ART CITIES: Paris-Corps et Âmes

The exhibition “Corps et âmes” is an exploration of representations of the body in contemporary art, with works by forty artists.  Freed from all mimetic constraints, the body—whether photographed, sculpted, drawn, filmed, or painted—does not cease to rein‑ vent itself, thereby granting art an essential organic quality that allows it, like an umbilical cord, to take the pulse of the human body and soul.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pinault Collection Archive

“Corps et âmes” begins with work by Georg Baselitz, a figure that is innocent from the front and threatening from the back, this cedar wood sculpture colored with oil paint is a colossal self‑portrait of the artist as a child holding a skull in his hands. Dominating the viewer, the feet solidly anchored to the ground, “Meine neue Mütze” (My New Cap) (2003) is Baselitz’s first sculptural self‑portrait. A diptych by Gideon Appah, “The Confidant and The Woman Bathing” (2021). Is inspired by works by Cézanne, Matisse, and Gauguin, in search of Edenic lands in which the figures of bathers and odalisques curled up in an idyllic landscape evoke a golden age threatened by modernity, Gideon Appah’s work turns perspectives on their head, depicting a world that is both dreamlike and real, and drawing inspiration from the paintings and photographs of post‑independence Ghana. The unreal blue of the bodies evokes a primordial, mythical universe, and the iconography sur‑ rounding Ghana’s independence in 1957 and its promise of a rediscovered land enter into resonance with the red blood of Ana Mendieta’s body in “Silueta Sangrienta” (1975). The body in metamorphosis and as something archaic here aspires to reconnect with foundation myths, to become one with Mother Earth, after the uprooting of the artist’s exile from Cuba to the United States in 1961. The artist’s body melds with the material before reappearing in the form of a silhouette of red lava: an intangible body of which only the radiance of its incandescent aura remains. The interweaving of texts and photographs between James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, “Nothing Personal” (1964), also acts as a manifesto that holds up a different mirror to America than the one that diffracts the vein sparkling of a consumer society which struggles to ignore the tarnished mirage of the American Dream. The painful odyssey that the author of “Nobody Knows My Name” (1961) and “The Fire Next Time” (1963) composed with his childhood friend Avedon, who turned away from fashion to focus his lens on human rights activists, gives shape to what we don’t want to see: an America of the disenfranchised, of the people left out of its dream. The legacy of the visual and political struggles of the artists in the Pinault Collection is clear in the works of Kerry James Marshall  and Terry Adkins, caught on the edge of the visible, between appearance and dissipation, as well as in the piece “Cloudscape” (2004) by Lorna Simpson, whose invisible men and women reveal the major influence of the novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison. For their part, David Hammons’ body prints return to the primordial form of the imprint to elicit a sense of belonging to a community, to restore what has been missing to one’s body and soul. At the same time, the drawings of Kara Walker, William Kentridge, Robin Rhode and Anne Imhof, against the academic tradition of the painted portrait, seize on the fragility of bodies, the lines drawing imperceptible veins on the paper that can be erased, but which take the pulse of these bodies that struggle to exist. It is through her daily practice of drawing that Anne Imhof draws and choreographs her future performance works, in which the flesh of a living body becomes the ultimate visual material through which life manifests itself, as if she were transmitting her own emotions to other bodies. It is reminiscent of the way that Géricault (whom she admires greatly) drew dead bodies in the morgue before giving them a renewed intensity in his large paintings, especially “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818‑1819). The work of art is no longer a theatrical scene that is removed from reality, instead the very space in which we become aware of art’s ability to make us human in a here and now. In a single gesture, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a London artist born to Ghanaian parents, hybridizes reality and fiction, the history of painting, and the immediacy of the present, all in the flash of the act of painting. Inspired by Manet, Degas, and Goya, she paints powerful portraits of black figures whose clothing and aura provide no indication of their social condition or the era in which they live, thereby imbuing these bodies with a dignity that they had long been refused, as in “Light of The Lit Wick” (2017), which depicts a majestic, young dancer. In 1969, American choreographer Anna Halprin refused to stage the violence of the race riots in a performance. In “Right On (Ceremony of Us), a workshop that was in part filmed during that same year, she invented a ritual in which black and white bodies that had historically remained separate could come together and dance together for the first time ever. Her humanist thought is reflected throughout the exhibition.

A gallery features one of Niki de Saint Phalle’s first Nanas, the “Nana Noire” (1965), inspired by Rosa Parks, emblematic figure of the struggle against racism in the United States. For this artist, the resistance to the subjection of women, the representations of whose forms are excessively fecund and generous, joins the struggle of African Americans who have been victims of racist and sexist violence in American society. A fan of jazz, the artist was also alluding to the singer Billie Holliday, who, like her, was confronted with sexual violence at a very young age. This exhibition of bodies is also manifest in the works of Auguste Rodin with “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” (1891), which depicts the Greek goddess headless, without any of her divine attributes. For her painting “Candle Burning” (2000) Marlene Dumas, who spent a lot of time going to strip clubs, took her inspiration from Polaroids taken of a famous dancer during her contortionist routines performed by candlelight. Marlene Dumas’ relationship to the body is polyphonic and free of all moral notions for being so closely bound up with desire. She questions the hackneyed model of the female nude in art history through painting, the fundamental medium of human contact. Senga Nengudi, who studied dance for a long time, uses performance to summon the energy of ritual dances from both Africa and Japan. She creates sculptures using pantyhose and performances such as R.S.V.P. (1976‑1978), which consist of choreographed movements through which she studies the extendibility, elasticity, and fragility of the body. Senga Nengudi’s anti‑form sculptures, of which the famous series “R.S.V.P.” (1976‑19778) is emblematic, embody a dynamic tension. They are made from disposable nylon stockings that she stretches, ties together, and pads. Nengudi was inspired by the practice of the Japanese group Gutai, which combined objects acting as “tools” with the body, selecting materials that embody the furtive capacity of dance and performance to be conjured as if they arose out of nowhere. The elasticity of the nylon mesh allowed Nengudi to play with the composition, using sand to ballast and position the various elements. Her collaborations with the dancer Maren Hassinger freely implemented this potential between body, object, movement, and identity in the form of a sculptural choreography. The exhibition gradually features works that exceed the raw materiality of the body to acquire a phantasmagorical quality, as in Marlene Dumas’ “Birth” (2018), which reconsiders art history and the figure of Venus by painting the body of a pregnant woman as the goddess of love and fertility. The bodies appropriated by the artist are carnal, liquid, or ghostly, as if they were drowning in the paint’s own fluidity. Her carnal painting touches the soul. The representation of bodies gives way to that of the spirit. Contemporary painting does not hesitate to explore a more symbolic and spiritual dimension, without overlooking political commentary, as in the works of Mira Schor. The multiple, kaleidoscopic images of Kudzanai-Violet Hwami explore the various aspects of identity, as does David Hammons’ “Rubber Dread” (1989), which lies halfway between a social commentary on physical and social cast‑offs and the ghosts that continue to haunt our society. Across various media, the work of Los Angeles‑based artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa embraces and celebrates Black American culture for all its nobility. From Barack Obama to gospel, from Aretha Franklin to the Black Lives Matter protests, by way of Miles Davis and Kanye West, Arthur Jafa delves into mass media and pop culture to construct a collage and montage aesthetic that recalls his role as an image collector and which brings together multiple references. He majestically presents the icons of black culture, as he struggles with the complex history of the United States. In this film, Arthur Jafa is not paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote “The medium is the message”. He is instead appropriating the idea of zapping. To the beat of Kanye West’s song “Ultralight: Beam (2016), the work features a vivid, gripping montage of icons of Black American culture (such as Michael Jordan, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Miles Davis, and Malcolm X) alternating with anonymous figures, such as a young girl, protesters, and citizens being arrested. Through various physical situations—dance, combat, work, and violence—the montage, interspersed with the appearance of an incandescent sun, creates a powerful associative sense of momentum that melds celebrity and anonymity to write a common destiny, that of Black people and of the United States. It is an attempt to unify identity, marked by a voice, a vibrant breath of mutual support that runs through all these characters, as reminiscent of slave chants as it is of a quest for unity. “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” is considered one of Arthur Jafa’s key works. Dating from 2016, it represents for the artist the affirmation of an African‑American identity, one of solidarity and confidence, while also showing and denouncing the violence that it has often faced. It includes a piece of music titled Ultralight Beam from Kanye West’s* album “The Life of Pablo” which was released that same year. This com‑ position, which combines gospel and R&B sounds, is an ode to spirituality, reconciliation, and the search for light, and it was praised as such by critics and a very wide audience upon its release. Arthur Jafa specifically chose this song for the values of hope and peace that it promotes.

Works by: Georges Adéagbo, Terry Adkins, Gideon Appah, Diane & Allan Arbus, Michael Armitage, Richard Avedon, Georg Baselitz, Cecilia Bengolea, Constantin Brancusi, Miriam Cahn, Claude Cahun, Ali Cherri, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Robert Frank, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Philip Guston, Anna Halprin & Seth Hill, David Hammons, Duane Hanson, Kudzanai‑Violet Hwami, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, William Kentridge, Deana Lawson, Sherrie Levine,  Kerry James Marshall, Ana Mendieta, Zanele Muholi, Senga Nengudi, Antonio Obá, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Robin Rhode, Auguste Rodin, Niki De Saint Phalle, Mira Schor, Lorna Simpson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Photo left : David Hammons, Black Mohair Spirit, 1971, pigment, string, broom strands, beads, fathers, and butterfly wings on black paper, 59 × 41.2 × 4 cm (framed). Pinault Collection. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo right: Ali Cherri, L’Homme aux larmes, 2024, stone head sculpted in the 14th‑15th centuries, patinated silver, plaster, steel, 49 × 41 × 31 cm. Pinault Collection. Courtesy of the Imane Farès Gallery. Photo: Studio Ali Cherri

Info: Curator: Emma Lavigne, Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, Paris, France, Duration: 5/3-25/8/2025, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, Fri 11:00-21:00, www.pinaultcollection.com/