ART CITIES:Paris-Openings During October
The new exhibition of Claire Morgan’s work is entitled “Perpetually at the Centre”, Claire Morgan is one of the most sought after and talented artists on the international scene today. This exhibition unveils the artist’s most recent works, created especially for this space, to the public. Fuelled by environmental and ethical concerns, this exhibition includes four new suspended installations predominated by the dynamics between the bodies of taxidermy animals that seem to be contained within synthetic or alien environments, and new compositions displayed in vitrines, including one that incorporates text. A corpus of delicate sketches permits us to discover the artist’s meticulous creative work juxtaposed with the ardent and instinctive impetus of a surprising series of large-scale canvases. Claire Morgan’s work explores the ambivalence in the human being’s relationship with the natural world that surrounds him/her. The artist’s reflections on the human presence in the world, which has resulted in the progressive destruction of our natural environment, are externalised in her installations using taxidermy animals that appear to be inhabiting and adapting to a world of superficial post-consumer waste that engulfs them. In the suspended temporality that defines these aerial sculptures, in which bodies are immobilised in a state of perpetual motion, this conflict plays out between life and death; between the organic and the artificial. Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 14/10-23/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
Following his major retrospective at the Perez Art Museum, Miami and his concurrent exhibition at Perrotin New York, Julio Le Parc, returns to Paris with “BIFURCATIONS”, an exhibition of recent and historic works. Both floors of the gallery sre dedicated to new installations and mobiles that are exhibited alongside recent paintings. Shown for the first time, these works create a dialogue with the historical paintings, sculptures and installations from the 70’s to the 90’s. Lastly, a virtual reality artwork, designed with his son Juan Le Parc, offers an insight into the artist’s work. Julio Le Parc attended the Escuela de Bella Artes in Buenos Aires in 1943. He immigrated to Paris in 1958, where he was central to the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel GRAV). At the same time hs conducted his own experiments with light, creating his first mobiles from small pieces of Plexiglas, which were connected and suspended from the ceiling. He also created light-based works, using projectors to play with rhythms of light and sound. In 1966, he received the Grand Prize in Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale. Le Parc’s participation in the May 1968 Paris uprising and union rallies led to his expulsion from France, but returned to Paris a few months later following the protests of French artists and intellectuals. Upon his return to Paris, Le Parc became an important conduit between activist Latin American artists and the Paris art scene. Info: Galerie Perrotin, 76 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 14/10-23/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
Pascal Convert is an artist working in sculpture, installation and video, a documentary filmmaker and a writer. The topics of memory and forgetting are central to his work. He explores personal, political and aesthetic questions through his use of materials such as glass and wax, which evoke time, light and the lingering after-effects of the past. The giant sculpted 
Buddhas of Bâmiyân owe their fame above all to their destruction by the Taliban on 11/3/01, in the wake of an edict condemning idols promulgated by Mullah Omar, who had been controlling Afghanistan since 1996. At the time, the western world had not completely acknowledged the scale of that event, which was nevertheless part of a time sequence which duly led to the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, exactly six months later, on 11/9/01. The destruction of the two giant Buddhas at Bâmiyân and of the Twin Towers in New York accelerated our entry into the 21st century and taught us that the comeback of cultural, economic and above all religious conflicts would go hand-in-hand with a toxic use of the power of imagery. Pascal Convert had made shootings of several major historical sites in Bamyan valley under the 15th anniversary of Boudha status destruction. In “At Bâmiyân” his solo exhibition at Galerie Eric Dupont the artist presents his latest works are all informed by absence, an absence which resists and which cannot be erased, an absence which is there in front of us, amazingly precise. Info: Galerie Eric Dupont, 138 Rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 14/10-19/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.eric-dupont.com
“Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter” is the first exhibition of Maya’s Picasso own childhood as seen through her father’s works. After Maya’s birth, Pablo Picasso chronicled intimate details of their private life together en famille, exploring the archetypal theme of maternity. Maya’s portraits reflect the great joy that she brought into the artist’s life, even on the eve of the Second World War. She would become the most frequently depicted of Picasso’s children—a muse, like her mother. This exhibition shows major works from the ‘30s and the ‘40s, including a collection of intimate portraits of Maya and Marie-Thérèse, sculptures and little paper cuts-out fashioned especially for his daughter. Like many of his favorite portraits of family members, most of the pieces remained in Picasso’s personal collection until his death in 1973. Alongside the artist’s works, a selection of archival material (unpublished photographs, films, letters and poems) explores the relationship between father and daughter, while providing an invaluable testimony of this new-found happiness. Info: Curator: Diana Widmaier-Picasso, Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 19/10-22/10/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
Most of the works presented in Chris Martin’s first solo exhibition in France, titled “Chris Martin – Paris TAZ” were produced in the artist’s studio in the Catskill Mountains, three hours’ drive from New York City. Inspired by the lush slopes basking in fickle light, Chris Martin experienced there moments that complemented the inner landscape whose contours are sketched by his childhood memories of the region. In this environment, the artist experiences singular, profound and unconstrained moments that are one of numerous senses that may be given to the term Temporary Anonymous Zone, or TAZ, invented in 1991 and made popular by «ontological anarchist» Hakim Bey. According to the artist, freedom means “accepting one’s limits but also accepting one’s obsessions”. While some paintings in the exhibition are interspersed with figurative elements, Chris Martin is fully committed to an abstract style of painting that enables him to access different levels of language and image in limitless expression. Info: VNH Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration 19/10-25/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.vnhgallery.com
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac present its first exhibition of Irving Penn, “The Flavour of France”. Titled after a photographic essay published by Irving Penn in 1960, in which he celebrates what André Gide called the “hries of orror of the approximate” that characterises French charm, the exhibition focuses on three different bodies of work: “Nudes”, “Small Trades” and “Artist portraits”. Commissioned by Vogue’s art director Alexander Liberman, the works in “Portraits” series strike by their graphic simplicity and immediate impact qualities that both meet the requirements of the printed page. Nudes: While working at Vogue in the late 1940s, Irving Penn initiated the personal project of photographing the female body in a pioneering way. This would become “the major artistic experience of his life”, as he himself stated. Freed from commercial expectations, he started a sesessions to photograph nudes in his own private studio at 480 Lexington Avenue. Equally influenced by Eugène Atget’s portraits of tradesmen at the turn of the century and the socially engaged work of Walker Evans, he developed his series “Small Trades”. Instead of the vernacular setting of the street he chose to isolate the subject in a studio Vogue rented for him in the rue de Vaugirard in Paris. Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 Rue Debellyme, Paris, Duration: 19/10/17-6/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.ropac.net
The I-beam is part of the bone structure of early capitalism, fundamentally shaping the modern landscape. At the same time, the I-beam symbolizes the vast fortunes, amassed by steel magnates and capitalists, and their obverse, the exploitation of millions of workers in the steel factories of Europe and the US. It thus encapsulates the fundamental tension inherent in capitalism itself, the dialectics of creation and destruction, progress and oppression. This dialectical tension is also present in “Steel Unforged” Kaz Oshiro’s solo exhibition of series of I-beams. At first glance, they seem like faithful sculptural reproductions of rusty beams, or even like real steel pillars, fragments of old buildings. On closer inspection, however, the sculptures turn out to be three-dimensional paintings, made from canvas, wood and acrylic. Oshiro breaks down the barrier between painting and sculpture and highlights the uneasy and pervious limit between artistic forms. His sculpted paintings, or painted sculptures, assemble fragments from the history of painting while fundamentally re-defining the latter’s scope and possibilities. Oshiro’s I-beam is a genuinely dialectical image, merging the past with the present, articulated around a series of fundamental tensions that point towards the future: painting vs. sculpture, individual craft vs. mass production, abstraction vs. figuration, tradition vs. avant-garde, the singular vs. the serial, illusion vs. reality. Info: Galerie Frank Elbaz, 66 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 19/10-16/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriefrankelbaz.com
Carried out in 2017 in collaboration with the writer and novelist Serge Bramly, Bettina Rheims’ latest photographic project, “Naked War” is the result of the meeting between the photographer and the Femen activists. Femen is an international women’s movement which began in 2008 in Ukraine. Femen’s actions are part of the “third wave of feminism”, after the Suffragettes in the 19th century and the movements in the ‘70s. More radical, and more physically involved, the Femen reappropriate performance codes by acting in the public sphere. Displaying slogans on their naked torsos, which become a privileged space for statements, they invented “political nudity” as a tool for raising awareness. Photographed against a neutral background, these fighting bodies are taken out of their public environment and, facing the spectator, address themselves directly to them. By means of photography, Bettina Rheims highlights the performative side of Femen activism and creates a work of which the artist and the activists are the co-authors. Giving a strong presence to the non-ideal and sometimes unconventional female body, turned into the medium of a political message, corporeality, always present in Bettina Rheims’ work, unveils another dimension – that of engagement and power. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 21/10-25/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com
Working across photography, sculpture, installation and most recently architecture, Hiroshi Sugimoto explores his concerns of time, memory and societal progress, tracing their origins, while bridging Eastern and Western ideologies. Hiroshi Sugimoto presents “Surface Tension” a collection of images from the his “Seascapes” series (1980– ) from the ‘90’s to his most recent works of the Tasman sea photographed in 2017. For Sugimoto, contemplating and photographing images of the seas of the world connects the present to the past and as well as the history of those seas to the land where he sets up his camera. The ever moving surface of the sea ensures that each work has it its own unrepeatable characteristics, communicated via weather, atmosphere and the illumination of the sun or the moon. The singular unifying element throughout the series is the perfectly balanced composition between the lower half weighted with the sea, and the airy upper half depicting the sky, each seascape divided dead centre by the horizon line. Despite the Romantic and almost mystical effect of these works, their titles are objective and documentary, reflecting Sugimoto’s roots in Conceptual art. Info: Galerie Marian Goodman, 79 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 28/10-22/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com