ART CITIES:Paris-Drawing by Numbers

At the beginning of the year 2018, Galerie Jérôme Poggi is presenting a new group exhibition focusing on graphic arts. The “Drawing by Numbers” exhibition brings together artists represented by the gallery, presenting an eclectic and singular body of work. Participating Artists: Babi Badalov, Anna-Eva Bergman, Larissa Fassler and Yona Friedman.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Jérôme Poggi Archive

Babi Badalov’s pratice is a constant exploration of the limits of the language. He is particularly interesting in the way that language is able to isolate individuals from the people who don’t share the same language. Thereby, the artist covers current geo-political topics that echoes his own personal experiences. Babi Badalov often introduces his own texts in his work : by combinating it with manipulated political pictures, he creates installations, objects, paintings and happenings that he used to qualified as “visual poetry”. The work of Anna-Eva Bergman is located outside the domain of art history as envisaged within a progressive concept based on the succession of artistic avant-gardes. The use of materials such as gold and/or silver leaf combined with that of painting and a commitment to the symbolic reveal a metaphysical concept of the landscape and puts it out of step with the major aesthetic challenges of the 20th century. Recognized during her lifetime, and nevertheless held in a marginal position, her work raises renewed interest, artistic as well as critical. Larissa Fassler’s work evolves from a social and practical approach to architecture.  It is constructed out of a mass of topographic tracking, sketches, observations, and feelings that she experiences on site, and that are then synthesised into large graphic compositions, models, and sculptures.  Yona Friedman first studied architecture at the University of Technology and Economics in Budapest, then at the Technion of Haïfa, Israël, where he worked as an architect from 1949 to 1957. Since his early projects on housing, he tried to step away from the responsibility for designing the projects by delegating it to their future inhabitants, a procedure he calls “self-planning”. In 1953, in response to postwar demographic problems and the challenges of the reconstruction period, he started to conceive spatial structures on stilts based on “mobile architecture”‘s principles. Exploiting spatial and distortions, Bertrand Lamarche proposes a group of sculptural hypotheses that are at once ecstatic and conceptual. His work is rooted in the amplification and the potential for speculation of figures that have featured regularly in his oeuvre for nearly 20 years. A large proportion of his oeuvre is characterized by a desire for subjectivation and appropriation, sometimes almost demiurgic, of various areas or figures of reality. Wesley Meuris’ work intersects with both architecture and scientific systems of consolidation and classification. He addresses concepts of conservation and engages in a rationalist understanding of space and knowledge. He produces such varied objects as zoological enclosures, hypothetical archives, museum furniture, and fictional exhibitions. Georges Tony Stoll became well known for his photographs even if his work is deployed on different media such as painting, video or installations, for exploring what he names the “domains of abstraction”. Reattached to an “aesthetics of intimacy” by several art critics, his work is nevertheless distinguished by a rather marked plastic and pictorial approach, and by his taste for staging bodies and objects. Marion Verboom’s body-work is mostly composed by drawings and sculptures, both of which operate autonomously but feed themselves respectively. The modeled shapes borrow from the history of sculpture, architecture and geology. If the drawings allow the artist to set a formal vocabulary freely conceived, their transposition into sculpture seeks to question the physical impact volume may have on the viewer. The physical or formal confrontation of these two media leads to a tension governing the arrangement of her installations. Far away from the art schools and movements of which he nevertheless was a keen observer, Kees Visserhas gradually created his own self-taught path over the last forty years. Parting from his native Holland, where in the mid-1970s he had worked in a vein oscillating between abstraction and Fluxus, Kees Visser left to settle in Iceland, where he lived for nearly twenty years. Co-founder with a group of Icelandic artists of the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik in 1978, Kees Visser became a prominent figure in the Icelandic art world. Invited for a residency in Paris in the mid-1990s, it was then in France that Kees Visser developed his work on series, shape and color, creating the monochrome paintings with crystalline qualities for which he is known for today.

Info: Galerie Jérôme Poggi, 2 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 27/1-3/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://galeriepoggi.com