ART CITIES: Paris

Throughout his four-decade long career, Henry Taylor has consistently and simultaneously embraced and rejected the tenets of traditional painting, as well as any formal label. Combining figurative, landscape and history painting, alongside drawing, installation and sculpture, Taylor’s vast body of highly personal work is rooted in the people and communities closest to him, often manifested together with poignant historical or pop-culture references. In this exhibition, with a guiding sense of human connection, Taylor leads us through a multifaceted narrative. In the lead up to his solo exhibition “FROM SUGAR TO SHIT”, Taylor extended his studio practice to Paris for a residency in the city during the months of June and July 2023. During this time, Taylor has drawn inspiration from the unparalleled array of historical art collections contained in the city, such as the Musée d’Orsay where he was surrounded by the work of French impressionists, expressionists and fauvists who have inspired him since an early age. Taylor’s studied awareness of his art historical predecessors and contemporaries is continually prevalent throughout his work, having gained influence from Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Phyllida Barlow, Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, among others. These influences are portrayed in the exhibition. Info: Hauser & Wirth, 26 bis Rue François 1er, Paris, France, Duration: 14/10/2023-7/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 9:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/

Characterized by a unique combination of textured brushstrokes, loose washes, stark graphic lines, and evocative colors, Mamma Andersson’s works embody a new genre of painting that recalls late nineteenth-century Romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her often-panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up: mountainous backdrops, trees, snow, and wooden cabins are recurrent elements within her works. The works in “Adieu Maria Magdalena” consider recurring themes and motifs from Andersson’s oeuvre and suggest complex and potent feelings related to loss. Marking a metaphorical farewell to a previous phase in her life, the exhibition title takes its name from a seventeenth-century church in the neighborhood where Andersson has long resided. The namesake painting portrays a screen divider with panels showing different views of uninhabited rooms; disembodied mannequin hands, a recurring motif for Andersson, are scattered at its base. Employing trompe l’oeil, the artist produces a subtly claustrophobic effect in this domestic space by layering uncanny interior scenes taken from her own home and her imagination, an interplay of surfaces and imagery that, like other works in the exhibition, probes the nature of representation. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, , France, Duration: 16/10-18/11/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com/

Introduced as an experimental space, the works in Jean-Luc Moulène’s exhibition “the dot the well the plain and the rain” operate as an ensemble and have been arranged along the lines of “a ritual without liturgy”. They are organized in three sequences: relative dimensions, conditions of practice and sphere of representation. The works reveal a multidimensional vision of the world, playing with human body mapping, abstraction, nature as a time marker. Within each space’s negative dimension (dimension -1, -2,…), the object exists through an infinity of limited and minuscule spaces, like topological shifts folding onto themselves. A first bronze collarbone work opens and closes the exhibition before turning itself into a key. The sculpture “Bubu filtre” holds a very strategic place. It is the zero mark of the exhibition, the identification point and figurehead of the procession. It mimicks the experience of hindsight, only to make the physical impossibility of showing negative dimensions, tangible. With this glass doll face placed on a cut plastic bottle filled with used oil, “Bubu filtre” gathers both body and poetry through materiality. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, France, Duration: 16/10-18/11/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.crousel.com/

Inspired by Giuseppe Penone’s experience of Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Éveux, France, are on view in his solo exhibition “Impronte di luce”, canvases alongside imprints used in their production; an artist’s book, “Le Bois Sacré du Couvent de La Tourette (2022), which collects rubbings made from the building’s wood-grained concrete walls; and other graphic and sculptural works. Penone’s complex and extended relationship with the convent—he has visited it repeatedly and exhibited there in 2022. Working with paint, a medium to which he is a relative stranger and making use of Le Corbusier’s sixty-three-color palette for “architectural polychromy,” the artist has again employed a process of imprinting and tracing. First stamping sections of his hands in ink on paper to generate shapes that suggest animal or human figures, he then projected the designs onto canvases, reproducing them at a larger scale in oil paint. The dimensions of Penone’s paintings—each is a 183 cm square—mirror those of Le Corbusier’s Modulor, an anthropometric scale based on the golden ratio. (The series also recalls Yves Klein’s Anthropométries [1960] in its direct transference of pigment from human body to painterly support.) Info: Gagosian, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, France, Duration: 17/10-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:30, https://gagosian.com/

Alvaro Barrington in his solo exhibition “They Got Time: YOU BELONG TO THE CITY”, transforms Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin into a three-part installation that he describes as “my streetscape”. A monumental self-portrait of his years growing up in New York, the exhibition invites the visitor into an exploration of the artist’s personal and cultural memory. Barrington fills the gallery with monumental handmade storefronts, made up of shutters in various mediums with rooms tucked behind chainmail curtains in which he instals his new series of works. He relates the installation overall to the ‘magic’ arcades of 19th-century Paris, as described by Walter Benjamin in his 1927–40 work of cultural criticism The Arcades Project, which formed the prototype for the modern storefront. Like in the memorable opening scene of the 1961 Blake Edwards-directed film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly looks longingly at the Tiffany’s window displays as the sun rises on 5th Avenue, Barrington encourages visitors to the exhibition to experience this sense of anticipation and aspiration for themselves as they look at his new works. Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, 69 Avenue du Général Leclerc, Pantin, France, Duration: 18/10/2023-27/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net/

The Brazilian artist Santídio Pereira in “Un horizon vegetal”,  his first solo exhibition in Paris presents recent works, including monumental woodcuts, wooden objects and watercolors on paper. Over the past five years, the artist has focused on the representation of tropical plants and Brazilian landscapes. Santídio Pereira’s artistic project reclaims and revitalizes the significant tradition of Brazilian woodcut, carried by renown artists such as Oswaldo Goeldi, Manoel Messias and Anna Maria Maiolino. These artists share a common approach where the woodcut technique is used to depict images of contingent reality within a refine and minimal aesthetic.  In this sense, the formal synthesis enabled by the woodcut technique connects Santídio Pereira’s work to the scientific tradition of botanical illustrations (which began to develop in the 6th century) where plant species are typically placed at the center of the page on a neutral background. In this exhibition, the viewer can find representations of bromeliads (bromeliaceae), tropical plants native to the American continent, characterized by stemless leaves, narrow rosettes, and a deep calyx. Info: Curator: Manuel Neves, Xippas Galley, 108 rue Vieille-du-Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 18/10-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.xippas.com/