ART CITIES:Paris Openings & Re-openings
Claude Closky’s new exhibition’s title, “Premier choix, deuxième choix, troisième choix”, is reminiscent of the big unpacking of a factory sale, in a hurry to sell unsold items and defective parts. Even if we know that an artist can produce works of varying quality during his career, it is a subject that is avoided, or feebly talked about. So is this title a matter of provocation, sabotage, an excess of modesty or a genuine stock clearance? As is often the case with Claude Closky, the answer is rather to be found in the double meaning, sneaked here into the language of the transaction and the object to be exchanged. The scenography of the exhibition can easily be described: three large tables, with cut-out shapes and covered with drawings, occupy three spaces in the gallery. A tone rings when visitors cross the thresholds from one room to the other. Despite this theatrical arrangement, there is no doubt that this is a drawing exhibition. The drawings too can be told without difficulty: there are more than a hundred of them, all unique, invariably black, printed on A3 sheets of different colors. Info: Laurent Godin Gallery, 36 bis rue Eugène Oudiné, Paris, Duration: 6/10/2020-16/1/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.laurentgodin.com
Through about 30 works created over the past two years, the Gideon Rubin once again transports us into his universe inhabited by figures made anonymous through his use of framing, posture and the systematic erasure of all individuality. “A Stranger’s Hand”, the exhibition’s title alone evokes all the ambiguity that is typical of Gideon Rubin’s work, particularly in the series of ten paintings including two diptychs that pay tribute to the 20th century artists whose influence has been so crucial to his work, including Philip Guston, Willem De Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn. An attentive, comprehensive interpretation of these works brings to light the special attention given to the hands of these figures, which are at the centre of each composition. Hands are fascinating parts of the human body. They can reach out or come together in a handshake. They can unleash passions, be bulwarks, protective. They give away feelings, passing states or moods, they illustrate an attitude. They are creative, tools for talent and ways to express mannerisms. Here, they crucially reveal the individuality of these figures of painters, writers and thinkers, who were so important for the artist paying tribute to them. Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 16/10/2020-161/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
Jim Dine is unveiling the results of almost three years of work in his solo exhibition “A Day Longer”. Partially produced at his Parisian studio during lockdown, the exhibition takes us on a journey into a body of work that is bolder and more introspective than ever. Born in 1935, Jim Dine first gained recognition as one of the pioneers of the New York happenings in the 1950s before becoming a key figure in the Pop Art of the 1960s. A profoundly independent, multi-faceted artist and poet, Jim Dine soon began to strike out on his own. Drawing on sculpture, painting, prints and photography, he has developed an original language, partly abstract, partly figurative, haunted by a distinctive iconography formed by figures from antiquity, tools, hearts and the figure of Pinocchio. The last decade has seen him creating an ever-expanding body of poetry and he regularly organises readings and performances of his poems alongside his exhibitions. Info: Galerie Templon, 30 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 7/11/2020-23/1/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com
Gerasimos Floratos’ exhibition entitled “Psychogeography” references a term Gerasimos Floratos often uses and which he has borrowed from Guy Debord. This “science” was invented in the 1950s, when Debord was actively involved in the Letterist International collective, and proposed to analyse and reinvent the development of the planned urban environment and its effects on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. Conceived during New York’s lockdown, when the artist was confined to his studio, the exhibition comprises a new series of oil paintings, drawings and collages on canvas created at night on the studio floor. The artist repeatedly illustrates the flow from one world to the other with internal depictions of organs – brains or digestive tracts – and external images of architecture. His paintings are loaded with color, his lines are bold, his style verges on expressionism. It is visceral, organic, saturated, crucial for the artist, and radiates a powerful energy. Some of his paintings are started on the floor, then side-tracked as he begins a new one. Canvases pile up against the studio wall until he chooses to rework and finish them. Some are composed with collages of drawings or sketches; sometimes, photographs replace the painted line. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 20/11/2020-8/1/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
Shannon Cartier Lucy presents her solo exhibition “Fooled Again”. Her paintings are loquacious despite seeming unassuming. They thrust us towards the edge of a precipice right where our inhibitions ends and our subconscious begins. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the entrails of a complex labyrinth where the walls are moving, reconfiguring the very space we’re walking through. Are we looking inside someone else’s mind or our own? Now the scene is set in the moments preceding our awaking. We are knee-deep in a lucid dream. Our subconscious is soliloquizing. The hushed tones and the mostly desaturated color palette render the surroundings slightly lugubrious. We have the power to wake up, but we opt to stay in this parallel universe. Despite her career’s upward momentum at the time, the artist fled New York a few years after 9/11, leaving behind her a nagging heroin habit among other things. With New York City out of the picture, Lucy got clean, pursued a masters degree and became a psychotherapist. The artist had grown up with a schizophrenic father, piquing her interest in psychotherapy and imparting its influence on her painting practice which may explain the well-wrought sense of unease the artist brings to her troubled human subjects and their uncanny settings. Info: Hussenot Gallery, 5 bis rue des Haudriettes, Paris, duration: 4/12/2020-27/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriehussenot.com
With the group exhibition “La terre est bleue comme une orange”, Praz-Delavallade wants to end 2020 on a more hopeful note that invokes color in all its forms and whose guest artists feel and see the world so keenly that color is empowered. Although the theme is apparently simple, when you set out to address this subject you are confronted with the ambiguous nature of the very notion of color. Color provides information that helps us understand the world all around us and at the same time “colors” our experience of it. In other words, colou is informative and yet it provides a subjective experience and therein lies the complexity of the question. Throughout the history of contemporary art, colour has been an adventure which, from Malevich’s white square to Rothko’s fields of solid colour and from Shigeru Ban’s white roof design for Centre Pompidou Metz to Pierre Soulages going “beyond black” with his outrenoir, not forgetting International Klein Blue, has played a part in establishing artists’ identities. Info: Praz-Delavallade Gallery, 5, rue des Haudriettes, Paris, Duration: 5/12/2020-6/2/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.praz-delavallade.com
Gallerie Thaddaeus Ropac celebrates the 30th anniversary of its Parisian galleries with a transformative exhibition entitled “30 Year in Paris” that brings together new and historical works by over 60 artists at our Pantin space. Organized in three parts, the exhibition will be unveiled over the course of seven months. The first part open on Sunday 6th December, thirty years after w Thaddaeus Ropac inaugurated our first gallery in Paris in 1990. Over the last 30 years, the gallery in the Marais has gradually grown to span four floors. In the wake of an increasingly dynamic Parisian art scene, the gallery decided to open a second, large-scale space just outside Paris, in a former boiler factory in Pantin. Inaugurated in 2012 with exhibitions by Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys the space allows for site-specific exhibitions on an expansive scale. The anniversary exhibition 30 Years in Paris opens a dialogue between artists from different generations, artistic movements and cultural backgrounds, reflecting the development and the diversity of the gallery’s programme. Info: Gallerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 69, Avenue Du Général Leclerc, Pantin, Duration 6/12/2020-26/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net/
A major figure of the Eastern European artistic scene, Nikita Kadan (born in Kiev, 1982) won the Pinchuk Art Center Prize in 2011 and participated in the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Initially scheduled for last spring, Nikita Kadan’s solo exhibition “The Day of Blood” gathers an ensemble of new works, including a sculptural installation, a series of large charcoal drawings as well as watercolors related to the antic myth of Attis. By giving glory to Attis, Nikita Kadan proposes to look into the contemporary subject, suffering from the unbearable knowledge of the violence of a world where no category is fixed. Metamorphosis is offered as the only possible permanence, and uncertainty as the only certainty. Emerging figure of the Ukrainian artistic scene, Nikita Kadan is a member of the group of artists R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) since 2004 and co-founder and member of the HUDRADA, group of curators and activists, since 2008. A graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kiev, where he studied monumental painting, he now works with installation, graphics, painting, wall drawings and posters in the city, sometimes in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, human rights activists and sociologists. Info: Jérôme Poggi Gallery, 2 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 8/12/2020-15/1/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://galeriepoggi.com