WANAFOTO: 10/2022

31/10/22

Sonia Gomes @ Pace Gallery, NYC - O mais profundo é a pele (Skin is the deepest part)

Sonia Gomes

O mais profundo é a pele

(Skin is the deepest part)

Pace Gallery, New York

November 4 – December 17, 2022

Portrait of Sonia Gomes

Courtesy Pace Gallery

Sonia Gomes

Constelação II, 2022

Pace presents Sonia Gomes’s first-ever solo show in New York at its 540 West 25th Street gallery. Gomes, who is known for her use of textiles and everyday materials in her complex assemblages, brings physicality and movement to the fore of her work. This presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with Pace since she joined the gallery’s program in 2020.

Sonia Gomes, a largely self-taught artist, first gained international recognition when the late curator Okwui Enwezor included her work in the 2015 Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first living Afro-Brazilian woman artist to have a monographic show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and in 2021 she participated in the 13th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the Liverpool Biennial in the UK. Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis—which is located in state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil and was once a textile hub—the artist has cultivated a practice anchored by her deft and meticulous manipulation of varied materials. Featuring juxtaposing forms, colors, and media, Sonia Gomes’s abstract assemblages have pushed the boundaries of conventional sculpture, forging connections between memory and abstract imagery.

Sonia Gomes

Untitled (from Torção series), 2022

In this exhibition Sonia Gomes presents works from 2021 and 2022, including hanging, free-standing, and wall-mounted sculptures. The artist’s works often incorporate secondhand, gifted, and repurposed textiles; furniture; driftwood; wire; and other seemingly disparate materials. Through kneading, twisting, and stretching, she grapples with the stories and memories rooted in the fabrics, imbuing her resulting sculptures with personal and political resonances. In her laborious process for creating these multimedia works, Sonia Gomes considers sewing akin to drawing: a means to produce gestural marks and compositional balance.

Two vibrant new works from the artist’s Torções (Twists) sculpture series, which will be included in Pace’s exhibition, reflect her interest in interactions between fabric and iron that create volume. Three pieces in the new series Entre Pérola e Vergalhão (Between Pearl and Rebar)—featuring freshwater pearls amid clusters of different fabrics—evoke shells, cocoons, wombs, nests, and other natural incubators. Supported by rebars, these works stand between three and four feet tall, encouraging viewers to bend their bodies to fully experience their formal nuances.

Among the other highlights in the show is the light installation Constelação II (2022), which projects the intricate linear forms of its constituent bird cage and fabric components as shadows against the gallery wall. In the way of two-dimensional works, the exhibition spotlights eight new pieces from the artist’s Tela-Corpo (Canvas-Body) series, in which she experiments with curved arrangements of graphic media amid color fields. Two hanging sculptures from Gomes’s Relíquia (Relic) series are in the show—these works feature ornate abstractions comprising lace, buttons, various metals, zippers, and other combinations of materials.

A group of layered collages—depicting vibrantly colored natural forms—also figure in the presentation. For these works, Sonia Gomes uses a wide range of materials, including Posca pens and watercolors, to make strokes, chromatic fields, arabesques, hatches, volutes, and stains. Utilizing papers of various textures, weights, and shades, the artist conjures new visual effects in each collage.

A section of the exhibition is dedicated to new works on paper Sonia Gomes created as part of a collaboration with her studio assistant, Juliana dos Santos. These small-scale, lyrical works depict organic—yet otherworldly—forms rendered with watercolor, acrylic, cotton lace, and other materials. A film documenting Gomes and dos Santos’s process and work in the artist’s São Paulo studio will also be on view.

SONIA GOMES (b. 1948, Caetanópolis) combines secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, to create abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history. Juxtaposing tensile and slack forms, Gomes’s contorted sculptures exude a corporeality and dynamism that she attributes to her love of popular Brazilian dances. Gomes uses found or gifted fabrics, which, according to her, “bring the history of the people that they belonged to.” “I give a new significance to them,” she adds. Her assemblages thus tie Brazil’s historical trajectory to the long-disregarded narratives of women, people of color, and countless anonymous individuals.

Through its recycling of used fabric, Sonia Gomes’s work also evinces a principle of thrift that is both a consequence of Brazil’s rapid and uneven industrial development and a dissenting answer to its accompanying culture of wasteful consumption and environmental destruction. As a whole, her art is marked by a decolonizing impulse, providing oblique responses to the social inequities and ecological urgencies of present-day Brazil and, more broadly, a globalized world.

Sonia Gomes’s work was recently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Tate in London. She is represented in numerous collections around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Rubell Museum in Miami; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas; the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; the Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil; and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

PACE

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

Cindy Sherman. 1977-1982 @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

Cindy Sherman. 1977 – 1982

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

27 October 2022 – 8 January 2023

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still, 1978

Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in / 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still, 1978

Gelatin silver print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm / 10 x 8 in

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice and opened the door for generations of artists and critics to rethink photography as a medium. Following its critically acclaimed New York presentation, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles exhibits over one hundred works from Cindy Sherman’s ground-breaking and influential early series – including the complete set of 70 Untitled Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections, Centerfolds and Color Studies – in her second major solo exhibition with the gallery.

Preferring to work alone, Cindy Sherman was not only the photographer, but also the makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and director, casting herself as the star of heavily staged, fictional tableaux. Inspired by depictions of women in television, film, and advertising, her characters explored a range of female stereotypes – femme-fatale, career-girl, house wife, etc.– to confront the nature of identity and representation in the media in a way that remains surprising and relevant today. Created over forty years ago, these powerful, enigmatic bodies of work are touchstones of contemporary art that continue to inspire and influence the course of art and image-making.

Cindy Sherman began making the Untitled Film Stills in the fall of 1977 just after moving to New York City at twenty-three years old. This iconic series of eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs was originally conceived as a group of imaginary film stills from a single actress’s career. What began as an experiment in how to imply narrative without involving other people would evolve into 70 works over the next three years. Inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, Cindy Sherman’s plethora of invented characters and scenarios imitated the style of production shots used by movie studios to publicize their films. The images are evocative of certain character types and genres, but always intentionally ambiguous, leaving room for the viewer to insert themselves into the work and walk away with their own interpretations. The entire set of Untitled Film Stills, the only series Cindy Sherman ever officially named, will be presented together in this exhibition for the first time since they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art for the artist’s retrospective exhibition in 2012.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled, 1980

Chromogenic color print, 40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman

Untitled, 1980

Chromogenic color print, 40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman stopped making the Untitled Film Stills in 1980 and began working in color. She continued to use herself as a model, transforming her appearance with various costumes, makeup, and wigs, leaving the narrative of her scenes deliberately vague. However, instead of making use of existing light and locations, Cindy Sherman brought her work back into the controlled environment of her studio, posing in front of locations projected onto a large screen – a technique made famous in several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films – to create the series now known as the Rear Screen Projections. Unlike the Untitled Film Stills, with their artificial narratives set in real locations, this series presents women no longer bound by their physical surroundings.

Around the same time that she was making the Rear Screen Projections, Cindy Sherman was commissioned to create new images for Artforum magazine. Continuing her exploration of the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture, she responded with a series clearly referencing erotic images commonly found in the middle of men’s magazines at the time. Reversing the dynamic of male photographer and female pin-up by assuming both roles, Cindy Sherman subverted the genre here – replacing the traditional nude woman with fully clothed female subjects reclining in emotionally suggestive yet ambivalently distanced poses. The photographs were ultimately never published by the magazine for fear of public backlash and instead became a critically acclaimed series of 12 large-scale horizontal color works known as the Centerfolds. Designed to make viewers uncomfortable, the series continues to challenge expectations surrounding this type of photograph, drawing attention to the way we consume images – especially of women.

CINDY SHERMAN: BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York NY. Her groundbreaking work has interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group – alongside artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler – Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College where she studied art in the early 1970s. In 1977, shortly after moving to New York City, she began her critically acclaimed series of Untitled Film Stills. Sherman continued to channel and reconstruct familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and by the mid to late 1980s, the artist’s visual language began to explore the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject, as seen in works such as Fairy Tales (1985) and Disasters (1986-89). These highly visceral images saw the artist introduce visible prostheses and mannequins into her work, which would later be used in series such as Sex Pictures (1992) to add to the layers of artifice in her constructed female identities. Like Sherman’s use of costumes, wigs, and makeup, their application would often be left exposed. Her renowned History Portraits, begun in 1988, used these theatrical effects to break, rather than uphold, any sense of illusion.

Since the early 2000s, Cindy Sherman has used digital technology to further manipulate her cast of characters. For the artist’s Clown series (2003) she added psychedelic backdrops that are at once playful and menacing, exploring the disparity between the exterior persona and interior psychology of her subject. In her Society Portraits (2008) the artist used a green screen to create grandiose environments for women of the upper echelons of society. These CGI backdrops add to the veneer-like charm of the women that Sherman portrayed, heavily made up and absorbed by societal status in the face of aging. In her series of wall murals from 2010 (installed for her MoMA retrospective in 2012), Cindy Sherman features several different characters against a computerized background in illfitting wigs, medieval dress, and no makeup, instead using photoshop to alter her facial features. In her Flappers series from 2016, the viewer is confronted with the vulnerability of the aging process in 1920s Hollywood starlets, who pose in the glamorous attire from their prime with exaggerated makeup.

In 2017, Cindy Sherman began using Instagram to upload portraits that utilize several face-altering apps, morphing the artist into a plethora of protagonists in kaleidoscopic settings. Disorientating and uncanny, the posts highlight the dissociative nature of Instagram from reality and the fractured sense of self in modern society that Cindy Sherman has uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career.

HAUSER & WIRTH

901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA 90013

www.hauserwirth.com

Krista Franklin @ DePaul Art Museum, Chicago - Solo(s)

Krista Franklin: Solo(s)

DePaul Art Museum, Chicago

September 8, 2022 - February 19, 2023

KRISTA FRANKLIN

Out of Love But Maybe There’s Still Some Romance, 2019

Ink, watercolor, pencil, pen, and collage on handmade paper.

Photo: Latitude

Chicago-based artist KRISTA FRANKLIN (American, b. 1970) presents “Solo(s),” an exhibition that draws on the artist’s vast range of materials and references. Franklin’s work intersects poetry, popular culture and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora.

A surrealist at heart, Krista Franklin’s works on display include books, poetry, collages, handmade paper, installations, murals, performances, sound works and sculptures. “The word ‘solo’ often refers to the performance of a single musician,” curator Ionit Behar said. “Here, it highlights the artist’s commitment to collaboration with fellow artists, writers and musicians.”

Krista Franklin creates collages from the text and images of vintage magazines and other printed matter she collects. The DePaul Art Museum created a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue for “Solo(s)” featuring documentation of the artist’s ongoing collage work, handmade paper, book and record covers, and installations alongside her poetry and other writings.

Exhibition organized by the DePaul Art Museum

Curated by Ionit Behar, associate curator of DePaul Art Museum

DePaul Art Museum - DPAM

DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Campus

935 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614

artmuseum.depaul.edu

Josephine Meckseper @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong - Objects Synthesis

Josephine Meckseper: Object Synthesis

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

4 November 2022 – 7 January 2023

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER

The Anthropological Sleep, 2022

Acrylic on canvas. 152.4 x 121.92 x 3.81 cm (60 x 48 x 1 1/2 in.)

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER

Empire of Signs, 2022

Acrylic paint on glass, acrylic paint on mannequin leg,

acrylic paint on canvas (double sided), oil paint on wooden hand form

in painted steel and glass vitrine with LED lights and acrylic sheeting

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new works by JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER. This exhibition comprises new paintings, a vitrine, and a film work informed by the evolution and surroundings of her work practice.

Throughout her career, Josephine Meckseper’s large-scale vitrine installations and films have melded the aesthetic language of early modernism with her own imagery of historical undercurrents. Her works, encompassing sculpture, painting, photography, and film, simultaneously expose and encase cultural signifiers and everyday objects to form an investigation into the collective unconscious of our time. The works for this exhibition, made between 2020 – 2022, come together to explore the concept of recycling, tracing, and capturing matter and memory as experienced by the artist during these unprecedented years.

Amongst the works on show is The Empire of Signs, a wood and glass vitrine titled after Roland Barthes’s eponymous book. In The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes describes a “novelistic object” that allows him to remotely isolate a certain number of features somewhere in the world, out of which a new system of signs emerge. Similarly, the vitrine encases a collection of objects between which a network of subtle correlations exists - connected loosely by their previous or current functions, location, and relation to other objects within the exhibition.

Spray-painted canvases continue the rhythm of the objects assembled in The Empire of Signs. These works chart the contours of the objects encased within the vitrine to form images reminiscent of abandoned dinner table settings and shelf displays. Their hand-painted textured surfaces evoke Roy Lichtenstein’s half-tone Ben-Day dots and Sigmar Polke’s “dot” paintings, as well as Robert Rauschenberg’s early blueprints and cyanotypes conceived in collaboration with Susan Weil. Josephine Meckseper’s new paintings, titled after chapters of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, from 1966, point to his thesis of an “archaeological” approach to the history of meaning and representation – suggesting that words are now entirely transparent and arbitrary counters. Consequently, to name things is to put them in a kind of necessary order.

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER was born in 1964 in Lilienthal, Germany, and lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. In 2022 Meckseper received the Annual Guggenheim Fellowship and was appointed a Princeton University Visiting Fellow, and in 2021 she undertook the Elaine de Kooning House Residency, in East Hampton, NY. Josephine Meckseper’s work has been included in two Whitney Biennials (2006 and 2010); the Sharjah Biennial (2011); the Taipei Biennial (2014) amongst other biennials; and the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (2017–18). Josephine Meckseper’s large-scale public project, Manhattan Oil Project, was commissioned by the Art Production Fund and installed in a lot adjacent to Times Square in New York, in 2012. Notable solo exhibitions include Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (online) (2021); Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, and Hab Galerie, Nantes, France (2019); MOSTYN Contemporary Art Gallery, Wales, UK (2018); Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, Mexico (2017); Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France (2016); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany (2014); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2013) and Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2009), a survey exhibition at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (2007). Her work has been included in major group exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2020); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022, 2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2015); and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2014). Her work is held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Migros Museum, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Perez Museum of Art, Miami; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Josephine Meckseper: Object Synthesis is the artist's first solo exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong.

SIMON LEE GALLERY

304, 3/F The Pedder Building , 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.simonleegallery.com

Iva Gueorguieva @ Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach - Pompeii Gray

Iva Gueorguieva: Pompeii Gray

GAVLAK Palm Beach

October 26 – November 20, 2022

GAVLAK presents Pompeii Gray, the gallery’s first solo presentation of the work of Los Angeles-based artist Iva Gueorguieva. The exhibition showcases three sculptures alongside seven new, ambitiously scaled works in acrylic and collage that mark Iva Gueorguieva’s return to the stretched canvas after a three-year immersion in the making of unstretched and at times double-sided tapestry paintings. The genesis of the Pompeii Gray works was her sudden decision to paint over a massive, colorful abstract painting from 2017 with white gesso and washes of gray. Iva Gueorguieva’s new paintings are works in low relief: layers of muslin, gauze, and pigment combine to blur the difference between the raw edges of strips of fabric and the illusionism of a painted line. Variegated layers of gray form a miasmatic haze that hangs over strata of bright colors and agitated lines that churn beneath the surface to reveal flashes of figures, human and animal. Like the bodies uncovered in the centuries-long process of excavating Pompeii from its blanket of volcanic ash, Iva Gueorguieva’s compositions invite speculation about the relationships of the creatures embedded in the dense layers to one another. Though originally compelled to strip her work from the stretchers, Iva Gueorguieva’s act of generative destruction ultimately inspired her to reconceptualize the canvas as a site of possibility and discovery, like the framed sieve of an archaeologist sifting through the layers of history.

To behold And She Cried for the Weekend (2021) is to experience the pleasure of uncovering fragments—buoyant breasts, splayed limbs, and rangy digits—that appear to combine in a scene of conjugal bliss. This sensation is quickly eclipsed by the unsettling possibility that the human figures rendered in anxious, wiry line as a writhing, undifferentiated mass are engaged in violent rather than orgiastic activity. Fingers that initially seemed arched in erotic tension over the belly of a lover now appear to be clawing through layers of gray and bruise-purple viscera. A Slow Congress Under Heavy Gauze (2021) similarly binds the carnal with the moribund; pink and blue aurorae shimmer beneath a shroud of gray to highlight a couple locked in eager congress. Yet the ashen palette and the gauzy texture produced by layers of muslin swaddling the surface of the work mummify this scene of passion and render our curious prying perverse. Wrapped in Animals and Fears (2021) corrupts even the sweet contentment of relaxing with an animal companion, as the stiff figure of a hollow-eyed hooved creature splays in a suffocating posture over where the neck of a vaguely human figure ought to be.

The exhibition also features three sculptures from Iva Gueorguieva’s “Talisman Debris” series, which informed her initial impulses to abandon the constraints of canvas stretchers, as well as the omnivorous approach to different media manifest in her latest work. Iva Gueorguieva salvaged hunks of concrete and twists of rebar from a Tampa demolition site and from these humble fragments fashioned compositions that exude a surprising, buoyant liveliness. Vanished Animal 3 (2015) lofts bright tatters of intaglio prints on fabric on a twisted steel scaffold, balanced precariously on a concrete island in a manner suggestive of migration and ruination. Inspired by her own family’s immigration histories, in this series Iva Gueorguieva alludes to the natural and manmade disasters that prompt us to leave life as we knew it behind. In considering the human and animal subjects of Pompeii fated to share their last breaths and long afterlives together amongst the ruins, Iva Gueorguieva envisages the interpersonal exchanges we perform in the thick of unfathomable disaster. The tender gestures of people frozen at the moments of their demise take on a particular sharpness in the contemporary context of a global plague that compels individuals to sacrifice physical closeness as an act of collective care. The companions who cling together within these compositions are at least not alone, and the beauty of their bonds is undiminished even in their wretchedness.

Iva Gueorguieva (b. 1974, Bulgaria) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations for UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2021; 2020); Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2018; 2016) and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2016; 2015; 2014). Her work featured prominently in recent group exhibitions including L.A. Louver, Venice, California (2022; 2018); David Lewis Gallery (2020); and Sophia Contemporary, London (2018; 2017).

GAVLAK Palm Beach

340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334, Palm Beach, FL 33480

www.gavlakgallery.com

______________

30/10/22

Exposition Faut-il voyager pour être heureux ? @ Espace Fondation EDF, Paris

Faut-il voyager pour être heureux ?

Espace Fondation EDF, Paris

Jusqu'au 29 janvier 2023

Affiche de l'exposition

Courtesy Fondation groupe EDF

Simon Faithfull

Going Nowhere 1.5, 2016

Vidéo, 8’43’’

La Fondation groupe EDF présente Faut-il voyager pour être heureux ? une exposition inédite en France sur la thématique du voyage, illustrée par les œuvres de 32 artistes contemporains, français et internationaux.

Invitant les visiteurs à se questionner sur le voyage aujourd’hui, l’exposition aborde des sujets d’actualité, comme la mobilité repensée à la suite de la crise sanitaire, les enjeux environnementaux de la préservation des écosystèmes et du changement climatique, ou encore les migrations contraintes et l’exil. C’est aussi une invitation au plaisir et à l’émotion pour découvrir d’un autre œil l’univers du voyage. Près d’une cinquantaine d’œuvres – installations, peintures, vidéos ou encore photographies – évoquent ces questions majeures.

Née d’un commissariat collectif réunissant Nathalie Bazoche de la Fondation groupe EDF, Alexia Fabre anciennement directrice du MAC VAL et Rodolphe Christin sociologue, cette exposition a pour ambition de faire réfléchir sur notre conception du voyage souvent identifiée comme un incontournable ingrédient du bien-être. Les récentes mesures prises par les différents gouvernements pour lutter contre la Covid-19 ont souligné notre dépendance au mouvement et révélé à quel point notre envie de mobilité pouvait être contrariée.

C’est avec l’art contemporain et toute sa créativité que s’éclaire le réel. Les artistes et leurs œuvres bousculent ainsi l’enchantement spontané du voyage, perçu comme un vecteur de connaissance, de dialogue et de développement, pour le confronter aux grands enjeux de notre époque : quelle est l’empreinte écologique des voyages et de leurs infrastructures ? Comment le tourisme transforme les ailleurs en espaces de consommation ? Quel regard peut-on porter sur les populations qui migrent par nécessité alors que d’autres se déplacent par plaisir ? Et enfin, parce que le rêve reste une dimension fondamentale du voyage, quels sont les nouveaux imaginaires pour les voyageurs d’aujourd’hui et de demain ?

LES ARTISTES DE L’EXPOSITION

David ANCELIN

Mali ARUN

Davide BALULA

Taysir BATNIJI

Mike BRODIE

Emilie BROUT & Maxime MARION

Stefan EICHHORN

Simon FAITHFULL

RICHARD & Camille MARTIN & Marine PONTHIEU

Julie C. FORTIER

Hamish FULTON

Andy GOLDSWORTHY

Pierre HUYGHE

Emily JACIR

Bouchra KHALILI

KIMSOOJA

Ange LECCIA

Barbara & Michael LEISGEN

Inka & Niclas LINDERGÅRD

Jean-Christophe NORMAN

Martin PARR

Abraham POINCHEVAL

Santiago SIERRA

Nathalie TALEC

Gwenola WAGON & Stéphane DEGOUTIN

Mark WALLINGER

COMMISSARIAT COLLECTIF

Nathalie Bazoche, Fondation groupe EDF

Rodolphe Christin, Sociologue

Alexia Fabre avec Julien Blanpied et Florence Cosson, MAC VAL - Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne

CATALOGUE DE L’EXPOSITION

Faut-il voyager pour être heureux ?

Textes de Julien Blanpied, Rodolphe Christin et Jeanne Slagmulder

Préface de Laurence Lamy

Éditions La Muette, mai 2022

16 x 23 cm - 160 pages

ESPACE FONDATION EDF

6 rue Récamier, 75007 Paris

www.fondation.edf.com

Faut-il voyager pour être heureux ?

Espace Fondation EDF, Paris

20 mai 2022 - 29 janvier 2023

29/10/22

Angel Otero @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - Swimming Where Time Was

Angel Otero. Swimming Where Time Was

Hauser & Wirth New York

10 November – 23 December 2022

Angel Otero

One Hundred Dreams From Now, 2022

Oil paint and oil paint skins collaged on canvas

241.3 x 241.3 x 3.8 cm / 95 x 95 x 1 1/2 in

245.4 x 245.4 x 7.6 cm / 96 5/8 x 96 5/8 x 3 in (framed)

Angel Otero

Concerto, 2022

Oil paint and oil paint skins collaged on canvas

241.3 x 241.3 x 3.8 cm / 95 x 95 x 1 1/2 in

245.7 x 245.4 x 7.6 cm / 96 3/4 x 96 5/8 x 3 in (framed)

Angel Otero presents his first major solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, ‘Swimming Where Time Was.’ Filling the 5th floor of the gallery’s 22nd street location, this new body of work marks a turning point in the artist’s career, revealing a new sensibility that has emerged over the last few years. These vibrant large-scale canvases merge the figurative and abstract sides of Angel Otero’s innovative technical practice, advancing the artist’s exploration of oil paint as a medium and a conduit for self-reflection and analysis. Using his personal history to make sense of the current moment, these new works intensify the artist’s uncanny ability to convey memory and history through materiality.

Angel Otero’s signature approach to visual storytelling synthesizes magical realism and abstraction, the observed and the imagined, and the past and the present through a labor-intensive process of laying down, peeling and collaging oil paint. Drawing from his memories of growing up in Puerto Rico and the gestural mark-making of artists whose work he first discovered in books as a child––Picasso, de Kooning, Mitchell and Pollock, for example––Angel Otero has invented a visual realm that evokes the enchanting and sometimes strange ways in which everyday objects become personified through the lens of memory.

While a few of the new works are predominantly abstract in nature, like ‘One Hundred Dreams From Now’ (2022), numerous compositions also represent quotidian objects that Angel Otero has imbued with surreal qualities–– blurring the line between gesture and allusion, documentation and recollection to evoke a dreamlike state of consciousness. In the work titled ‘Concerto’ (2022), an upright piano from Angel Otero’s studio, a former church in upstate New York, sits against an undulating crimson background.

The instrument is surrounded by objects that have become staples of Angel Otero’s visual language––paint buckets, an old table lamp, an aluminum cooking pot and dentures soaking in a drinking glass. Meanwhile, a school of goldfish––another recurrent motif––rains down upon the piano’s keys in a hypnagogic melodic performance. Below, the floor is covered by ceramic tiles decorated with a pattern inspired by traditional tiles from sixteenth- century Spain. Found throughout homes in Puerto Rico, the tiles reflect both the artist’s personal recollections and the collective memory of colonialism in Puerto Rico.

Angel Otero

Behind Curtains, 2022

Oil paint and oil paint skins collaged on canvas

241.3 x 241.3 x 3.8 cm / 95 x 95 x 1 1/2 in

245.7 x 245.4 x 7.6 cm / 96 3/4 x 96 5/8 x 3 in (framed)

Angel Otero

Mi Acuario, 2022

Oil paint and oil paint skins collaged on canvas

241.3 x 360.7 x 3.8 cm / 95 x 142 x 1 1/2 in

245.7 x 366.1 x 7.6 cm / 96 3/4 x 144 1/8 x 3 in (framed)

In the painting ‘Behind Curtains’ (2022), the viewer is positioned just outside an arched doorway that frames an inviting yet disorienting space: A sheer curtain of crocheted lace obscures the details of a room rich with bright colors and textures, while the diagonal composition of a wooden sculpture made from old furniture levitates above the floor. The curtain’s floral patten reappears on a bedspread in the painting ‘Mi Acuario’ (2022), in which bright blue and yellow sea kelp have taken over the room like an overgrown garden, transforming it into a fantastical, human-sized fish tank.

In a reversal of the typical painting process, Angel Otero begins each new work by painting the foreground scene on plexiglass first and then working backward, in layers, so the background, frequently inspired by historical abstract masterpieces, is painted last. He then builds in a layer of fabric to hold the entire structure together before scraping it off and fixing it onto canvas. Afterward, Angel Otero continues to add to the surface, collaging images of items like pots and pans, window shutters, bingo tickets and folded paper fans from a repository of previously made works to create an entirely new, multilayered composition. In this way, the artist merges process and intent: through the skilled layering and mixing of fragments from different sources, he effectively emulates the ways in which our memories of the past, imprecise and frequently distorted, are pieced together to construct our present.

ANGEL OTERO was born in 1981 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where he resided until moving in 2004 to obtain his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently splits his time between New York and Puerto Rico. Angel Otero was recently the subject of major solo exhibitions in 2017 at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY, and in 2016 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In 2009, Otero was included in the exhibition ‘Constellations’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, shortly after receiving his MFA. Angel Otero’s work is in numerous public and private collections including the Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx NY; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago IL; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Margulies Collection, Miami FL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park KS; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; UBS Art Collection, Chicago IL; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond VA.

HAUSER & WIRTH NEW YORK

542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.hauserwirth.com

28/10/22

Dubai Design Week 2022: Key Programming

Dubai Design Week 2022

8 - 13 November 2022

Dubai Design Week

Photo courtesy Dubai Design Week

Curated in strategic partnership with Dubai Design District (d3), a member of TECOM Group PJSC, and supported by Dubai Culture, Dubai Design Week returns for its eighth season, 8 - 13 November, providing individuals and companies with a platform to showcase their design experience and thinking by ways of installations, exhibitions, and overall experiential mediums.

The annual event is one of the region’s most significant cultural occasions with a line-up of programming demonstrating Dubai’s commitment to design, and is scheduled to take place at d3, a regional hub for art, design fashion and architecture. This year’s programming will have a focus on designing for a sustainable future that will be integrated across the week’s activities in a range of disciplines including architecture, product design, interiors and multimedia by international and regional designers.

Khadija Al Bastaki, Vice President of d3, comments: “We are proud to present the eighth edition of Dubai Design Week, which is set to be – once again – a very exciting highlight of Dubai’s autumn calendar. We look forward to bringing the design and creative community together to engage, connect and be inspired by the ideas, talents and artisans presented across installations, exhibitions, talks, workshops, the Downtown Design fair and the market. In addition, we look forward to giving incredible talent from the UAE, region and wider world a platform for their work to be showcased and celebrated. We at Dubai Design District are deeply committed to rethinking the regular, empowering talent and being an ever-growing ecosystem for creative thinkers. We look forward – with this edition of Dubai Design Week – to fortifying Dubai’s status as a UNESCO Creative City of Design and further growing the profile of the creative industries in our city.”

Dr Saeed Mubarak bin Kharbash, CEO of the Arts and Literature Sector at Dubai Culture, said: “Design is a key pillar of our strategic roadmap in which we continuously support to empower creativity and the talented people behind them toward the development of the creative economy and to cement Dubai’s position as a global centre for culture, an incubator for creativity, and a thriving hub for talent as well as the global capital of the creative economy. Dubai Design Week is an annual celebration of design and designers that we are proud to be continuously supporting.”

Key Programming at Dubai Design Week 2022

Trade Show

At the heart of Dubai Design Week is Downtown Design (9-12 November), the Middle East’s leading fair for contemporary and high-quality design, that will again take place at the Waterfront Terrace at d3, with this year’s fair being the most extensive to date with a line-up of leading international speakers, designers and brands taking part forthe first time.

Installations

This year’s installation programme named DESIGN WITH IMPACT, will feature both regional and international names who will produce a series of immersive installations placed throughout Dubai Design District (d3), using materials that will spark conversations around how design can have a positive impact on the environment.

Exhibitions

A series of exhibitions will be hosted within the core of Dubai Design District (d3) that will include an exploration on how Metaverse technology is pushing the boundaries of design and within Downtown Design, the UAE Designer Exhibition, supported by Dubai Culture will once again highlight work from some of the most exciting locally based designers.

Workshops

The Dubai Design Week workshops programme will provide visitors of all ages and levels the opportunity to experience and learn from a range of professionals, from professors of world-renowned institutions to makers who push the envelope in material experimentation and innovative ways of creating.

Market

For the first time, the d3 Design Market by FLTRD will take place across the week offering a retail experience full of homegrown offerings that span from homewares to ready to wear, with the programme expanded on the weekend to offer the best in local artisanal products.

Talks

For those who are looking for engaging panel discussions and opportunities to interact with other design professionals, The Forum at Downtown Design will host leading international and regional experts within the design industry to discuss the latest trends and innovations in regional and international design.

Dubai Design Week 2022 is a free to attend event that will offer a uniquely varied programme that suits the culturally curious of all ages.

Held under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairperson of Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) and member of the Dubai Council.

In parallel to Dubai Design Week, Dubai Design District (d3) will also be running its annual d3 Architecture Exhibition, from 8-13 November. This year’s edition, now in its third year, will highlight the work of d3-based regional and international architects with installations dispersed around d3 and showcase innovative designer and architect collaborations.

DUBAI DESIGN WEEK 2022

DXBDW22

dubaidesignweek.ae

Pierre et Gilles @ Galerie Templon, Paris - Les couleurs du temps

Pierre et Gilles : Les couleurs du temps

Galerie Templon, Paris

10 novembre - 30 décembre 2022

TEMPLON présente une exposition de PIERRE ET GILLES. Avec Les couleurs du temps, le couple célèbre pour ses portraits entre peinture et photographie, dévoile une série tout en sensibilité, témoin des contradictions de notre époque.

Dans une scénographie conçue avec soin, Pierre et Gilles présentent les travaux réalisés au cours des trois dernières années. Leurs tableaux, tous uniques, sont exécutés avec minutie dans l’intimité de l’atelier à partir de décors grandeur-nature construits sur mesure. Après la séance de pose photo, orchestrée par Pierre, suit un lent travail de peinture à la main directement sur le tirage sur toile, réalisé par Gilles. Le résultat, une peinture-photographique artisanale et ambiguë, propose une vision du monde à la fois enchantée et troublante, où la sensualité des couleurs transfigure chaque sujet.

L’exposition s’ouvre ainsi sur une courte série en hommage à l’Ukraine. « La promesse » ou « Les moissons du chagrin » mettent en scène avec pudeur de jeunes ukrainiens pleurant l’innocence et la paix perdues. Face à eux, un autoportrait masqué des artistes posant accroupis à la manière de « gopniks », nous invite à veiller ensemble un univers en pleine déliquescence.

Leur regard attentif, grave et décalé, se décline ensuite à travers une vaste galerie de portraits, aux atmosphères contrastées. À la manière d’un journal, l’exposition témoigne des soubresauts de l’actualité, de leurs nombreuses rencontres et leurs préoccupations les plus viscérales. Les références au cinéma des studios côtoient, par exemple, un clin d’oeil au plasticien Hans-Peter Feldmann. Ils réinventent des personnages archétypaux : le prisonnier romantique à la Jean Genet, le SDF au grand coeur, le jeune dealer des banlieues, mendiants angéliques et marins nostalgiques. Les inconnus découverts sur Instagram voisinent leurs amis et quelques visages familiers comme ceux des acteurs Fanny Ardant ou Tahar Rahim.

Au sous-sol, les sujets religieux se déploient dans un climat subaquatique, où les déchets de plastique rejetés par l’océan accompagnent la descente aux enfers de créatures des ténèbres. Sans avoir l’air d’y toucher, Pierre et Gilles évoquent ainsi de nombreux débats qui traversent la société, des questions d’identité sexuelle en passant par les phénomènes d’exclusion sociale, la dépénalisation des drogues douces, la tolérance religieuse ou le réchauffement climatique. Ni illustration univoque, ni manifeste, leur oeuvre appelle à la nuance, à l’humour, à l’interrogation, dans une célébration émerveillée de la créativité et de la beauté.

Mondialement reconnus, PIERRE ET GILLES développent depuis 1976 une oeuvre à quatre mains à la frontière entre peinture et photographie. Leur travail a été consacré par de nombreuses expositions en institutions, notamment une rétrospective à la Maison européenne de la photographie en 1996, au New Museum de New York en 2000, au Museum of Contemporary Art de Shanghai en 2005 et au Jeu de Paume à Paris en 2007. En 2017 une vaste rétrospective « Clair-obscur », a été présentée au Musée d’Ixelles (Bruxelles) puis au MuMa du Havre. En 2018, ils ont exposé au K Museum of Contemporary Art de Seoul et en 2019, deux expositions majeures « La Fabrique des idoles » à la Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris et « Le goût du cinéma » au Centre d’art La Malmaison de Cannes, ont rencontré un succès public et critique spectaculaire. Récemment en 2022, leur travail a fait l’objet d’une exposition, « Troubled Waters », au Spritmuseum de Stockholm.

A l’occasion de l’exposition, un catalogue avec un texte de Paul B. Preciado et un entretien d’Edouard Louis sera publié aux Éditions Galerie Templon.

GALERIE TEMPLON

28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris

www.templon.com

_________________

Brahim Alaoui, Regard sur les artistes modernes et contemporains arabes - Éditions Skira

Brahim Alaoui

Regard sur les artistes modernes et contemporains arabes

Éditions Skira - Parution Novembre 2022

Brahim Alaoui

Regard sur les artistes modernes et contemporains arabes

Cinquante portraits d’artistes arabes modernes et contemporains, photographiés dans leurs ateliers ou lieux de vie, viennent composer un vaste panorama de l’art au Proche-Orient et en Afrique du Nord depuis la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale à nos jours.

L’ouvrage présente une génération d’artistes modernes - dont Shakir Hassan Al-Saïd, Etel Adnan, Farid Belkahia, Abdellah Benanteur, Mounir Canaan, Inji Aflatoun, Paul Guiragossian, Saliba Douaihy, Adam Henein - souvent formés dans l’Europe d’après-guerre et qui, une fois de retour dans leurs pays, entamèrent une réflexion sur leur identité et élaborèrent leur propre modernité post-coloniale. L’ouvrage rend aussi compte d’une nouvelle génération au tournant du XXIe siècle – Ghada Amer, Kader Attia, Mounir Fatmi ou Youssef Nabil – qui s’est émancipée des voies classiques de la représentation, explore de nouveaux médiums, et s’impose sur la scène internationale de l’art contemporain.

Dans cet ouvrage qui s’enrichit d’un important entretien avec la critique d’art Pascale Le Thorel qui a permis de contextualiser ses rencontres avec les différents artistes, l’historien de l’art et commissaire d’exposition Brahim Alaoui propose ainsi sa vision des évolutions et des voies nouvelles de l’art moderne et contemporain arabe depuis les débats de l’ère post-coloniale jusqu’à aujourd’hui où se mêlent utopies, tragédies, résistances et espérances.

BRAHIM ALAOUI

D’abord chercheur au Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Brahim Alaoui a ensuite été directeur du musée de l’Institut du monde arabe à Paris où il a organisé entre 1987 et 2007 de prestigieuses expositions. Il partage désormais sa vie entre des activités de conseil en ingénierie culturelle, d’édition et le commissariat d’exposition.

Édition en français - Reliée – 16,5 x 24 cm -

376 pages - 250 illustrations - ISBN 978-2-37074-195-0 - 49 €

Monographie de Philippe Cognée, Editions Skira - Par Julie Chaizemartin, Marc Donnadieu, Guy Tosatto

Philippe Cognée

Éditions Skira Paris et Galerie Templon

Parution Septembre 2022

PHILIPPE COGNÉE

Né en 1957, PHILIPPE COGNÉE est peintre, graveur et dessinateur. Représenté par la galerie Templon depuis 2002, il est aujourd'hui reconnu comme l'un des principaux artistes français de sa génération qui furent à l'origine d'un intérêt nouveau pour le médium de la peinture, et ce, dès les années 1990.

Procédant par effets de « floutage et amélioration », son travail se distingue par une approche et une technique particulières par le biais desquelles il cherche à transcender la banalité quotidienne en perdant le sujet choisi - fleurs, architectures, objets, foules, vues familières - dans le flou. Son travail pose notamment la question de l’épuisement de l’image et de la condition humaine dans son rapport à l’environnement urbain, il interroge le rôle de la peinture dans une société où l’image, sous les effets des nouvelles technologies, est à la fois omniprésente et appauvrie.

Philippe Cognée photographie ou capte en vidéo ses sujets puis en photographie quelques images diffusées sur un moniteur. Ces images, telles quelles ou déconstruites ou ré-assemblées, sont ensuite projetées sur la toile ou sur un panneau de bois. L'artiste utilise alors une peinture à l'encaustique faite de cire d'abeille et de pigments de couleur pour reproduire les images choisies. Il dispose cette peinture au pinceau sur la toile, puis recouvre celle-ci d'un film plastique sur lequel un fer à repasser chauffe la cire pour la liquéfier, étalant et déformant les formes, ce qui a pour effet de créer un enfouissement trouble du sujet dans la matière. Le film plastique, lorsque décollé, produit à certains endroits des manques dûs à l'arrachage de la couche picturale. L'image semble alors piégée sous une surface glacée.

Au cours de sa carrière, Philippe Cognée a notamment pu porter son attention sur des sujets tels que des architectures ou des lieux - supermarchés, abattoirs - liés à la société de consommation. Dans sa peinture, des monuments tels que le Centre Georges Pompidou, la basilique Saint-Pierre de Rome ou le Musée Guggenheim de Bilbao apparaissent non dans leur structure réelle et objective mais tels qu'ils pourraient exister dans notre mémoire. Ces images viennent restituer une réalité altérée par le souvenir et la subjectivité de l'artiste.

Depuis 2006, Philippe Cognée s'est également intéressé aux clichés satellite diffusés sur Internet ainsi qu'aux clichés Google Street View à 360° qui lui permettent d'explorer le monde entier depuis son atelier, de travailler sur les bâtiments et d’observer les différents régionalismes et particularismes architecturaux.

Aujourd’hui, ses paysages champêtres, champs de coquelicots ou de tournesols, bien qu'évoquant le plein air des impressionnistes, viennent témoigner d'une réalité autrement plus étouffante. Diptyques ou triptyques, étrangement déserts, figés dans une lumière ambigüe, ces morceaux de campagne familière fascinent autant qu’ils inquiètent. Leur apparente immuabilité, traversée de couleurs vives voire incongrues, leurs surfaces en dripping ou grattées, font état d'une forme de résistance : résistance contre le réalisme, résistance contre la superficialité au sens propre comme figuré. Les terres agricoles deviennent sauvages et les forêts tourmentées, elles s'inscrivent dans une majesté qui contraste avec une sensation de disparition imminente, chaque paysage se faisant le constat d’un irréconciliable malentendu entre nature et culture.

Auteurs

Julie Chaizemartin

Critique d'art et journaliste, Julie Chaizemartin écrit notamment pour artpress, Le Quotidien de l’Art, Beaux-Arts Magazine et Transfuge.

Marc Donnadieu

Commissaire d'exposition, Marc Donnadieu est actuellement conservateur en chef à Photo Élysée à Lausanne.

Guy Tosatto

Historien de l'art et conservateur, Guy Tosatto est directeur du musée de Grenoble depuis septembre 2002.

Édition bilingue en français et en anglais - Reliée - 23,5 x 30 cm -

288 pages - 220 illustrations - ISBN 978-2-37074-198-1 - 45 €

27/10/22

Prix Photo Terre Solidaire - Le Prix International de la photographie humaniste et environnementale - Première édition

PRIX PHOTO TERRE SOLIDAIRE

Le Prix International de la photographie humaniste et environnementale

Première édition

Clôture de l'appel à candidatures le 4 décembre 2022

Depuis sa création en 1961, le CCFD-Terre Solidaire fait de la photographie le témoin de son action à travers le monde. Toujours au plus près des hommes et des femmes, jamais misérabiliste, mettant en valeur ceux qui contribuent à faire changer les choses. La première ONG française de solidarité internationale illustre, à travers ses nombreuses collaborations et la mise en valeur permanente de la photographie, un monde qui bouge, positif et sincère.

Le PRIX PHOTO TERRE SOLIDAIRE est l’aboutissement du soutien à la photographie et ses auteurs, mené par l’ONG depuis sa création.

La première édition du PRIX PHOTO TERRE SOLIDAIRE est présidée par Sebastião SALGADO qui effectua en 1973 son tout premier reportage photographique professionnel avec l’aide et le soutien de l’ONG, dont il est toujours un complice.

Le ou la lauréat.e du Grand Prix Terre Solidaire recevra 30 000 euros afin de poursuivre la réalisation du projet présenté au concours, la commande d’un reportage auprès des partenaires de CCFD – Terre Solidaire. Son projet photographique sera présenté lors d’un festival en 2024.

Les deux lauréat.e.s du Prix Terre Solidaire recevront une dotation de 10 000 euros chacun.e afin de poursuivre leurs projets présentés au concours, la commande d’un reportage auprès des partenaires de CCFD – Terre Solidaire au cours du premier semestre 2023. Leurs reportages réalisés bénéficieront d’une exposition dans différents lieux culturels à travers le monde

Les candidatures sont ouvertes aux photographes du monde entier majeurs, avec ou sans cartes de presse, le dossier peut être constitué en français ou en anglais. Le travail documentaire proposé doit s’inscrire dans le thème de la photographie humaniste et environnementale.

Page officielle du prix :

https://ccfd-terresolidaire.org/prix-photo-terre-solidaire/

25/10/22

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

October 21, 2022 - February 12, 2023

Paul Klee

Glühende Landschaft [Glowing Lanscape], 1919

Oil on cardboard, 40,5 x 30,5 cm

Private collection, Switzerland

For the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non.
The artist is a man, himself nature and a part of nature in natural space.
Paul Klee
Ways to Study Nature, 1923

Throughout his life, the Swiss-born German artist PAUL KLEE (1879-1940) felt an undying fascination for the observation of nature. For him, the contemplation of natural phenomena was an art in its own right, which allowed him to go beyond the world of the apparent in order to understand their intrinsic dynamics and to create works based on them.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, the exhibition Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature examines the link the artist had with the natural environment, in which he found not only a field of study and a pedagogical model, but also a source of inspiration and a vital refuge. In collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and with advice from its chief curator, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, the show also aims to demonstrate just how important the exploration of natural phenomena was for the formation and development of an artist like Paul Klee, one of the most outstanding artists of the European avant-garde and perhaps one of the most surprising ones to rediscover through the lens of nature itself.

The exhibition unfolds into four areas that propose a chronological journey through Paul Klee’s holistic view of nature, from his formative stage right up to his final artistic one. The Zentrum Paul Klee’s collection is the most important archive of the artist’s drawings and pictorial works. The Zentrum Paul Klee also conserves his library and the natural objects that interested him and accompanied his research. The bulk of the more than 200 pieces on display in the exhibition are from these holdings, while the rest are contributions from other outstanding international private collections and institutions. Within the context of the current revision of the canon and as part of the effort to recover the names and careers of artists silenced by the official account of the history of art, each section includes a work by a woman artist, of whom some were contemporaneous with Paul Klee, such as Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Emma Kunz (1892-1963) and Maruja Mallo (1902-1995), while others were or are aligned with some of his artistic approaches, such as Sandra Knecht (Switzerland, 1968).

This project falls within the framework of a line of exhibitions organised in collaboration with other monographic museums of major artists of the avant-gardes. Based on the Fundació Joan Miró’s holdings, the links between the two institutions will also result in a Miró exhibition focusing mainly on the large format works that were made possible by the artist’s new studio in Palma de Mallorca from 1956, which the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern will host from January to May 2023.

In his formative years, Paul Klee’s curiosity for the origin of form and of artistic expression led him to meticulously study his most immediate environments: the outskirts of Bern and the family garden. The plants, animals, landscapes, geological formations and atmospheric and physical phenomena that he examined in his various places of residence and also while on excursions and trips strengthened his relationship with nature and had an impact on his unique poetics. The first area of the show presents the importance of the study of nature to the discovery of this artistic personality based on early drawings done between 1883 and 1911, among which is his first documented drawing, done when he was just four years old. In this selection, Klee dialogues with two major artistic legacies: naturalist drawing, which he was taught during his school years and which shaped his ability to pay attention to the visible; and classical culture and its internal order, which he discovered during his trip to Italy in 1901, filtered by the reading of J. W. von Goethe, and which encouraged him to disentangle the even more complex order inherent to the natural world.

Paul Klee’s interest in discovering the dynamics of nature, and the grammar of art that he began to elaborate from his observations, gradually developed in the years between the First World War and his arrival at the Bauhaus as a teacher. ‘Trip to Tunisia, and the First World War. Nature as an Enigma and an Escape (1912-1920)’ is the title of the second area of the show, which brings together oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, in which the contemplation of nature became a visionary instrument for coping with the tough moments that he had the misfortune to endure. Standing out in this room are works like Glühende Landschaft (Glowing Landscape, 1919), an example of Klee’s total landscape, where the artist aimed to represent not only the motif, but also the connectivity of organic, atmospheric and geological elements. Belonging to the same historical context as these is another oil painting included in this area: Abstrakt (Abstract, 1914) by the German artist Gabriele Münter, a member of the avant-garde group Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) of which Paul Klee also formed part during his time in Munich, until the outbreak of the First World War.

This baggage and his careful reading of books like The Metamorphosis of Plants by J. W. von Goethe together served as the basis for his courses at the Bauhaus, during the years of theoretical consolidation of the first avant-gardes. Entitled ‘Teaching at the Bauhaus. The Analysis of Natural Phenomena (1921-1931)’, the third area of the show presents around 70 pieces, among which are works, pedagogical materials and collections of natural objects such as preserved plant specimens and seashells, which provided him with a field of study. His works from this period and his theoretical compendium both manifest his reflections stemming from his contemplation of the internal laws of nature – movement, growth, recurrence, conformation, which he turned into the basis of his creative process and teaching programme. When Klee taught these notions at home, he would often invite students to spend time observing fish in his aquarium, just as he would do. To evoke the philosophy of these teachings, the design of this exhibition space reconstructs Klee’s aquarium by displaying works containing fish. The works brought together in this area have already transcended the apparent aspects of nature in order to compose themselves according to their internal principles, and that is what he encouraged his students to look for. Obeying these laws are titles like Vor dem Blitz (Before the Blitz, 1923), Klang der südlichen Flora (Harmony of Southern Flora, 1927) and Gemischtes Wetter (Unsettled Weather, 1929), where nature is represented by its constituent forces. These works dialogue with one of the characteristic geometric drawings by the Swiss artist and healer Emma Kunz, whose practices precisely flowed from using the energy underlying matter.

Finally, in his last stage, Paul Klee carried on working on these topics in a mature synthesis. They also became an artistic refuge when faced with the challenge of living the latter years of his life with a degenerative disease. So, the area ‘Synthesis and Identification. The Last Period (1932-1940)’ shows how, in the final stretch of Klee’s life, which was highly productive despite his fragile state of health, his understanding of the principles of nature and his communion with it reached the peak of their expression. All of this is clear to see in works like Der Winter kommt (Winter is Coming, 1939), where he uses his fingers to paint, arriving at his so sought-after transcendence of the dualism between subject and object: is body becoming one with nature through the pictorial medium.

The artist of today is more than an improved camera; he is more complex, richer and wider. He is a creature on the Earth and a creature within the whole, that is to say, a creature on a star among stars.
Paul Klee
Ways to Study Nature, 1923

Also presented in the last room is Protozoarios (Protozoans, 1981), a later work by the Spanish surrealist painter Maruja Mallo, who was interested in portraying the potentiality of natural shapes – flowers, shells, fruit or fantastical hybridisations of living organisms – and, like Paul Klee, continued painting them right to the very end.

Sandra Knecht

My Land is Your Land Dark Night (Home Is a Foreign Place), 2022

Pigment print on cotton paper, 152 x 110 x 6 cm

Artist's collection

The exhibition concludes with an installation by the contemporary Swiss artist Sandra Knecht. She was born in the same canton as Klee and advocates rural life as part of her practice. To establish a dialogue with Paul Klee, Knecht makes a reflection on the disease that the artist suffered from, understood as a natural process. The resulting installation is entitled Dark Night (Home is a Foreign Place) and includes photographs, sculptures and an audiovisual piece referring to the natural world and rural tradition, as well as drawings by Klee, and photographs by Francesc Català-Roca of the natural objects that abounded in Joan Miró’s studio. Pro Helvetia has participated in Sandra Knecht’s project as a collaborating institution.

By examining the artist’s special experience of natural phenomena, the exhibition Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature also offers visitors an insight into how contemporary society has constructed its view of the natural world.

In the words of its curator, Martina Millà: ‘at a time when, facing imminent planetary collapse, there is speculation about survival strategies […] we would like to see this project as an exercise that can help us reposition ourselves by revisiting that period which marked the start of the problematisation of our gaze and of our current understanding of the phenomena of nature. Visitors can find a great opportunity to rethink their relationship with artistic practices connected with the agenda of modernity and with a planet subjected to an unstoppable process of ecosystem and biodiversity destruction; a planet that has nevertheless been the sounding board and a canvas on which human creativity has been unleashed.’

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature

Exhibition Catalogue

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature is accompanied by a catalogue that reproduces a broad selection of the show’s works and includes a curatorial text by Martina Millà and an essay signed by Fabienne Eggelhöfer. The catalogue is completed by a conversation between Myriam Dössenger, a researcher at the Zentrum Paul Klee, and the artist Sandra Knecht, as well as a pedagogical manifesto written by Paul Klee in 1923 entitled Ways to Study Nature. This catalogue is available in english and in spanish.

An exhibition organised and produced by the Fundació Joan Miró in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Fabienne Eggelhöfer, chief curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Fundación BBVA.

Fundació Joan Miró

Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona

fmirobcn.org