ART CITIES:Paris-Openings

In her latest series of vivid geometric paintings that are on show in the exhibition “Paintings”, Farah Atassi intermingles references to modernist painting, decorative arts, textile motifs and folk art. Having long used colorful triangles, rectangles and circles to construct fanciful unpopulated interior scenes, Atassi has only recently begun to assemble these shapes into stylized still lifes and human forms. The suite of twelve new paintings (all 2020) presented for the first time at Almine Rech features Cubist-style female figures, musical instruments, domestic objects and circus props depicted in rooms whose colorfully patterened décors variously recall Mondrian paintings, Memphis Group designs, Scottish tartans and Pucci textiles. Atassi relies on a grid to organize her carefully devised compositions of colors and shapes. However, she also uses the grid to help plot out the orthogonal lines that help her to represent three-dimensional space. By reappropriating a defining feature of non-objective art as the armature onto which she builds fictive spaces and hangs narrative scenes, Atassi anchors her paintings firmly between abstraction and representation. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration:5/9-3/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com

Ari Marcopoulos’ solo exhibition “Into the Now” is a body of work that was put together during the Covid-19 pandemic. The center piece of the exhibition is a digitized  Super-8 film titled “Brown Bag”. The title refers to a brown paper bag filled with exposed Super-8 film cassettes that Marcopoulos found in hia studio unpacking some long-forgotten boxes. He sent the film out to be developed and digitized. When the material returned it turned out to be mostly skate footage from the mid-90’s in New York. The film had sat in that bag almost 25 years, a true time capsule. with the footage and edited this film. Also in the show are a series of 14 vintage prints taken in New York in the 80’s and early 90’s, these include images of Spike Lee on the set of “Do the Right Thing”, and Public Enemy lead man Chuck D in the recording studio. The most recent work is a recto/verso edition covering the past year, including the doctor who administered his Covid-19 test, my sons and stepdaughter, several up and coming hip hop artists and others. Info: Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, Duration: 5/9-10/10/20, Days & Hours: The-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriefrankelbaz.com

The work of Rirkrit Tiravanija has not stopped questioning the format of artworks and the exhibition system. A mix of performance, sculpture, installation, and more, with Tiravanija, the artistic space transforms into a place of social interaction, often dotted with meeting points, encounters, and exchanges. Rirkrit Tiravanija in his solo exhibition “untitled 2020 (once upon a time) (after jasper johns)” presents a new set of works, textiles and marbles. Made from the purest tradition of weaving, Aubusson rugs displayed on walls and floors will serve as surfaces conveying the artist’s new slogans. At the crossroads between political activism and commercial marketing, the words are set out on U.S. geographical maps referring to the ones Jasper Johns made between 1960 and 1965. Other texts overlap the United States’ flag (as Jasper Johns depicted it from 1954) in a series of unique marble works, creating both echo and tension, eternally engraved. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, Duration” 5/9-10/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com

Key figures in American art and pioneering installation artists, Edward and Nancy Kienholz are renowned for their hard-hitting art that combines a formal and political radicalism that is particularly relevant today. The exhibition at Galerie Templon presents over 20 works, some of them for the first time in Europe, created between 1978 and 1994, the year of Edward Kienholz’s death. Life-size installations, three-dimensional tableaux and assemblage works made from everyday items, their works lie beyond the boundaries of sculpture, depicting an unsettling world as fascinating as it is repellent. Far from the conventions of readymade or pop art, their strange scenes are populated by human figures and manufactured items that create an ambiguous and mysterious realism. The aim is to offer a fierce criticism of the dysfunctionalities of American society: unbridled consumerism, everyday racism, sexism, structural violence and religious hypocrisy. 26 years after the death of Ed Kienholz and one year since Nancy died, this exhibition illustrates more clearly than ever the complexity of artists who have become part of history but whose approach, often running counter to mainstream movements of their day, turned them into visionaries. Info: Galerie Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration: 5/9-31/10/20, Days & Hours: Tues-Sat, 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com

Luc Delahaye in his solo exhibition “The Village” presents a group of large-scale photographic tableaux and black and white series. All the works were realized during a long stay in a village in northern Senegal, near the river after which the country was named. “Le Champ” (The Field) represents a young man preparing a rice paddy before it is sown. In a wide-open landscape, halved by the horizon, the man whose profile is sharply defined by the hard light is captured in motion. The energy he emits, the size of his body within the frame and the wealth of details make him look like an archaic vision of hard work. As with the other large-scale formats included in the exhibition, the photograph is a reconstruction of a situation witnessed at another time by the photographer. With his model, during several posing sessions and with the untiring repetition of gestures, he tries to give a tangible existence and a structured form to something that is but a fragile impression. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, Duration: 4/9-31/10/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com

A former resident of the Villa Medici (Rome), Thomas Lévy-Lasne presents “L’asphyxie” an original collection of paintings and drawings. Patiently – at the speed that painting imposes – the artist makes visible, the cultural habits, if not the disaster, of humankind in its relationship with its environment. Collecting visual evidence of this mutation and the anthropisation of the world, Lévy-Lasne reports a renunciation of the idea of wilderness in favour of the modern project of artificialisation and technological utopia. Graduated from Les Beaux Arts (Paris), Thomas Lévy-Lasne worked for five years with art critic Hector Obalk, filming all the museums of Europe for television. Watercolors of parties, charcoals of demonstrations and marches, erotic webcam drawings, oil paintings of urban solitude, he tackles the most diverse and contemporary subjects in a classical way. For the cinema, he stars in the multi-award-winning medium-length film (Berlinale, Angers, Brive, etc.) “Vilaine fille, mauvais garçon” by Justine Triet (See film / password: loreleï), collaborates on the script for “Victoria” (second feature film by Justine Triet) and directed his first short film “Le collectionneur ”(2017). Info: Les filles du calvaire, 17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, Paris, Duration: 3/9-24/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:30, www.fillesducalvaire.com