving depicting the tempestuous courtesan Marie-Catherine Lescombat (1728-1755), set in her Louis XIV salon, where one of Ernest T.’s well-known, abstract, geometrical canvases made up of interlocking Ts is on display. The other works shown in the Project Room pay homage to Suprematism, with their smooth, monochrome colors emerging from the ruins left by a bombing raid on the 6 June 1944 and scenes of looting during the Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965. Other pieces on display include hints of grandiose canvases replaced by modernist monochromes. These oeuvres are truly a celebration of painting, its capacity to withstand any given catastrophe and the fact that it is worth defending at all costs. When all is said and done, this series of repaints is a sincere declaration of love for modern painting. __ (1) Going under the name of , these articles were collected and published by Semiose in 2015 (FILAF prize for the best art book published by a gallery, awarded at the Galeristes salon in 2016).

Over the last few years, the art of Salifou Lindou focussed on the topics of exile and politics, praising the resilience of families in the context of financial embezzlement and the decay of community infrastructures. To answer to the recurring electricity and water cuts and the malfunctioning of phone lines in Cameroon, Lindou draws the prospect of a sweeter and carefree life in which these issues would only be a distant memory. Les collines de l’espoir presents a poetic space imbued with change. Between the dancing lines of urban disorder and the ochre notes of sunflowers - harbingers of happy horizons - birds fly off in pursuit of a renewed freedom.

Halsey’s work proposes visionary new possibilities for art and architecture that convey the vitality, pride, and resilience of her community in South Central Los Angeles, an area that has long played an important role in defining Black culture. The exhibition in Paris features two related series: (2011–) and (2022–). In both bodies of work, Halsey collects and repurposes imagery unique to her community as means of commemoration, celebration, and transcendence. The eight-foot-tall wall-mounted are mixed-media assemblages on foil-insulated foam, a support that reflects Halsey’s interest in architectural materials. Combining found objects and collaged images, she produces dense, colorful compositions with an energy that echoes that of the community that inspires them. The works incorporate a wide range of vernacular iconography and slogans, commercial signs and products, fliers, and graffiti that promote local businesses, institutions, and activism. In her collective representations of those who live in South Central LA, Halsey voices support for efforts against forces of gentrification, displacement, and disenfranchisement. Also pictured within the densely montaged compositions are Black and queer icons including musicians such as Joan Armatrading, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Luther Vandross, and Stevie Wonder. Halsey produces using a dense, durable form of polymer-modified gypsum, carved into wall-mounted reliefs with an applied patina. They feature words and symbols inspired by the lived experience and visual culture of South Central residents, remixed with ancient Egyptian iconography and Afrofuturist utopian visions. Espousing an optimistic understanding of communal identity, these works use imagery related to (2023), Halsey’s monumental site-specific commission for the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Halsey will participate this year in , curated by Adriano Pedrosa for the 60th Biennale di Venezia, on view from April 20 through November 24, 2024. In addition, Serpentine, London, will organize the first solo exhibition of Halsey’s work in the United Kingdom, open from October 4, 2024, through January 5, 2025.

Muñoz believed that a sculpture is activated by its relationship to the viewer and the surrounding architecture. Understanding that sculpture only makes sense in human terms, his figures function as mini narratives that playfully, almost mischievously, speak to the lives we lead, our relationship to the world around us, and the enigma of the smallest human gesture. This holds true even when presented with a single figure, as seen in many of the works on view in the exhibition. Rooted in notions of spectatorship espoused by minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, to look at a Muñoz sculpture is to enter a theatrical world in which all is not what it seems. This is perhaps most evident in pieces that utilize the wall or the ceiling, involving the entire space as part of the work. Albuquerque Balcony (1993), for instance, reveals two characteristically gray figures seated across from each other on a cramped balcony positioned over the viewer’s head. One of the earliest motifs to enter the artist’s lexicon, the balcony manipulates the surrounding architecture in a theatrical manner, shifting the relationship between work and viewer. By forcing the viewer to come closer than is natural, and to crane their neck to see the piece in full, Muñoz’s trickster side comes out—a description he welcomed and cultivated. Tricks of scale and slights of hand continue in Three Laughing at One (2000), which is rendered at slightly smaller than life-size and positioned just high enough on the wall that the three men appear not only in a fit of raucous laughter, but higher up and farther away than they really are, which draws the viewer in closer. Once the viewer arrives at the proper point of engagement, it becomes clear that they are the “one” in the work’s title—the one being laughed at, the one who fell into their trap. Suspended from the ceiling Hanging Figure (1997), inspired by the acrobat in Edgar Degas’ 1879 painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, is simultaneously intriguing and unsettling, a viscerally felt piece as well as a visually seen one. The viewer is here forced to crane their neck to take in the full scope of the work, creating a new rapport and verticality. Space takes on an existential quality in Walking with a pointing stick (2001). Part of a series of Chinese figures Muñoz started in the 1990s, the man’s face elicits a self-awareness in the viewer as they contemplate his tenderly frozen expression. Stuck in mid-laugh, as many of his figures are, this man distances himself from the viewer instead of drawing them in closer. Muñoz consciously evokes a feeling of “otherness” throughout this series, to, in his words, “behave as a mirror that cannot reflect.”[1] In presenting an archetype more than an individualized figure, Man with a pointing stick allows the audience to look, but not see. Futhermore, he is imbued with a tension between movement and stasis: the man is walking, and yet he has no feet. Likewise, Untitled (1991), with its voluminous round bottom, feels like it could topple over at any minute, and yet he remains firmly upright, while Blotter Figures: Coming Towards (1999) can move forward with ease, and yet cannot see where he is going. These choices not only remove any sense of naturalism from the figures, but their singularity as figures investigate solitude and the failures of communication, balancing conviction and a lack of conviction. Muñoz belongs to an important group of sculptors from the 1980s and 1990s such as Robert Gober, Charles Ray, and Thomas Schütte who reinvigorated the human form in three dimensions, ushering in a new era of the medium—a trend seen throughout those decades across all media by painters including Eric Fischl, David Salle, George Condo, and Jeff Koons. Taking the interest in space and formal discipline of minimalism, coupling it with the intellectual restraint of conceptual art, and transferring it to figuration, Muñoz’s figures are at once humorous and fraught, unsettling and inviting, alive and frozen. They reveal his deep understanding of art history and the human condition, yet deny the viewer the satisfaction of teaching us some sort of universal truth. Instead, Muñoz’s leaves his viewer with allegories, speaking in three-dimensions what we cannot in words. [1] Juan Muñoz quoted in Paul Schimmel, “An Interview with Juan Muñoz,” in Juan Muñoz (Washington D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2001), 150.

Depicting faces with a stress expression and a piercing gaze, Matthew Eguavoen portrays Nigerian society. Staged in a familiar interior, his models mirror social issues. This new body of work, gathered under the title Ukhurhę, centres around depression and regrets that mental health has been for a long time - and still is - neglected, stigmatised and made invisible on the African continent. Each image carries an intimate story and emphasises the complexity of personal internal conflicts. The artist's experience hides behind these portraits, himself being involved as a witness of the global malaise spreading among the youth. The exhibition Ukhurhę underlines the importance of a listening and support system – physical and spiritual – to cope with depression. Eguavoen’s painting insists on the strong relationships between individuals and stresses how these spiritual and human bonds - family and friends - lead to healing through a freedom of speech and breaking away from taboos and stereotypes surrounding mental health.

Absorbed in our own daily routine, we seem to leave the fundamental issues of life in the background, until we eventually have to face them and their questions of meaning, utility, and demands. Yoon Ji-Eun’s new collection of wooden reliefs and drawings, Unanswered Questions, borrows its title from composer Tristan Murail and acts as a way of materialising the artist’s reaction to existential questioning. In a time of ever-present violence of all kind, the artist wished to offer her works as a source of comfort and relief. Her introduction to new musical genres opened Yoon Ji-Eun in turn to new perspectives. By immersing herself in a specific sound world while at work, she can capture and translate the feelings awakened by pending phrases or slowly-dying sounds, beyond the human perception... Through these experiences of intense doubt and equally intense presence, lived on the physical state that only music induces, she breathes into her works a renewed poetry and energy. From attempting to foresee and control her existence, she seems to have led way to embracing the movement of life, and to embedding herself in it. From the start, the term “landscape” comes to mind when referring to Yoon Ji-Eun’s world. In her recent works, her landscape is now found transformed: on her juxtaposed vignettes and figurative fragments, she overlapped other layers. Space is no longer relative and linear, but deep and full of shapes twirling to the surface. Here and there, gathered shapes rise, some in a supple movement, others in angles, without any patent link. Thus forms an aethereal dialogue between independent configurations in an ever-changing world. The drawn areas, reminiscent of collages, create a slight and subtle tension through their fluid, sensual shapes in bright colours. Like notes of a spatial music, they create an invisible flow for suns and planets to cross. In some places, gates and the simplest architectures in watercolour create a shadow theatre in the background. In other drawings, floating circles overlook the composition, like portals to parallel dimensions. Time is an ever-present concept, both through the rhythm of the artist’s compositions and through their physicality, in particular her layered wooden reliefs. Yoon Ji-Eun likes to go along the grain of the wood to bring about organic outlines. By carving it, she reveals its layers and further conveys the idea of temporality. Yoon Ji-Eun’s subtle work as a colourist alternates tensions through contrasts and a shrewd leverage of values within the same range. She introduces a new light through more vibrant colours, taking over in a sophisticated balance of earthly tones and soft pastels. As warm colours prevail, darkness and melancholia infiltrate the compositions with bleaker shades of blue. The material itself of her colours brings about unique textures and luminosity, be it the matte density of acrylic paint, the soft or strong stroke of pencils, or the transparency of watercolour. With Unanswered Questions, Yoon Ji-Eun reaches a new milestone in her search. Intimacy and experience are now expressed in an abstract, more universal language, made of snatches and snippets. The world is

Evoking Nick Mauss’ practice could take the shape of a fine uninterrupted line, like a gesture, a breath, extending endlessly over the course of the artist’s encounters. He makes wander the drawing, a medium used for recording ideas, over various supports and spaces. He traces it between events, artistic practices, personal histories that have fallen into oblivion. The artist looks for them in archives, links them in exhibition spaces, and creates a place where elective affinities between works and people are revealed. Slipping into an exhibition by Nick Mauss, one is struck by superimposed images, interlacing connections in a kind of evanescent simultaneity. It might be like seeing bodies moving about a space, on a stage, inspiring and looking at each other, getting tangled up, yet not merging. For his first exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Nick Mauss pursues his formal inquiries. He plays with the effects and meanings of materials, with the reflection of his mirrored reverse-painted glass, reflecting the movement of bodies and architecture, with the sensorial quality of the draperies, or even with the unexpected, heightened, malleable materiality of ceramics. The images he makes appear or disappear during the production process, once the shimmering film has been applied, the clay has been fired, the fabric . The first space the artist has occupied is the page, the sketchbook. An intimate space that has expanded into larger spaces, to implicate the visitor’s body. Here, the frame of the sheet can be found with its drawings on paper. The pages are joined, sketches of images placed side by side, lines traced. Shapes, abstract figures intermingle with body fragments. As the art historian Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen has written of the tension between memory and the act of drawing in Mauss' work: “Invariably his drawings register the fact that they are made in series of discrete and disconnected sittings, often separated by intervals of weeks or months. This method of temporal distancing has the effect of leveling, and produces new and imminent relationships—spontaneous marks and motifs derived from a “source” become equal options within a spectrum of possibilites, almost like dealing cards from a shuffled deck. These intervals of oblivion obviously somehow condition the way in which his drawings approximate mnemonic rendering. The mnemonic structure of Nick's work is precisely not that of the Rauschenbergian “flat-bed,” representing memory as the random order of raw data in the mind's filing cabinet. The visual information that appears has been processed, and it's therefore closer in quality to dream-pictures, because what is preserved and represented is something selectively self-constructed and edited” (1). Nick Mauss has taken an interest in practices that have long been confined to the minor arts, craft, or even the decorative arts. For over a decade, he has been interested in ceramics, an unpredictable material. Working the clay and its glaze means imagining the future potential of a line, the interactions of color, the play of transparencies. The artist has developed new techniques in collaboration with the Bottega Gatti ceramics studio in Faenza, known for its secular history of work with artists. The materiality of his ceramics has become more pronounced over time, more sculptural and architectural, with a whole repertoire of traces, whether painted, printed, or inscribed, blending various states of “raw” and “cooked.” The two mural panels on view, in stoneware and terracotta, were made in a quasi-blind process; the white and red clays used have the same color when raw; only after the first firing are the colors revealed. Another series of drawings was made by applying wax to the white stoneware. The image only appears once it is covered with black glaze, the wax serving to repel and prevent the material from being absorbed. The drawing is thus revealed in the negative. The idea of an under-drawing as an initial, momentary state of a performance that is lost recurs in the artist’s work. He prioritizes the study, the sketch, the emerging image at the limit of the decipherable, over the “finished” work. The series of reliefs in textured and heavily worked clay are carriers for drawings overwhelmed by a form of physicality, for images remembered and remodeled by the body. Others are unglazed but are sprayed with manganese oxide, a pigment used for the paintings and drawings in prehistoric caves, also reminiscent of the patina on statues and sooty urban facades. The light, voluptuous satin and velvet hanging drapery suggests a more delicate, intimate connection to the body, unlike the fixity and gravity of stoneware. These hangings move with breath. They were made using the process borrowed from couture, which entails a chemical reaction that etch some elements of the fabric according to a pattern, which then appears imprinted, in transparency. Nick Mauss implements what he calls “acts of translation,” like a drawing on paper made of collapsing memories, photographs, and observations that can reappear modified on another material. In the manner of on wet clay, the wax on ceramic, paintings on the reverse side of mirrors, or satin. The works made using the process of reverse-painting on mirrored glass address this very directly, entangling the viewer and the exhibition space with the work. Nick Mauss’ mirrored works are the result of an elaborate process extending over time and creating a distance in the process of conceiving, making, and perceiving the work, while also maintaining a form of immediacy. Although paint seems to have been applied to the surface of the mirror, it is underneath the glass, executed on reverse. The paint is then covered in a mirrored surface revealing the image and provoking unexpected reactions, burnt effects, and solarization. With , Nick Mauss brings together for the first time in the same space the full array of those formal languages, developing the sensation of an almost fleeting elusive materiality. The artist seeks to capture the experience of seeing something for the first time. He invents, borrows from surfaces, materials, techniques to elicit the strange feeling of encounter, made visible in the exhibition through a form of drawing, writing suspended in the field of vision and the movement of body. Born in 1980 in New York, United States. Lives and works in New York, United States. Nick Mauss has exhibited his work in various internationally renowned institutions such as the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco (2022; 2016; 2014); Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Paris (2021; 2017); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2020); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020; 2018; 2013; 2012); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019); Museum Ludwig, Köln (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto (2017); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016; 2012; 2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2013); FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2011); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2011), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2010). His works have joined the collections of the The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto ; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; KADIST Art Foundation Paris; Long Museum, Shanghai; Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth. (1) Nick Mauss, , with essays by Kirsty Bell and Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, 2010, Koenig Books London, United Kingdom, p.136.

Avec la mode comme point de départ, l’exposition « Figure Libre. Stéphane Ashpool » donne à voir des œuvres pluridisciplinaires (mode, photographie, vidéo, musique...) amplifiées de façon ponctuelle par des événements culturels ou artistiques conçus avec des artistes et performeurs invités. Cette saison célèbre la puissance du collectif et la nécessité de la transmission, l’une des valeurs clé du 19M. Elle propose de découvrir la façon dont l’habillement des sportifs peut être un art, une approche non seulement technique — qui répond aux besoins impérieux du corps de bouger avec aisance dans une quête de performance — mais aussi une célébration visuelle mettant le corps à l’honneur par le choix d’étoffes, de tissus et d’ornementations célébrant la prouesse. En écho à l’exposition, la Galerie du 19M programme des ateliers pratiques de découverte des Métiers d’art, des conférences avec des temps forts les weekends, réunissant artistes, artisans et performeurs qui travaillent sur le mouvement.

Constantin Brancusi has never before been the subject of an exhibition of such magnitude. It is in fact a collection of nearly two hundred sculptures, as well as photographs, drawings, films, archives, tools and furniture from the workshop which will be exhibited. Carried out on the occasion of the complete move of the Brancusi workshop as part of the renovation work at the Center Pompidou, this deployment offers the unique opportunity to reread the art of this immense 20th century artist in a new light . The workshop, jewel of the Museum's collection since its bequest to the French State in 1957, forms the matrix of this retrospective, which brings together previously unpublished sets of sculptures, thanks to major loans from major international museums.

À quelques pas du Palais de Tokyo, dans un quartier où les galeries d’art contemporain se font encore rares, la Galerie d’Eylau présente des artistes encore émergents, exclusivement en solo show. Dans « Revenge Dress », Renske Linders explore les symboles de la féminité par des détails évocateurs. Une collection d’images dont la force narrrative invite à s’émanciper du mythe qu’elles incarnent. « Le bout d’un escarpin pointe une direction inconnue sur le plancher en bois massif. Les orteils sont sagement ordonnés dans le soulier vernis, d’un rouge grenat. Le cadrage serré à la rigueur quasi photographique et le format exagéré de l’objet confèrent à l’ensemble une impression de douce étrangeté. L’escarpin nous domine, presque menaçant. Dans cette oeuvre intitulée The Shoe, Renske Linders offre une vision saisissante de l’objet ordinaire, transformant un accessoire féminin iconique en une énigme visuelle. Avec son style proche de l’hyperréalisme, l’artiste s’attache à reproduire des objets du vestiaire féminin ainsi que des moments de vie, vécus ou symboliques, explorant la manière dont les femmes sont conditionnées dans leurs rôles sociaux. Dans ses oeuvres où le visage est absent, elle transforme les sujets en fragments évocateurs qui attisent l’imaginaire. A la fois chacune d’entre nous et personne, les héroïnes s’effacent et d’elles, ne subsistent que des attributs, des attitudes. Chaque détail minutieusement représenté est chargé de sens, offrant aux oeuvres une valeur narrative qui invite à l’introspection. Dans l’enchevêtrement des oeuvres présentées au sein de l’exposition Revenge Dress, une intrigue sourde se trame. Celle-ci offre une plongée dans les méandres de la condition féminine, explorant les injonctions de la mode et de la beauté qui enserrent les femmes dans le rôle d’objets de fantasme. Renske Linders exhume les mythes, puise dans sa propre expérience – notamment sa carrière de mannequin – et celles des femmes de sa vie – ses amies, ses grand-mères – pour dénoncer les diktats d’une société obsédée par la perfection illusoire. On pourrait noter ici une allusion aux travaux de Mona Chollet, notamment son ouvrage éclairant Beauté Fatale (2012) qui dissèque le culte de la minceur, de l’idéal esthétique, de la blancheur et de la jeunesse. Dans Taille XXS, l’artiste nous invite à déguster un plat de spaghettis, parsemé de pilules multicolores avec la promesse que ces comprimés magiques nous feront perdre plus d’un tour de taille. « Une aubaine ! » raille Renske, évoquant le comportement parfois aveugle des consommateur·ice·s de remèdes miracles qui inondent la publicité et les réseaux sociaux. Ses oeuvres, empreintes d’ironie et parfois d’absurdité, interrogent : comment subvertir ces codes ? L’artiste répond par un gros plan d’un bain de soleil en bord de mer : tattoo fleuri, bikini léopard et tanga à paillette. Car pour autant, elle n’a pas pour vocation de faire le procès des normes établies. La force de ses oeuvres est de ne pas rejeter cette culture féminine, mais plutôt son usage et de montrer comment cette dernière peut être utilisée au contraire comme facilitatrice de l’émancipation des femmes. À l’instar de la célèbre « Revenge dress » arborée par Lady Diana en 1994 à la suite de sa rupture avec le Prince Charles, Renske Linders célèbre la femme libre, indépendante. Dans ses oeuvres, la lumière inonde de sa chaleur dorée, évoquant le crépuscule d’une ère révolue. C’est dans cette lueur enveloppante que s’expriment des messages empreints de résilience et d’affirmation de soi. Ils résonnent comme autant de cris de révolte et d’espoir pour un avenir où la femme retrouve pleinement sa voix et sa place dans le monde. » Léna Peyrard

Cette exposition marque une évolution significative de la pratique de Ben Arpéa vers le design avec la création d'une ligne de mobilier capsule. Extensions tangibles de son langage artistique, les pièces présentées naviguent entre la sculpture et le design, intégrant l'art dans l'espace domestique et dans l'intimité du foyer. Ben Arpéa investira la galerie pour créer un espace intime à l’image de son univers. Le titre « Inside Out » fait référence aux intérieurs de Ben Arpéa, souvent dépeints dans ses tableaux, mais explorés de façon plus concrète pour cette exposition via la création de meubles. Mais aussi à l’extérieur, cette nature qui lui est chère, incarnée ici par les tableaux de paysages spectaculaires baignés de chaleur et de lumière. Ainsi, le visiteur déambule dans l’espace de la galerie tel un invité dans une maison d’été. Du salon, il observe la vue sur mer, au loin la nature et un terrain de tennis. En créant une ligne de design, Ben Arpéa étend son expression artistique à l'aménagement de l'espace. « Inside Out » devient ainsi une exploration sensorielle où l'art dépasse son rôle traditionnel pour devenir une expérience immersive.