Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits @ Denver Art Museum

Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits

Denver Art Museum

November 17, 2024 – May 11, 2025

DAWOUD BEY

A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike,

Amityville, NY, from the series Street Portraits, 1988 

Pigment print 

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago 

© Dawoud Bey

DAWOUD BEY

A Couple in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY,

from the series Street Portraits, 1988 

Pigment print 

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago 

© Dawoud Bey

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, featuring 37 portraits by celebrated photographer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow DAWOUD BEY (American, born 1953).

From 1988 to 1991, Dawoud Bey collaborated with Black Americans of all ages whom he met on the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of people in these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments.

“We’re pleased to present the first standalone museum show of this important work,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for DAM. “Dawoud Bey’s Street Portraits mark a turning point where the deliberate, closely observed portraits he had been making with a handheld camera began to contain what he has called ‘the kind of lush physical description’ he wanted his pictures to convey—and that is a consistent part of all the work he has made since. The slower process of working with a camera on a tripod invited collaboration between the artist and his subjects, making each picture both an experiment and a discovery.”

Dawood Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. Bey considers photography an ethical practice that requires collaboration between the artist and his subjects. To reciprocate with the people who posed for him, he gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print.

"This is the first standalone museum show of Bey’s Street Portraits," said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for the DAM. "Each picture is an experiment, a discovery that describes people and the places where they live. At the same time, these photos are attentive to the quality of light on a particular day and the way the artist orchestrates all those things through his camera. This was a transformational work that evolved through the 20 years of Dawoud’s signature photography."

The exhibition is organized by the community the photographs were made: Brooklyn; Washington, D.C.; Rochester; Amityville; and Harlem. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting photographs reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

DENVER ART MUSEUM

100 W. 14th Avenue Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204

denverartmuseum.org

Chicago Style Exhibition @ Georges Adams Gallery, NYC - Featured Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum

Chicago Style

Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum

George Adams Gallery, New York

December 13, 2024 – February 8, 2025

The George Adams Gallery presents Chicago Style, a group exhibition highlighting key figures from Chicago’s vibrant mid-to-late 20th century art scene. The show features works by Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum. 

This exhibition traces the development of a unique Chicago aesthetic, shaped by artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Hyde Park Art Center. These artists rejected the dominant trends of New York and the West Coast, creating diverse and unconventional work in movements like surrealism, figuration, abstraction, and social commentary. 

The exhibition also reflects their overlapping careers and collaborations, such as the 1949 Exhibition Momentum organized by Golub and Lanyon, which included Ito. The spirit of collaboration continued with the founding of Superior Street Gallery by Ito and Lanyon in the 1950s.

Allan Frumkin Gallery, which opened in Chicago in 1952, played a key role in supporting many of these artists and elevating their work beyond the city. Frumkin gave Leon Golub, and H.C. Westermann their first solo exhibitions in Chicago, and employed Ellen Lanyon as a restorer and Jim Nutt as an art handler, fostering a dynamic creative community. By showcasing these artists in both his Chicago and New York galleries, Frumkin helped establish the unique aesthetic that defined Chicago’s mid-20th-century art scene. 

Works in the exhibition includes paintings from the late 1950s by Golub and Ito, works from the 1960s by Lanyon and Beall, and examples from the 1970s by Brown, Nilsson, Paschke, Rossi, and Wirsum. Of special note is Westermann’s The Death Ship (Black Tar Death Ship) from 1974 that has never been offered since it was acquired by a private collector in the late 1970s. 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Gerold Miller @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Gerold Miller

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

January 17 – February 16, 2025

Now exhibiting in Finland for the first time, GEROLD MILLER is a German sculptor known for his minimalistic, geometric works exploring intersections of space, form, and perception. His practice revolves around space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, with the viewer becoming merged an an integral part of the artwork. His art is distinctive for its precision, clean lines, and the use of industrial materials such as aluminium and lacquer. It blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, challenging traditional distinctions and thus inviting the viewer into a dialogue with the visual experience.

The sculptures and wall reliefs featured in the exhibition represent a reduced notion of pictoriality, a key role being played by their placement in time and space. Much depends on the viewer’s perspective in the space and how they position themselves in relation to the work. The merging of the sculpture and the viewer is an ever-evolving process: when encountering Miller’s works, the viewer can experience the world as being simultaneously mirrored and real, while themselves occupying both simulated and real space. In this way, Miller interweaves space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, viewer and sculpture, as a holistically integrated artwork.

GEROLD MILLER (b. 1961) studied sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, graduating in 1989. His work has been exhibited and is held in museums and private collections around the world, including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art in the United States, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Takasaki Museum of Art in Japan, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musée de l’Art et de la Histoire Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Italy.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki 

www.galerieforsblom.com

Leena Nio - Exhibition @ Helsinki Contempory - "Dwellers"

Leena Nio: Dwellers

Helsinki Contempory

10 January - 2 February 2025

Leena Nio

Crowded I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Oil on canvas, 170 cm x 150 cm

© Leena Nio, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Leena Nio

Composition with a red dress shirt and yellow 

handmade sweater, 2023-2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Oil on canvas, 170 cm x 150 cm

© Leena Nio, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Leena Nio’s practice is underpinned by the pleasure of painting and looking. As she paints, she surrenders herself to the magic of colour and an abundance of details and intertwined brushstrokes. She plays with tensions between concealment and exposure, the personal and the universal, and juxtapositions of contrasting textures.

Leena Nio’s latest exhibition consists of still life compositions capturing scenes of quotidian daily existence. Many are composed around a laundry basket, a mundane household item that is rarely celebrated in art, yet nevertheless an object in which there is beauty, softness and nuances to be discovered. A human presence is suggested indirectly through cropped fragments of garments and laundry.

Leena Nio’s complexly layered paintings straddle between abstraction and representation. Things hidden behind façades are central to her recent paintings, many of which literally contain peepholes evoking the duality of daily existence: behind the public façade is a private world that is revealed only to one’s closest loved ones. Fluffy jumpers and other items of clothing appear as recurring symbols of the softening buffers that we erect between ourselves and external reality.

Leena Nio’s layered paintings bring to light the interconnected nature of reality. As if braiding hair or knitting strands of woollen yarn, she visually juxtaposes and interweaves meticulously executed details, inviting viewers to reflect on the inextricable oneness of the objects, people, and other living beings in our lives.

Leena Nio’s paintings seem to ponder the way our lives unfold almost like a series of still life compositions. An object such as a laundry basket is a theatre stage upon which we perform our daily existence in an ever-changing procession of clothing, while we ourselves observe this theatre of life as onlookers in the sidelines.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes @ The Hepworth Wakefield + Book

Forbidden Territories: 

100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

The Hepworth Wakefield

23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

The Hepworth Wakefield presents Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes. This major exhibition marks 100 years since Surrealism began with the publication of André Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ in 1924. Taking its title from André Breton’s description of the Surrealist project as “the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territories”, thisis the first UK survey to explore the role of  landscape in one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the twentieth century.

The exhibition brings together over 100 surrealist works, featuring a wide array of British and international artists working across mediums, from Breton’s circle in the 1920s, through to Surrealism’s ongoing resonances in contemporary art. Artists on display include Salvador Dalí, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller and Max Ernst, alongside later Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Edith Rimmington, Marion Adnams, Conroy Maddox, Desmond Morris, and contemporary artists working within the legacy of Surrealism such as Shuvinai Ashoona, Stefanie Heinze, Helen Marten, Nicolas Party, and Wael Shawky. Presented in transhistorical groupings, Forbidden Territories explores how Surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical, and provide means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms.

Central elements of André Breton’s manifesto, including automatism and psychoanalysis of childhood memories, became a route into re-visioning landscape painting for many Surrealists. Well-known paintings by Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, which draw on the artists’ formative memories of the forests of Bavaria and seashores of Brittany respectively, will be displayed, alongside the first UK site-specific mural by Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Party is known internationally for hismonumental, immersive murals made with soft pastel, a medium  which holds vivid colours to create fantastical environments. Party will select historic Surreal landscapes to install on the mural, offering a contemporary twist on the Surrealist strategy of collage and juxtaposition.

As well as works by central figures from the movement, such as René Magritte and Francis Picabia, Forbidden Territories foregrounds previously neglected artists and narratives. These include the relationship between Surrealism and ecology, drawing prescient connections topresent day environmental concerns. Visual conversations will be drawn between the humananimal-botanical hybrids of Desmond Morris and Leonora Carrington from the 1950s, to those of Shuvinai Ashoona and Stefanie Heinze working today. Forbidden Territories also includes the first presentation of a new gift of Jean Arp’s plaster sculptures, at The Hepworth Wakefield, generously donated to Wakefield’s art collection by the Jean Arp Foundation. The plasters span several decades of the artist’s career and exemplify the surrealist biomorphism at the heart of his practice.

Surrealism responded to times of political upheaval. A series of works, made around the period of WWI, by Salvador Dalí, Gordon Onslow Ford and Mervyn Evans convey political tensions through uncanny landscapes. This section of the exhibition will also feature several sculptures and paintings by Egyptian contemporary artist Wael Shawky. These are presented alongside Lee Miller’s photographs of Egypt taken during WWI, creating a dialogue between these diverse surreal depictions of the landscapes of North Africa with undertones of political and societal tensions.

Forbidden Territories features a solo presentation of works by Mary Wykeham, a now underrecognized Surrealist artist who decided to become a nun in 1950, at the height of her career. The display includes her paintings, drawings, etchings on paper and copper printing plates, and is the largest public showing of Wykeham’s work since her solo show of 1949 at Galerie des Deux Îles, Paris. It marks the donation of a large group of works by Wykeham to The Hepworth Wakefield by her family, a body of work preserved by the convent where she spent her final years.

A final section of the exhibition brings together new work by contemporary artists María Berrío and Ro Robertson alongside Surrealists Ithell Colquhoun, Eileen Agar and Dora Maar, to explore ideas of gender identity and autofiction within bodies of water. 

Eleanor Clayton, Head of Collection and Exhibitions, said: ‘This unique survey will take visitors on a fantastical journey through an array of surrealist landscapes, some well-known and some rarely seen. Bringing exceptional modern art in dialogue with the best of contemporary practice is at the heart of our programme at The Hepworth Wakefield. We are delighted to be showing long-established masterpieces in Wakefield for the first time, alongside newly commissioned artwork, showing that the influence of Surrealism – one of the most dynamic and wide-reaching art movements of the twentieth century – is still alive to this day.’

Forbidden Territories: 

100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

Published by Thames and Hudson

A book of the same title is published by Thames and Hudson and edited by The Hepworth Wakefield’s Head of Collection and Exhibitions, Eleanor Clayton to accompany the exhibition. The book includes essays by Clayton, Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh; Anna Reid, Senior Lecturer History of Art at the University of Leeds; and Tor Scott, Curatorial Assistant, National Galleries of Scotland. It is interspersed with texts by artists including André Breton, María Berrío, Helen Marten, Ro Robertson and Mary Wykeham offering contemporary and historical perspectives on Surrealism.

Forbidden Territories at The Hepworth Wakefield is presenting concurrently with The Traumatic Surreal at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The Traumatic Surreal brings together work made after 1960 through to the present day to explore the radical appropriation and development of surrealist sculptural traditions by women artists in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD

Gallery Walk, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF1 5AW

hepworthwakefield.org

Irving Penn @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Kinship" Exhibition Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Irving Penn: Kinship

Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Pace Gallery, New York

November 15 – December 21, 2024

IRVING PENN

Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

IRVING PENN

Three Single Oriental Poppies, New York, 1968

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

Pace is pleased to present Irving Penn: Kinship, an exhibition of work by the famed photographer IRVING PENN, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas, at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show spotlights works produced by Irving Penn throughout his 70-year career, including selections from his Worlds in a Small Room series, his iconic portraits of artists, actors, and writers, and other genres of his images. These photographs are exhibited within an installation designed by Hank Willis Thomas to replicate a structure that Irving Penn used to photograph many of his high-profile subjects.

Working for Vogue for nearly 70 years, Irving Penn left an indelible mark on the history of photography. His inventive fashion photographs, which transformed American image-making in the postwar era, continued to appear in the magazine up until his death in 2009. The artist was also highly accomplished and experimental in the darkroom, having engineered, among other innovations, a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints.

A trained photographer, Hank Willis Thomas, widely known for his galvanizing public works around the US, is deeply interested in both the making and consumption of images. His investigations into subjectivity and perception inform his work in photography and other mediums, including sculpture, screenprinting, video, and installation. Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room works—for which he journeyed to Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea, and Morocco to capture people’s portraits within a tent he used as a portable studio—have been particularly influential for Hank Willis Thomas, who was part of the artistic team behind the traveling, participatory installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), which debuted in 2011 and has since been presented around the world.

Often investigating the ways that framing and perspective can shape our experiences of the world around us, Hank Willis Thomas situates Irving Penn’s photographs within a bespoke, star-shaped structure with intersecting corners, created using a material similar to the plywood flats of the photographer’s original studio for his portraits in a corner. Displayed on the structure’s exterior walls and within its central interior space, Irving Penn’s images will invite viewers to inhabit a similarly intimate, enclosed space as the subjects of his portraits captured across the globe—through Thomas’s vision, this room becomes a new world of its own.

Showcasing the varied but interconnected motifs and ideas that Irving Penn returned to time and again over the course of his life, the images selected and paired by Hank Willis Thomas speak to a transcendent, universal quality that can be traced across the photographer’s vast oeuvre. His arrangement of Penn’s works is guided by a kind of “visual muscle memory,” which he describes as “the notion that an artist’s eye and hand retain the imprints of past works, unconsciously shaping new creations.” The diverse photographs on view, for Thomas, are marked by their stillness and dignity, their shared interest in capturing and communicating the human experience in a single frame.

“In Penn’s work, I see a profound reverence for the overlooked and the mundane,” Hank Willis Thomas writes in a curatorial statement for the show. “His fashion photography, often celebrated for its clean lines and sculptural compositions, shares a surprising kinship with his still lifes of discarded objects. By juxtaposing these images, I want to highlight how Penn’s meticulous attention to detail elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s as if each image, regardless of subject, carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most unlikely places.”

Concurrent with this curated presentation in New York, Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition of his work at Pace’s London gallery, Kinship of the Soul, is on view through December 21. A retrospective of Penn’s work, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, is on view through May 1, 2025 at The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.

Hank Willis Thomas’s work is currently featured in the group exhibitions Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 18, 2025 and Grow It, Show It: A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, through January 12, 2025. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Gun Violence Memorial Project—a collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain—is on view through January 20, 2025.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

pacegallery.com

Marie-Claude Deffarge & Gordian Troeller @ Museum Folkwang, Essen - "No Pictures to Dream of" Retrospective exhibition - Stern-Features and Documentaries

Deffarge & Troeller

No Pictures to Dream of

Stern-Features and Documentaries

Museum Folkwang, Essen

15 November 2024 - 23 February 2025

Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troeller, around 1965 

Anonymous photographer

Silver gelatine print, 13,5 x 13,8 cm

© Ingrid Becker-Ross Troeller

Marie-Claude Deffarge & Gordian Troeller 

Caracas, Venezuela, 1961 

From the Stern-report: Kennedy against Castro 

© Ingrid Becker-Ross Troeller

The Museum Folkwang presents No Pictures to Dream of brings, the Stern features and documentaries by Marie-Claude Deffarge (1924-1984) and Gordian Troeller (1917-2003). This retrospective is presented for the first time in a major museum exhibition. Since the 1950s, the two journalists have reported on riots, wars and social grievances from more than 55 countries. The estate is being presented to the public for the first time on the occasion of Marie-Claude Deffarge's 100th anniversary.

No Pictures to Dream of brings together over 300 works, including photographs, documentary films, personal documents and written material, and offers a comprehensive insight into Deffarge and Troeller's half-century of reporting. Since the 1950s, the two reportage journalists have been documenting social injustice, conflicts and political crises all over the world - from Japan to Yemen and Peru. The exhibition not only presents photographic and film reportages, but also criticises capitalist perspectives and the lack of feminist perceptions, working methods and the division of labour. At a time when objective reporting was in the foreground, Deffarge and Troeller pursue a sometimes subjective, perceptive and often controversial documentary style.

Initially, Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troeller concentrated on West Asia. They published newspaper reports and a first book project: Persia without a Mask. From 1959 to 1969, they reported on social grievances, unrest and wars for Stern magazine, but were particularly successful with The Women of the World. From the mid-1960s, the team produced their first documentary films alongside the Stern features. From 1973 onwards, they become known in German-speaking countries for their films, particularly through their collaboration with Radio Bremen. The documentary series In the Name of Progress, Women of the World and Children of the World were broadcast during prime time until 1999 and reached a large audience. Among other things, they address the devastating consequences of European colonial rule and the patriarchal structures responsible for oppression and exploitation worldwide. The photo and film reportages are an important source of information for understanding the roots and causes of the global consequences of climate change, environmental destruction, economic crises, migration flows and political influence in our time.

In the year of Marie-Claude Deffarge's 100th birthday, the Museum Folkwang is dedicating the first comprehensive museum retrospective to the work of the journalist team. It is based on the photographic estate of Deffarge and Troeller, which was transferred to the Museum Folkwang and the film holdings at the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg in 2017. The exhibition highlights not only the reportages and films, but also the working methods and team structures that contributed significantly to their success. A special role is played by Ingrid Becker-Ross, who accompanied many of the trips as a sound recordist and is now also involved in the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition also offers perspectives from people from the countries covered in the reports. Raika Khorshidian and Heidar Zahedi, for example, have edited the extensive material on Iran and summarised their views in two film documentaries.

A 296-page exhibition catalogue will be published by Scheidegger & Spiess (price € 48).

The exhibition is a co-operation between the Museum Folkwang and the CNA, Luxembourg. It is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen) and the Gouvernement Du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, Ministère de la Culture.

The exhibition will be shown at the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg, from 2 May to 14 September 2026.

MUSEUM FOLKWANG

Museumsplatz 1, 45128 Essen

www.museum-folkwang.de

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern - Exhibition @ MoMA, New York + Book

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern

MoMA, New York

November 17, 2024 – March 29, 2025

Lillie P. Bliss. c. 1924 

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

The music room in Bliss’s apartment, 

1001 Park Avenue, c. 1929–1931

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Installation view of the exhibition 

“The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.”

May 14, 1934 – September 12, 1934

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Installation view of Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern 

on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025 

Photo: Emile Askey

The Museum of Modern Art presents Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern, an exhibition focusing on the collection and legacy of LILLIE P. BLISS, one of the Museum’s three founders and an early advocate for modern art in the United States. The exhibition which marks the 90th anniversary of Bliss’s bequest coming to MoMA, includes iconic works such as Paul Cézanne’s The Bather (c. 1885) and Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska (1917). The exhibition, which features about 40 works as well as archival materials, highlights Bliss’s critical role in the reception of modern art in the US and in the founding of MoMA.

Paul Cézanne

The Bather. c. 1885 

Oil on canvas. 50 x 38 1/8″ (127 x 96.8 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934 

Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America 

Art Conservation Project 

Photo: John Wronn

Amedeo Modigliani 

Anna Zborowska. 1917 

Oil on canvas. 51 1/4 x 32″ (130.2 x 81.3 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York  

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Photo: John Wronn

When it opened in 1929, The Museum of Modem Art was a destination where visitors could see groundbreaking temporary exhibitions, but it did not have a significant collection. Just two years later, when Lillie P. Bliss died, she left approximately 120 works to the Museum in her will. In an effort to ensure the Museum's future success, Bliss stipulated that MoMA would receive her collection only if it could prove that it was on firm financial footing within three years of her death. 

In 1934 the Museum was able to secure the bequest, which became the core of MoMA's collection. This included key works by Paul Cézanne, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Odilon Redon, Marie Laurencin, and Henri Matisse, as well as a selection of paintings by Bliss's friend, the American artist Arthur B. Davies. 

Georges-Pierre Seurat 

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor. 1888 

Oil on canvas. 21 5/8 x 25 5/8″ (54.9 x 65.1 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Odilon Redon 

Silence. c. 1911 

Oil on prepared paper. 21 1/2 x 21 1/4″ (54.6 x 54 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Bliss's bequest also allowed for the sale of her works to fund new acquisitions, facilitating the purchase of many important artworks, including Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, which is featured in the exhibition. Other favorites wholly or in part funded through the Bliss bequest, such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, are on view in the collection galleries.

Vincent Van Gogh

The Starry Night. Saint Rémy, June 1889

Oil on canvas. 29 x 36 1/4″ (73.7 x 92.1 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), 1941 

Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America 

Art Conservation Project 

Photo: Jonathan Muzikar

At the end of her life, Lillie P. instructed her bother Cornelius Newton Bliss Jr. to burn her personal papers, making it challenging for future generations to recognize the essential part she played in the history of modern art. The exhibition showcases archival materials from MoMA's Archives and other collection, reconstructing Bliss's life before MoMA, including her passion for music, her involment in the Armory Show of 1913, and her interactions with fellow collectors and artists. It also highlight Bliss's critical role in MoMA's founding, and her continued impact on the Museum going forward, through scrapbooks, journals, photographs, and letters.

"It has been a joy to explore the life and work of this courageous woman whom we have known as little more than an important name. We are eager to share our discoveries, and to shine a spotlight on Lillie Bliss for the first time since 1934, when MoMA organized an exhibition to celebrate the new bequest," says Ann Temkin.

Inventing the Modern: 

Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art

by Romy Silver-Kohn (Editor), Ann Temkin (Editor), 

Anna Deavere Smith (Foreword by), 

Mary Schmidt Campbell (Text by), Sloane Crosley (Text by)

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 2024

384 p. - ISBN 9781633450790

 

The exhibition is presented on the occasion of the release of Inventing the Modem: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modem Art, a revelatory account of the Museum's earliest years told through newly commissioned profiles of 14 women who had a decisive impact on the formation and development of the institution. Inventing the Modem comprises illuminating new essays on the women who, as founders, curators, patrons, and directors of various departments, made enduring contributions to MoMA during its early decades (especially between 1929 and 1945), creating new models for how to envision, establish, and operate a museum in an era when the field of modem art was uncharted territory.

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Romy Silver-Kohn, co-editor with Ann Temkin of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York

11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019

moma.org

Artist Kevin Lowenthal @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - "Mannequins in Audience" Exhibition

Kevin Lowenthal

Mannequins in Audience

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

October 25 - December 21, 2024

KEVIN LOWENTHAL

Through the Window, Through the Door, 2024

Oil on cotton on linen, 80 x 64 inches

© Kevin Lowenthal, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by KEVIN LOWENTHAL entitled Mannequins in Audience in the North Room of the gallery. With a background in weaving and textile, Lowenthal encrusts his surfaces with a textured mixture of cotton and layered oil paint, creating a rich, fibrous ground on which to build worlds, investigate forms, and uncover signifiers.

Confined to liminal, compact interiors, Lowenthal’s architectural dreamscapes are often inhabited by lingering, faceless figures. Provoking a sense of theatricality, curtains frame each scene, setting the stage for domestic interiors bound together in one enigmatic space. In 2 Blonde Mannequins in Conversation, the pattern of the figures’ hair matches that of the curtains. Rather than acting as hard, definitive boundaries, the curtains appropriate the fluidity of hair. This malleable relationship of forms ignites a cyclical reinforcement of performance and body, of object and texture. The settings in which these shapes and objects exist possess a vastness akin to a free-roam video game where viewers can choose to stay within the limits of a prefabricated narrative or enter portals that go beyond.

In fact, the initial source of Lowenthal’s imagery derives from the survival-horror video game Silent Hill. In some of the rooms in Silent Hill, wall paint peels away to expose bare concrete. This fracturing inspires the rip, or the glitch, in the painting Patched Overworld. Reminiscent of the energy fields and the jagged dramas of Clyfford Still, Kevin Lowenthal leaves parts of the canvas untouched in order to expose the pale, raw cotton surface. As if to provide a window into the canvas, Kevin Lowenthal pulls back the curtain to expose the thingness of the painting itself.

As in a theatrical presentation, Kevin Lowenthal controls how much information he exposes. In Through the Window, Through the Door, architectural forms are taken out of context and reduced to only their signifiers: a rectangle becomes a door because of the presence of a doorknob; a grid becomes a window only because of its transparency. Modeled after plastic heads, the human-like figure, or mannequin, calls attention to the synthetic nature of doors, windows, and furnishings. These familiar objects and their vacant resemblance to the real world create an overall atmosphere which is both mysterious and unsettling.

KEVIN LOWENTHAL (b. 1994, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. Lowenthal received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Lowenthal recently had a solo exhibition at 243 Luz in Margate, UK. Recent group exhibitions include Brigette Mulholland, Paris, France; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; and Ruby/Dakota, New York, NY. This is his first solo exhibition in New York City.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Martha Diamond @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Deep Time" Exhibition

Martha Diamond: Deep Time 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,  Ridgefield 

November 17, 2024 - May 18, 2025 

MARTA DIAMOND 

Untitled, 1973 

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches 

Collection of Jasper Campshure 

Photo: Jason Mandella 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Deep Time, a traveling survey of five decades of work by MARTA DIAMOND, marking the artist’s first solo museum presentation in thirty-six years. Martha Diamond: Deep Time is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph. 

Martha Diamond’s ties to The Aldrich extend back to 1972 when Larry Aldrich, the Museum’s founder, visited the artist’s Bowery studio and purchased the sevenby-six-foot acrylic on canvas painting, Untitled, 1972, marking her first museum acquisition. This painting was included in Martha Diamond’s debut exhibition, Contemporary Reflections 1972-73, an annual series at the Museum that spotlighted emerging artists with no gallery representation. Aldrich bought another painting from Martha Diamond a year later, Untitled, 1973. It would be included in three more exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s at The Aldrich. Now in the Museum’s 60th anniversary year, Untitled, 1973 makes its return as the earliest work in Deep Time. 

Martha Diamond, who passed away in December 2023, is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Encompassing paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. 

Deep time is a concept used to explore thousands of years of human civilization and billions of years of planetary history. In conversation with ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, the exhibition emphasizes Martha Diamond’s commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. Martha Diamond’s relationship to the built landscape of New York was surely informed by her more than 50 years spent maintaining her studio in the Bowery, demonstrating her tremendous perseverance as an artist and her rootedness in a single place over time. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph, an amply illustrated catalogue that includes an original essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, a chronology, and texts reprinted from some of Diamond’s most insightful critics: New York poets steeped in the visual arts. Martha Diamond: Deep Time documents the inspirations that converge in, and are transformed by, Diamond’s enigmatic and utterly original work. 

Martha Diamond: Deep Time is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, and co-curated by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator, Amy Smith-Stewart and Colby’s Katz Consulting Curator, Levi Prombaum. 

MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and, after a period of living abroad in Paris, an MA from New York University in 1969. She was an active participant in New York’s art and poetry scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her work has been shown at major New York galleries and institutions from the mid-1970s on, including solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and the New York Studio School, and important group shows at Skarstedt, the Hill Art Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also had concurrent solo exhibitions in 1988 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work was in the former collection of The Aldrich and was exhibited at the Museum in group exhibitions in 1973, 1974, 1985, and 1988. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. 

ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Heidi Lampenius @ Helsinki Contemporary - "Ground Color" Exhibition

Heidi Lampenius: Ground Color

Helsinki Contemporary

22 November - 21 December 2024

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs II, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs IV, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 195 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Color Chart I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 165 cm x 165 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

“I like the way the paint glistens when it is wet, like dew-kissed mornings, but when it is dry, the colours become muted as the clay enfolds them in its own harmonious palette. Here lies the secret, the secret of the clay, the secret of the earth, conveying a sense of everything invisible in nature that we feel but cannot see.”

- Heidi Lampenius

Ground Color presents new clay paintings by Heidi Lampenius. They reprise her signature symbolic language of painting that is based on the natural sciences and her experience of nature. The title of the exhibition is ambiguous: ‘ground’ can mean ‘earth’, but it can also refer to the surface used for painting. In this exhibition, earth serves as the ‘ground’ both conceptually and literally.

In her past paintings, Heidi Lampenius gave a visible form to invisible natural phenomena such as wavelengths of sound and light. The artist’s new explorations in clay reflect her quest for a new sense of groundedness – her desire to return to tangible basics. The paintings in the exhibition are composed around simple geometrical shapes that enclose folds and diagrams. Her abstract paintings conceptually represent her investigations into the hidden world of clay. While her forms are angular, there is great tenderness to her painting style and tonal scale.

The artist’s enduring themes – time, nature and memory – are revisited in series such as Stairs, in which the viewer can make out the shape of stairs simultaneously leading up and down, and in multiple directions all at once. For Heidi Lampenius, stairs symbolize harmonious cycles, their circular movement representing reassuring continuity and harmony  –  an endless cycle where what is at the ‘top’ and at the ‘bottom’ are inextricably linked.

Clay paint has the special quality of being temporally layered. Earth minerals are among the oldest pigments known to humankind. Clays, ochres, and earth and mineral pigments are born through cycles of elements spanning vast expanses of time. Heidi Lampenius thus takes the viewer on a long journey across peatlands, fields and bedrock, through millennia of folklore, and through geological epochs stretching far back beyond human history.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Exposition Dolce&Gabbana, Grand Palais, Paris - « Du Coeur à la Main : Dolce&Gabbana »

Du Coeur à la Main

Dolce&Gabbana

Grand Palais, Paris

10 janvier - 31 mars 2025

Dolce&Gabbana

Photographie © Mariano Vivanco

« Entrez dans l’univers de Domenico Dolce et Stefano Gabbana, où s’entremêlent imagination et magie, légende et réalité. » -- Florence Müller, commissaire de l’exposition

Réunissant pour la première fois les créations uniques de la maison de mode de luxe, Du Coeur à la Main : Dolce&Gabbana est une lettre d’amour ouverte à la culture italienne, source d’inspiration constante de Domenico Dolce et Stefano Gabbana. L’exposition retrace l’itinéraire esthétique de leurs créations, d’abord portées dans leur coeur, puis exécutées à la main dans leurs ateliers.

Conçue par l’historienne de la mode Florence Müller, l’exposition célèbre Dolce&Gabbana en tant que symbole du style italien, et remonte à l’origine du songe extraordinaire devenu la réalité de leur Alta Moda. Elle explore une approche singulière dans le monde du luxe, faite d’élégance et de sensualité, mais aussi d’humour, d’impertinence et d’extravagance.

Les modèles exposés, des pièces uniques réalisées par des artisans italiens dotés de savoir-faire incomparables, mettent en évidence les différents éléments de la culture italienne qui nourrissent les créations de Dolce&Gabbana. L’exposition, selon un parcours thématique, reflète la richesse de leurs inspirations puisées dans l’histoire de l’art italien, l’architecture, l’artisanat, les cultures régionales, la musique, l’opéra, le ballet, le cinéma, les traditions folkloriques, le théâtre et bien sûr – « la dolce vita ».

GRAND PALAIS, PARIS 

Galeries 3.2, 4.1 et 4.2

www.grandpalais.fr

Chiharu Shiota - Exposition Grand Palais Paris : "The Soul Trembles"

Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles*

Grand Palais, Paris

11 décembre 2024 - 19 mars 2025

* Les frémissements de l’âme

En avant-première de la réouverture de l’ensemble de ses galeries en juin 2025, le Grand Palais présente une exposition consacrée à l’œuvre poétique et sensible de l’artiste japonaise Chiharu Shiota.

Née à Osaka au Japon en 1972, Chiharu Shiota vit et travaille à Berlin. Elle combine performances, art corporel et installations dans un processus centré sur le corps. 

Depuis le milieu des années 90, l’artiste produit des installations de fils de laine entrelacés, créant des réseaux graphiques spectaculaires, au travers desquels le visiteur doit trouver son chemin et sa place. Ces toiles gigantesques enveloppent très souvent des objets de son quotidien (chaises, lits, pianos, vêtements, etc.) et invitent à un voyage onirique majestueux. Si l’art de l’enchevêtrement a fait sa renommée, la pratique de l’artiste s’étend également à la sculpture, la photographie, la vidéo et au dessin, dont l’exposition présentera un corpus. Ses créations protéiformes explorent les notions de temporalité, de mouvement, de mémoire et de rêve, qui requièrent l’implication à la fois mentale et corporelle du spectateur.

Chiharu Shiota a été exposée à travers le monde, notamment au Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japon (2024), au Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, États-Unis (2023), au P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003), au K21 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2014), au Smithsonian, Washington DC (2014). En 2015, Chiharu Shiota a représenté le Japon à la Biennale de Venise. 

L’exposition, co-organisée  par le GrandPalaisRmn, Paris et le Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, est la plus importante jamais consacrée à Chiharu Shiota. Elle retrace plus de 20 ans de sa carrière. Elle offrira au public une expérience sensible à travers plusieurs installations monumentales déployées sur plus de 1200 mètres carrés.

Ayant fait l’expérience directe, et à de multiples occasions, de la vulnérabilité de la vie qui lui a été accordée, Shiota espère que cette exposition pourra transmettre aux autres, avec l’ensemble de son corps, les tremblements de sa propre âme. 

Avec sept installations à grande échelle, des sculptures, des photographies, des dessins, des vidéos de performance et des documents d’archives liés à son projet de mise en scène, l’exposition représente l’occasion de se familiariser avec la carrière de Chiharu Shiota, qui s’étend sur plus de vingt ans.

Sept étapes successives ont déjà eu lieu au Japon, en Corée du Sud, à Taiwan, en Australie, en Indonésie et en Chine. Une étape est prévue à Turin au musée d’Art Oriental, d’octobre 2025 à l’été 2026.

Commissariat : Mami Kataoka, Directrice du Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

GRAND PALAIS, PARIS

Entrée Porte H - Galerie 9 et 10.2 

www.grandpalais.fr

Ron Norsworthy @ Edwynn Houk Gallery, NYC - "I, Nacissus" Exhibition

Ron Norsworthy: I, Narcissus

Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

November 14 - December 21, 2024

RON NORSWORTHY

Considering Narcissus, 2024

Mixed media collage in relief on wood panel

© Ron Norsworthy, courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery

Edwynn Houk Gallery presents I, Narcissus, an exhibition of new work by RON NORSWORTHY that is the artist’s first with the gallery after announcing representation in 2023. 

Centered around Ron Norsworthy’s long standing interest in spatial poetics, narrative and allegory, these eleven works provide an extended reflection on both the personal experience and social construction of beauty, while also reconsidering narcissism as a virtue of self-love. Expressed through Norsworthy’s distinctive process of creating digital collages and then translating them into three-dimensional form—what he calls paintings—the works oscillate between their photographic illusion and the transparency of their making.

Ron Norsworthy uses the myth of Echo and Narcissus as a thematic point of departure for the exhibition, reinterpreting the myth’s central narrative thread through a contemporary sensibility. Originating from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story told of how Narcissus, after spurning Echo’s love, was cursed to love in such a way that could never be reciprocated. After then seeing himself reflected in a pool of water and becoming infatuated with his own beauty, he was unable to remove himself from that spot, eventually dying long after his youth passed and with it the source of his original affection. Though often invoked today as a cautionary tale about the consequences of excessive self-regard and admiration, Ron Norsworthy would have us reframe the story to produce an entirely new set of questions: What exactly is wrong with loving oneself? Who does society deem to be beautiful, and why? If beauty is a social construction, then what else might be as well?

These are questions that Ron Norsworthy explores through both the literal and figurative construction of I, Narcissus’ eleven works. Each begins as a digital collage composed of photographs mined and made from the internet’s vast visual landscape and eventually transferred to wood panel, with certain areas or details being given several layers of nearly-overlapping relief. What illusion his images achieve is intentionally undermined, or undone altogether, by the visibility of the plywood relief. In a related way, the beauty of Norsworthy’s subjects and the spaces they inhabit are typically at odds with the spatial incongruencies he leaves for us to notice. Through his use of physical layering and metaphoric reference, Ron Norsworthy creates architectural inconsistencies that paradoxically compliment his subjects while being central to each work’s presentation as well. The scenes he builds are often psychologically evocative while being narratively oblique: details may be richly specific, but their past and future importance remains permanently unclear, leaving us to impart meaning or significance.

Ron Norsworthy reimagines Echo and Narcissus primarily through its central theme of reflection. With a different Narcissus appearing in each work, so too do the ideas of reflection and tone of contemplation change. In some, as in Narcissus, Dearest, the subject sits upright while turning away from us to gaze at his own mirrored image, of which we only see part of, leaving us to focus instead on the room and an open door beyond it leading off into the lush outdoors. In others, as in Narcissus In Rollers, the subject’s face is all that we see, adorned as it is with rollers, a silk headscarf and sunglasses, and the reflection is captured by the glasses in a prismatic assortment of colors while we can imagine Narcissus considering his own beauty in a moment of repose. Absent from these scenes, however, is the tragic or consequential mythical element. Instead, the works take on an allegorical function and offer discrete commentaries on the multivalent experience of self-contemplation, of which beauty is but one part.

The figurative and interpretative depth in these works is typical of Ron Norsworthy and his penchant for creating scenes that are personally inflected without being overly specific; images that suggest internal coherence and representational verisimilitude while also calling into question the very possibility of those qualities. Though these images may lure us into believing their illusion—into seeing and appreciating their beauty—they also ask us to consider how and why we might have done so in the first place.

RON NORSWORTHY - BIOGRAPHY

Ron Norsworthy is an interdisciplinary artist whose broad practice engages the fields of art, architecture, filmmaking and design. Informing his work is a foundational belief that the rooms, spaces and environments we inhabit and interact with speak volumes not only about who we are now, but also about our dreams, aspirations and our struggles as well. Through the creation of collaged reliefs, decorative objects, textiles and installations, his work carries the viewer through a non-linear, layered story of his life, one shaped by his lived experience as a queer person of the global majority.

Ron Norsworthy was born in South Bend, Indiana and currently lives and works in Connecticut and New Jersey, respectively. His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; The Old Stone House, Brooklyn, NY; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY; Five Points Gallery, Torrington, CT; Standard Space, Sharon, CT; Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ; the International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, NE; the New York Historical Society, NYC; the Governor’s Island Art Fair, Governors Island, NY; the Armory Show, NY; Paris Photo; and it is also in the permanent collection of the Newark Museum of Art. In 2023, Ron Norsworthy was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in Visual Arts. 

EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

www.houkgallery.com

Les 10 lauréats FoRTE#6 en arts visuels @ Réserves du Frac Ile-de-France, Romainville

Les 10 lauréats FoRTE#6 en arts visuels

Fonds Régional pour les Talents Emergents

Réserves du Frac Ile-de-France, Romainville

30 novembre 2024 - 18 janvier 2025

Créé en 2017 par la Région Ile-de-France, FoRTE - Fonds Régional pour les Talents Emergents - offre aux jeunes artistes de toutes nationalités, travaillant en Ile-de-France, les moyens financiers et matériels de créer une première œuvre dans les domaines des arts visuels, du cinéma, de la musique et des arts de la scène. Doté de plus d'1 M€ chaque année, FoRTE s'adresse aux artistes de 18 à 30 ans, diplômés ou ayant suivi une formation qualifiante, qui candidatent avec une structure d'accompagnement les soutenant dans leur projet. Les lauréats bénéficient d'une bourse de 2500 € par mois pour une durée maximale de 10 mois, soit 25000 €.

FoRTE s’adresse également aux structures culturelles et artistiques, ainsi qu’aux établissements d’insertion professionnelle, qui peuvent soumettre des projets de jeunes créateurs. La structure reçoit alors une subvention pouvant aller jusqu’à 50.000 € et s’engage à rémunérer le jeune artiste ou la jeune équipe artistique. 

Chaque année, les lauréats FoRTE sont sélectionnés par un jury d’experts et de professionnels renouvelé annuellement. Depuis sa création, FoRTE a soutenu 300 projets.

Aux Réserves du Frac Ile-de-France à Romainville est présentée une exposition des dix lauréats FoRTE#6 en arts visuels avec les oeuvres qu’ils ont créés grâce au dispositif.

Cette édition 2024 marque une évolution majeure de l’exposition, celle-ci se déployant pour la première fois à tous les étages des réserves du Frac Ile-de-France, avec un dialogue inédit entre les oeuvres des artistes lauréats FoRTE 2024 et celles issues de la collection du Frac. Ce dialogue entre générations d’artistes met en lumière la transmission des savoirs et des sensibilités.

La promotion FoRTE#6 se caractérise par son interdisciplinarité et la manière dont les artistes se saisissent des enjeux contemporains qui traversent notre société. Issues de collaborations, d’échanges et de rencontres fertiles, les oeuvres illustrent comment l’art s’imprègne de la société et, en retour, contribue à la façonner. Des thèmes récurrents comme la perception du réel et son altération se retrouvent dans le travail de Flora Bouteille ainsi que dans celui de Rosario Aninat. Tandis que Lise Thiollier, en évoquant la production des cristaux de lithium et Marylou en reconstituant le chant d’oiseaux en voie de disparition, montrent les façons dont nos modes de vie influent sur notre environnement. A travers sa roulotte inspirée des fêtes foraines, Clément Courgeon s’amuse de la transmission d’héritages et traditions culturelles tout comme Silina Syan. Ces oeuvres nous incitent à réfléchir à la manière dont nous percevons et habitons le monde. 

A travers une recherche textile et tactile, Diane Chéry crée un langage pictural mêlant art et artisanat dans une approche synesthésique. Jérémie Danon et Gabriel Fontana remettent en jeu les utopies d’hier tout comme celles de demain en imaginant d’autres manières de vivre ensemble, tandis que Gala Hernández López transpose ce thème dans un monde virtuel, basculant peut-être dans une forme de dystopie. Ces « espaces vivants » créés par les artistes invitent les visiteurs à interagir avec les oeuvres, à s’y immerger, activant ainsi la réflexion sur notre manière d’habiter et de transformer les environnements qui nous entourent.

Ces oeuvres nous plongent dans un « méta-monde », un espace au-delà de nos perceptions immédiates, où s’entrelacent technologie, écologie et exploration des nouveaux médias. Les oeuvres de la collection du Frac font écho à ces univers, dans une discussion transgénérationnelle. 

Les oeuvres des FoRTE#6, en dialogue avec les oeuvres de la collection du Frac Île-de-France célèbre la jeune création artistique, vecteur d’un échange riche et inspirant avec notre monde, dans toute sa complexité.

Associations des artistes FoRTE avec les artistes des oeuvres de la collection :

Rosario Aninat : Clémentine Adou

Flora Bouteille : Ulla Frantzen

Diane Chéry : Maëlle Labussière

Clément Courgeon : Mathis Collins

Jérémie Danon : Lynne Cohen

Gabriel Fontana : Rip Hopkins

Gala Hernández López : Henrik Plenge Jacobsen

Marylou : Camille Henrot

Lise Thiollier : Joan Jonas

Silina Syan : Jean-Luc Moulène

LES DIX LAUREATS FoRTE 2024 ET LEURS OEUVRES

ROSARIO ANIMAT 

Compulsive Schemes

Installation photographique

© Daniel Browne

Soutenue par la Fondation Fiminco, l’oeuvre de Rosario Animat nous oriente vers des sites d’Ile-de-France parfois mal aimés, qui se cachent sous la surface et se fondent dans le paysage urbain. L’oeuvre prend la forme d’une série de caissons lumineux présentant des diapositives originales grand format, confrontées à des objets réfléchissants convexes soufflés à la main.

FLORA BOUTEILLE

Cannibales

Installation immersive de cinéma

© Marine Leleu

Cannibales de Flora Bouteille est une série de performances soutenue par le Parc de la Villette, conçue comme un dispositif de jeu en constante évolution, transformé et façonné par les représentations et les interactions avec le public. Le projet explore la dynamique de prédation cannibale dans la société contemporaine, en mettant notamment en lumière le rôle central des caméras et les questions éthiques que pose leur usage.

DIANE CHERY

Soir au Matin

Exposition et performance

© Eugénie Touze

Le projet de Diane Chéry, soutenu par Poush, raconte la musique créée lorsque les mains d’une peintre rencontrent le textile. Il tourne autour de l’interprétation de la peinture par diverses techniques et matières, à la lisière de l’art et de l’artisanat. Les tentures sont imaginées comme des fenêtres ouvertes sur le passage des heures. En suspension ou accrochées aux murs, elles sont activées par des actions performatives.

CLEMENT COURGEON

La Roulotte à personne 

Sculpture

© Clément Courgeon

Soutenue par Art Exprim 18, La Roulotte à personne de Clément Courgeon est une installation itinérante dont le titre peut évoquer aussi bien le monde des bohémiens et des bateleurs de cirque qu’une errance échappant aux diktats de la société de consommation. Le transport et ses aléas (pannes, casses, retards) font partie intégrante de l’œuvre, tout comme sa capacité à utiliser le hasard et à créer du lien chemin faisant.

JEREMIE DANON

Utopie topique

Installation vidéo

© Jérémie Danon

Le film de Jérémie Danon, soutenu par la Galerie centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, questionne les transformations radicales d’une utopie collective. Construit par des femmes et des hommes juifs en 1940 en Galilée, sur des terres palestiniennes sous mandat britannique, le kibboutz Matzuva est un village collectiviste socialiste où l’égalité et la communauté devaient régner. L’auteur interroge les anciens et nouveaux habitants du kibboutz, et tente de décrypter ce qu’il reste des ambitions de vie collective. Le film traduit également « le bouleversement [des intentions de l’artiste] par la terrible réalité de la guerre ».

GABRIEL FONTANA

En Jeu

Performance, jeu et installation vidéo

© Gabriel Fontana

En Jeu est un projet de co-création initié par Gabriel Fontana, en partenariat avec le Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson et des établissements scolaires de Seine-et-Marne. Il reflète son travail visant à développer de nouveaux sports d’équipe qui déconstruisent les dynamiques de groupe et encouragent l’empathie. Le projet aborde des enjeux clés de la construction du lien social, les questions d’identité et d’inclusion dans les compétitions sportives traditionnelles.

GALA HERNANDEZ LOPEZ

Hodl

Vidéo d’art

© Artur-Pol Camprubi

Avec le soutien de Don Quichotte Films, Hodl, oeuvre de Gala Hernandez Lopez, propose de réfléchir à la manière dont l’incertitude économique, les croyances spirituelles et une nouvelle forme de religion basée sur la liberté financière se mélangent dans un contexte de précarité et d’instabilité. Ce projet prend la forme d’un collage d’images en 16 mm, de vidéos YouTube, d’animations 3D et d’images générées par l’IA, confrontant ainsi des régimes visuels hétérogènes.

MARYLOU

Maison

Installation immersive et performance

© Zoé Thiburs

Le projet de Marylou, Maison, soutenu par Siana, s’intéresse à la manière dont les oiseaux habitent leur territoire par le chant. Il forme un cocon, un écosystème électrique hypersensible où chaque « bestiole électronique » (réalisée par un réseau de circuits électroniques et sonores) recrée artificiellement le chant d’oiseaux communs. L’électronique est utilisée comme principal intermédiaire, mettant en lumière les similitudes entre écosystèmes brisés et interfaces électriques.

SILINA SYAN

Sonar Bangla (Lux reflections) 

Installation : photos, vidéos, objets

© Silina Syan

Sonar Bangla (Lux reflections), soutenue par Artagon Pantin, évoque l’univers des commerces bangladais des quartiers de Hoche et de Quatre-Chemins à Pantin. Silina Syan interroge l’organisation de ces espaces, met en perspective les volumes et surfaces : vitrines extérieures, stocks, étalages, et présentoirs, où l’accumulation de produits, de couleurs, de motifs et de typographies offre un terrain d’expérimentation formelle riche.

LISE THIOLLIER

Métamorphoses de sel

Installation immersive

© Lise Thiollier

Métamorphoses de sel est une installation soutenue par la Galerie centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, composée de sculptures en céramique cristallisées par le sel, associées à des photographies du désert de sel d’Atacama. L’œuvre invite à ralentir, s’installer, se recharger. Lise Thiollier utilise aussi des matériaux contemporains – écrans de smartphones fissurés et cartes-mères usagées – pour questionner notre dépendance au tout-électronique et la signification de l’habitat.

Les Réserves du Frac Île-de-France 

43 rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville 

www.fraciledefrance.com

Entrée libre.

Ouvert du mercredi au dimanche

de 14h à 19h