ART CITIES:Paris-Blanc sur Blanc

Kazimir Malevich was undoubtably one of the most influential modernist artists and the first one to engage fully in geometric abstraction. Malevich’s “White on White” series can be considered iconic examples of suprematism along side the Black Square. Within these paintings, Malevich reduces the pictorial means to a bare minimum, he disregards the illusion of depth and volume, while stripping his paintings of the seemingly last essential attribute, color. The remaining geometric figure, barely differentiated from a slightly warmer white background, has a illusion of movement achieved by its off-centered position.

By Efi michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Working in different contexts and with different ends in mind, the artists in the group exhibition “Blanc sur Blanc” find unexpected power and substance in what appears at first to be an absence or lack. In 1946, Lucio Fontana and his students drafted the “Manifesto Blanco”, a vision for a fundamentally new method of artistic production that demanded that artists engage with the real-world physicality of their materials instead of treating the canvas as an illusory, self-contained space. It was out of this impulse that Fontana produced “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” (1966), one of his first slashed canvases. For Fontana, the painting’s allover coat of white formed a blank screen and acted as a vehicle for heightened drama, with any connotations of purity or tranquility disrupted by his forceful incisions. During the last decade of his life, Andy Warhol broke with the visual and conceptual language of Pop art to produce idiosyncratic takes on abstract and gestural painting. “Abstract Painting” (1982) is one such work. Measuring 102/6 cm square, the same dimensions that Warhol used previously for his notorious “Society Portraits” the canvas is veiled in a white wash that permits only tantalizing glimpses of multicolored swirls beneath. Though the subjects in Y.Z. Kami’s oeuvre span from painted portraits and devotional subject matter to abstract domes, the artist continually returns to themes of introspection, subjectivity and contemplation. As such, a universal sense of spirituality is conveyed by Kami’s “White Dome VI” (2013), the series is characterized by a central white light that pours over countless rows of mosaic-like white rectangles, hand-painted or stamped onto the canvas. Like his portraits, Kami’s dome paintings create an aura of meditation and tranquility. “LEAN” (2005) exemplifies Rachel Whiteread’s practice of concretizing negative space in order to memorialize it. Here she has cast the interiors of various cardboard boxes in plaster of paris as a somewhat wistful tribute to the banal, quotidian container. The resulting geometric accumulation of minimalist white slabs is propped up casually against the gallery wall, ghostlike yet palpable. Also, on view are three recent works by Sheila Hicks, whose textile works incorporate yarn-based techniques from diverse cultures. While Hicks’s oeuvre is characterized by intense color, she also works with natural undyed fibers. Here she has fashioned spheres, woven rectangular canvases, and tumbling cascades of linen in neutral shades that exude a tactile yet meditative calm.

On show are works by: Jean (Hans) Arp, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Edmund de Waal, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Diego Giacometti, Wade Guyton, Simon Hantaï, Sheila Hicks, Thomas Houseago, Y.Z. Kami, Imi Knoebel, Bertrand Lavier, Sol LeWitt, Sally Mann, John Mason, Olivier Mosset, Giuseppe Penone, Seth Price, Paolo Scheggi, Setsuko, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Franz West, and Rachel Whiteread.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 16/1-7/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com