ART CITIES:Paris-Openings 1st Week of September
The year 2018 marks the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and France, as well as the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Meji period, when Japan opened up to the West. As part of the Japonisms 2018, Kohei Nawa presents his solo exhibition “PixCell Deer”. The works scattered in the permanent Collections of the Museum resume the themes dear to the artist who attempts to renew the sacred imagery. To this end, he mixes elements from traditional Japanese culture, Buddhism and Japanese Shintoism with images from contemporary technology. “PixCell” is sculpture of a taxidermied maral deer. “PixCell” is a term coined by connecting the words pixel, the smallest portion of a digital image, with cells. Images of chosen objects are digitalized and encapsulated in a layer of spheres; the same process is then applied to the physical piece by covering it with a layer of glass beads. While the glass beads create a different system of representation through matter, the various dimensions of the spheres create the effect of a lens and a unique, deep, and continuous view. Info: Curators: Claude Anthenaise and Sumiko Oe-Gottini, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, 62 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration: 4/9-2/12/18. Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-21:30, www.chassenature.org
Structured around a set of new works and around the eponymous film, Laurent Grasso’s exhibition “OttO” interconnects sacred spaces, animistic beliefs and scientific theories. Each of these works concerns imperceptible and yet active phenomena that have in common the real or supposed effects of electromagnetic waves, vibrations and frequencies. Continuing his exploration of the forms of political and scientific power, Laurent Grasso proposes new research into the power of waves, a matter which, although invisible, has tangible effects. The space of the gallery is bathed in frequencies emitted by hybrid and active sculptures whose electromagnetic activity can potentially act on the visitor’s body and mind. A Steiner machine, spiral sculptures with hypnotic forms, glass spheres featuring conductive paintings gravitate around the new film “OttO”, shown for the first time in France. In this work the artist continues his attempt to represent the immaterial and his research into aesthetic, fictional and poetic variations produced on the basis of scientific utopias, theories or mythologies. Info: Galerie Perrotin, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 6/9-6/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
Men are not born in the Holly Mountain” says Stratos Kalafatis for his solo exhibition “Athos-The Colors of Faith”, A project that took 25 visits to Mount Athos in a period over 5 years and ended with the publishing of the self-titled album from Agra Publications. Stratos Kalafatis selects the square format to give his version of the landscape and the people in this particular area. A difficult format because there is no dominant axis, but in his hands gives an excellent dynamism, escaping from the stereotypical images that someone is expecting from a religious center, presents details, landscapes but mostly the people of this male society. He captures with his lens the everyday life in the monasteries, the calm gaze of the monks and their social and hierarchical relationships. His images balance between contemporary photography and the paintings of Delacroix and Gericault, both in his landscapes, especially at night and the portraits of people that emerge from the photos and reveal their personality. Info: Galerie Intervalle, 12, rue Jouye Rouve, Paris, Duration: 7/9-27/10/18, Days & Hours: Fri-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerie-intervalle.com
The exhibition “Fred Sandback: Le Fil d’Occam” pays homage to the radicalism and purity of Fred Sandback’s work with a selection of sculptures and works on paper made between 1967 and 2002. Emerging from the U.S. scene of the 1960s, and influenced by Minimalism, Sandback sought to raise line to a new, pure level by working with acrylic yarn, creating multidirectional networks that map out materially fragile yet precise geometrical forms and volumes in space. After experimenting with a number of materials in his early works, including elastic cord, in the mid- 1970s he settled on acrylic yarn. This could be white, black, or colored – a choice which was made intuitively in response to the context. Although each work was developed in conversation with the specificities of the architectural settings, Sandback’s three-dimensional works were never limited to a fixed site; they can be reinterpreted. Based not only on the tension of the lines but also on the invisibility of the system for fixing the yarn in the wall, floor or ceiling, Sandback’s sculptures offer a unique aesthetic that helps to stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Info: Galerie Marian Goodman, 79 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 8/9-27/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com
Vik Muniz in his new solo exhibition “Handmade”, explores the nature of perception, playing on the dichotomy between the object and its representation, and reinventing the possibilities of the construction of the photographic image. The “handmade” works, as the title of the exhibition suggests, are the result of a hybrid process combining painting or collage and high-resolution digital photography. The results are complex compositions, each unique pieces, combining different techniques: paper and cardboard are painted, cut out and superimposed on a surface, before being photographed in order to allow for manipulation, rearranging and further photographing, and so on. By creating different planes which reveal underlying elements and their photographs, Vik Muniz invents real trompe-l’œil where the objects and their photographic representations are interlinked in a visual game. Inviting the spectator on a quest to distinguish between the object and its image, the artist pursues his research on the mechanisms of perception, a common thread throughout his work. The series refers to the fundamental principles of abstract art: color, form and rhythm are used as the main components of composition. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 8/9-20/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com
For her solo exhibition “Native Naked…”, Rina Banerjee brings together works from a variety of media. While some works are mounted on the wall, others are on the floor, standing or sitting in the gallery space. These choices are made to underpin the conceptual frame by which Banerjee references position and location. The familiar mounted trophies that grace the walls of a hunting era with a head of an animal invite our dialogue when approaching the wall mounted steel sculptures. Rina Banerjee’s sculptures incorporate a wide range of media, such as feathers, seeds, shells, glass seed beads, gourds, colored threads, silver and gold leafing, minerals, nests formations, tail motifs, horn and net structures, found objects both archaic and from commercial interior decorative markets, silks, cottons, linen, vials, bottles… Which collectively ‘dress” the skeleton sculptures. Also present in the exhibition, paintings on wood panels and watercolors on paper are a true testimony to the artist’s origins. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, Duration: 8/9-27/10/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com
Fabien Mérelle’s new exhibition “TRAVERSÉ(E)”, could be considered a portrayal of the artist in everyday life, a mise en scène of what happens within the confines of a place of leisure, a workplace, a place for creating or within a personal and intimate space. But what form does it take and what impression does it make on others? And it is this question that Fabien Mérelle has decided to tackle, this tension between an individual and the other, invariably portraying himself dressed in striped pyjama bottoms, a pantomime-like costume all the better to surreptitiously invade the public space in a civilised, bittersweet and ironic manner. He finally accedes, with the participation of his friends and relatives, to a theatrical dimension as he translates his fantastical and dreamlike scenes into ink and watercolour drawings. These drawings that describe in minute detail a world where present and past combine and the living, the dead and forgotten, humans and plants, whimsical characters and extraordinary animals are brought face to face like childhood dreams that have been repressed. Info: Praz-Delavallade, 5 rue des Haudriettes, Paris, Duration: 8/9-6/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.praz-delavallade.com
The exhibition “Les années 60-70” offers the chance to rediscover one of the most singular and emblematic painters in French contemporary art: Georges Mathieu. The exhibition features around thirty paintings created between 1960 and 1979, demonstrating the significance and inventiveness of a body of work that left a lasting impression on French art and imagination. The period covered by the exhibition represents Georges Mathieu’s work at its pinnacle. In his quest to transcend the notion of the avant-garde, he developed a form of painting where speed and spontaneity became key. He was famed for his large-scale formats where the unadulterated paint spurts from the tube. He brought a new brand of freedom to the creative gesture, rooted in emotion, violence and subjectivity. Freedom that then gave birth to a brand new style, somewhere between esoteric sign, calligraphy and raw energy. The titles, often steeped in historical, musical and geographical references, add a poetic quality, both sophisticated and offbeat. Info: Galerie Galerie Templon, 30 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 8/9-20/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com
Wallace Berman was a crucial figure in the history of postwar California art. Music was inseparable from Wallace Berman’s life and work. The artist always kept strong ties to the music world and kept track of the latest developments with an insatiable curiosity, exploring the avant-garde beyond California and taking notice of innovative, unusual, and sometimes confidential. Wallace Berman’s solo exhibition “Visual Music” examine the connection between sound and image, music and visual art, in Berman’s work and show the extremely important role music played in Berman’s artistic approach. His series of Verifax Collages, named after the brand of copier he adopted as a main tool for his art-making in the mid-1960s. He always composed these collages while listening to music. As a result, sound, specifically music, infuses the artist’s artwork. Explicit or implicit, metonymic or formal, musical references abound in the “Verifax Collages”. For instance, portraits of singers such as Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful, and Bob Dylan are featured in several Collages. Info: Curator: Sophie Dannenmüller, galerie frank elbaz, 66 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 8/9-11/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriefrankelbaz.com
Nolan Hendrickson presents his solo exhibition “CMNM (Clothed Man Nude Man)”. The personal moods of his paintings are intensified into a singular figurative contemplation. Painted in light flashe acrylic, the situations are composed with stylized figures and rendered with hypersensitive distance. In Hendrickson’s electric celebration of the active body, everything, including sexuality and the surface of the canvas is in perpetual motion. Hendrickson’s precise expression of emotional in-between-ness is unique in how current his maps of the human being are. It is the most updated satellite imagery of the soul. In 2009, Nolan Hendrickson illustrated and published “Faggot Carnival” a book of cartoons. These cartoons featured clownish, lumpy melancholics, detached but moving calmly and shamelessly through the motions of crudely original forms of sexual experimentation. His second book, “White Shoulders” published in 2013, developed the dynamics of awkward groups attempting to cum together. Printed under the superimposed grid of blotter paper, the illustrations in White Shoulders also suggested a mismanagement of the psychedelic, with an understudy in genital disillusionment. Info: Galerie Éric Hussenot, 5 bis rue des Haudriettes, Paris, Duration: 8/9-27/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriehussenot.com
The works of of Misleidys Castillo Pedroso and Rigo that are on presentation in his solo exhibition “fuerza cubana 2” are mysterious, striking and memorable. Misleidys was born in 1985, not far from Havana, with a severe hearing impairment, and that her father left home when she was still a very young child. The little girl showed signs of developmental difficulties, so her mother placed her in a specialized facility at the age of five. But as the symptoms of autism became clearer, she had to leave. She went back to live at home, in total isolation from society, before beginning, one day, to paint and then to cut out silhouettes of bodybuilders, sometimes larger than life-size – soon adding wildlife, demons, organs, of which some have cut-away views. This assemblage ended up decorating all the rooms in the house. The strips of brown Scotch used to tape them to the walls giving them a sort of supernatural aura. Guillermo Rigoberto Casola Marcos was born in Havana in 1961, is better known as Rigo. His parents and his siblings suffer like him from mental disorders; one of his brothers is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Rigo has been drawing since childhood. He offers his drawings or throws them. His art tries to express his everyday life, the feeling of a poor Cuban, half artist, half crazy. He also likes to watch experimental films and makes his own videos that he keeps until he finds a computer to broadcast them. Rigoberto has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice. He is currently working as a warden in a state service. Info: Christian Berst Art Brut, 3-5 passage des Gravilliers, Paris, Duration: 8/9-6/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, www.christianberst.com