Eric Fischl @ Skarstedt Gallery, Paris - 'Couples' Exhibition of Recent Paintings

Eric Fischl: Couples

Skarstedt, Paris

October 20 – December 6, 2025 

Skarstedt presents the exhibition Eric Fischl: Couples, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s recent work, in Paris. Four years after his first exhibition Eric Fischl: My Old Neighborhood, which inaugurated the Paris gallery, ERIC FISCHL returns with a series on the historical theme of couples - whether mythological, literary or cinematic – as well as the feelings that are intrinsically linked to relationships: fidelity, passion, and love, but also breakups, betrayal and solitude.

Renowned for his depiction of the human figure, Eric Fischl’s naturalistic paintings captures moments of everyday life, featuring characters from the American middle class. Having been raised in the suburbs of Long Island, Fischl’s quasi-autobiographical works provide food for thought about American society, where image culture, sexuality and the troubles of couple relations are recurrent themes.

Each painting is imbued with a tragic tranquillity, the characters belonging to a true “casting” of actors that the artist mobilises to tell an intimate story. The direction of his narratives guides the choice of protagonists he employs, taken from his own photographs, working, in a way, as a director. Roadsides, hotel rooms, suburbs, swimming pools: these are all cinematic settings that serve as backdrops for his works, where apparent stillness masks deeper psychological unease.

Fischl’s characters rarely make eye contact—either with the viewer of the others in the composition— but are often driven by a desire to get closer to one another. The viewer becomes a witness to scenes populated by the unspoken, where an imminent incident risks triggering a rift or, alternatively, a healing complicity. The proximity of bodies juxtaposed to their emotional distance and nebulous dynamics are at the heart of Couples. The series presents duos - companions or strangers - suspended in moments of immobility, where narrative certainty is withheld and the viewer is left to navigate the emotional terrain between the figures.

Since the 1980s, the artist has been constructing these pictorial episodes of great intensity from his memories and his own photographic montages. With lucidity, Eric Fischl reveals the other side of the American way of life, exploring the invisible flaws of intimacy, desire and the human condition in a tragicomic tone. In Fischl’s own words, “When something happens beyond what is expected, and whose very nature strips you of your armour, that’s the definition of tragedy. Ambiguity is then the only way to move towards understanding.”

SKARSTED PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

Previous Exhibitions at Skarstedt Paris:

Sue Williams, June 5 – July 25, 2025

Chantal Joffe: The Dog's Birthday, April 3 – May 31, 2025

Self-Portraits , February 13 – March 29, 2025

Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, October 14 – December 21, 2024

Yuan Fang @ Skarstedt Gallery, NYC - "Spaying" Exhibition

Yuan Fang: Spaying

Skarstedt Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 25, 2025

Skarstedt Chelsea presents Spaying, Yuan Fang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery (the previous one was in London). In this deeply personal and formally rigorous body of work, Yuan Fang turns inward, offering a meditation on illness, identity, and the intricate architecture of womanhood. In addition to her large-scale canvases, Yuan Fang debuts a suite of smaller, more intimate paintings—what the artist refers to as “subplots,” fragments of a larger, lived narrative.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the medical and emotional ramifications of Fang’s recent breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments, functioning as a reference not only to the potential biological consequences of her treatment, but also the literal act of cutting—a gesture central to her process. Through cycles of modification, layering, and erasure, Yuan Fang pares down each composition until a dominant “entity” emerges. These central forms, always abstract yet bodily, function as torsos, anchoring each painting with a visceral sense of presence. “I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Yuan Fang notes, and indeed, each image carries that charge, meeting the viewer with both the emotional weight of her experience and a visual strength that builds like a storm on the horizon. 

New to this body of work is Fang’s embrace of negative space. Informed by the tradition of “leaving blank” in Chinese painting, these compositional voids focus the viewer’s attention on what remains. Separately, the rhythm of her studio practice has slowed, inviting longer periods of contemplation and greater attention to detail. The resulting compositions feel more deliberate with each painting charged with quiet intensity.

Autobiographical threads run throughout. Several works incorporate the artist’s own medical imaging subtly embedded in the compositions, such as Accumulating, Breaking Through the Defense Line. Others channel the psychic toll of external expectation and all of the rage, pressure, and fatigue that accompany it. 

Throughout the show, Yuan Fang navigates the porous boundaries between vulnerability and strength, life and death. This emotional duality is echoed in the palette of deep burgundies, forest greens, and indigos, and in the evocative titles of works such as Standing, Injured Horse and Bloody Meteorite Falling from the Sky. In the ease of her oil transitions and the fluidity of her lines, there is a quiet but profound sense of release. The works in Spaying may emerge from pain, but they insist on clarity. Though anchored in personal experience, Spaying broadens Fang’s ongoing investigation into the construction of feminine identity and the quiet rebellions required to reclaim it. Confronting her own mortality has yielded a new lucidity, and with it, a sharpened resolve to live on her own terms.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK CHELSEA

547 West 25th New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

Sue Williams @ Skarstedt Gallery, Paris

Sue Williams

Skarstedt Paris

June 5 - July 25, 2025

Skarstedt Paris presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist SUE WILLIAMS, her fourth with the gallery and her second in the Paris space. Known for her fearless excavations of the sociopolitical through paint, Sue Williams continues her decades-long practice of fusing acerbic critique with formal experimentation. In this latest body of work, she conjures a restless visual field in which twisted toes, melting horses, costumed frogs, and other disobedient forms hover, jostle, and careen across raw canvas—part protest, part dreamscape.

Emerging in the late 1980s with a politically charged, graphic approach to figuration, Sue Williams has long challenged both the conventions of painting and the institutional forces behind them. Her canvases initially directly addressed sexual violence, gender inequality, and the failures of law. Over time these themes have remained, but her work has grown increasingly abstract without abandoning the corporeal, instead intertwining gestural mark-making with the persistent residue of the figure. In these new compositions, that duality remains striking: muscular brushwork meets airy line, suggestive silhouettes dissolve into pure color, and cheeky iconography mingles with painterly exuberance.

At once cartoonish and lyrical, these works revel in contradiction. The grotesque meets the buoyant; the vulgar sidles up to the charming. Bloated human figures, spindly feet, and salamanders coexist with frilly frogs, checkered prints, and floating cows. Sperm-like tadpoles swirl around the canvas, while toilets and sinks linger nearby. Amid the visual cacophony, abstraction and figuration refuse to hold their ground. Vivid splashes and delicate strokes compete for attention, producing compositions that defy visual hierarchy and resist tidy interpretation.

Yet for all their apparent chaos, these paintings are deeply controlled: orchestrated improvisations that channel formal invention through deliberate risk. Williams’ line remains unpredictable but precise—her touch as light as it is incisive. The eye is left to swim among body parts, blobs, and symbolic mischief, following no ordained path but always arriving somewhere surprising.

In Sue Williams’ universe, abstraction is not a retreat from the world but a strategy for confronting it obliquely, even mischievously. Hers is a practice attuned to the grotesque comedy of power—whether personal or geopolitical—and committed to exposing its fault lines with wit, pleasure, and unrelenting clarity.

SKARSTED PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

André Butzer @ Skarstedt, NYC - Chelsea

André Butzer

Skarstedt, New York

Through April 26, 2025

Skarstedt presents the first solo exhibition with acclaimed German painter André Butzer. Made specifically for the gallery’s new Chelsea space, he has created 10 large-scale paintings as well as 15 works on paper.

Since 1994, in direct succession to Georg Baselitz and Albert Oehlen, André Butzer’s fundamental fusion of European Expressionism and American ready-made pop culture, the conceptual repetition and apparent seriality of his iconic characters as well as his insistence on bare human dignity have been testament to his courageous and continuous inquiry into societal contradictions and social non-conformity.

Butzer’s Synthetic Paintings appear to be blasted and contorted, atomized into countless abstract particles. No painting can rely on any prefabricated compositional order. Enormous discharges of colors, forms and patches, ornamental bands, framework and planes—placeless and unstable.

The huge, solitary figures, as austere as ludicrous, are a challenge to our image of man. Their towering, composite bodies are industrialized, permeated by technology, maltreated by devices and pieces of apparatus, distorted, destroyed from within.

But at that precarious moment, in which the human figure is completely negated, dissolved, broken, and hollowed out, André Butzer begins. In the face of absolute annihilation, nothing remains but mere existence. An enduring basis for living. Vibrant and vital. From there, he builds his figures and thus the entire image anew.

For a figure is nothing that ever was a given in painting. Unique and inimitable, it incorporates both creation and destruction, permanent obliteration and renewal. André Butzer decisively realizes the substantial coherence of these opposites. "I want to be right in the middle of these destructive and redemptive contradictions", he says. In every image, opposites such as placing and dispersion, disruption and solidity, affirmation and negation reunite and therefore converge into a balanced, all-encompassing wholeness.

Each painting establishes its own, fragile stance from within itself. The straightening up of the figures, their presence and posture, their foothold and powerless composure, all this corresponds to the pervasive verticality of the canvases like an echo. A painterly totality, in which color transfigures every form and body.

The entire painting becomes a coloristically built “pictorial figure,” which “has no validity outside the picture and which is only potent in this one image and on this specific plane.” A trembling, truthful image of man, made whole again amidst fracturing and dissolving. Just as Butzer’s figures suddenly fit into the image, it is as if, even we, might fit into the world again.

André Butzer confronts our frail existence. His paintings reveal with utmost urgency that a dignified life, the integrity of body and soul, must be preserved not only in painting, but everywhere all at once.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK - CHELSEA

547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

André Butzer @ Skarstedt, New York, February 13 - April 26, 2025

On Ugliness: Medieval and Contemporary @ Skarstedt London - A rare convergence of paintings, sculptures and photographs spanning the twelfth century to the present day

On Ugliness 

Medieval and Contemporary

Skarstedt London

February 27 – April 26, 2025

Skarstedt London presents On Ugliness: Medieval and Contemporary, a rare convergence of paintings, sculptures and photographs spanning the twelfth century to the present day. Taking its title from Umberto Eco’s seminal publication On Ugliness, this curated presentation examines the grotesque as a universal theme, tracing its evolution across a millennium of artistic output. Four medieval stone heads form the crux of this exhibition, their contorted faces- ranging from grimaces to sneers- serve as a touchstone throughout art history and play a formative role in contemporary interpretations of the grotesque.

The exhibition features work by George Condo, Nicole Eisenman, Jameson Green, Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, Jacob de Litemont, Pablo Picasso, Stefan Rinck, Pensionante del Saraceni, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Schütte and a selection of unknown artists working between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

Although the grotesque has been dismissed and deplored by various critics over the past millennium, it remains a recurrent fascination, continuously re-imagined by each generation. As a result, its etymology is in constant flux. Some argue that the grotesque is a collective tool for conceptualising difference and change, while others see it as a means of liberation, freeing the artist from earthly constraints. Regardless of the motif or iconography, the grotesque reveals aspects of the world that elude comprehension, therefore our experience of the genre should result in bafflement.

The most prevalent expression of the grotesque is through metamorphosis or hybridity – a motif discovered in the Roman Emperor Nero’s Villa Aurea upon its excavation in the fifteenth century. The ornamental scenes, later dubbed grottesche (‘from a cave’) captivated artists from Raphael to Pablo Picasso, who revelled in hybridity - first understood through his early proto-cubist works. During this period, he experimented with fragmentation and metamorphosis as exemplified in Tête de femme (1908), an exquisite drawing inspired by African and Iberian artefacts. Similarly, Nicole Eisenman explores corporeal distortion in Maquette: Sketch for a Fountain (Reclining Figure) (2019), where the figure’s exaggerated limbs merge into an amorphous whole. Whilst not traditionally beautiful, Eisenman imbues a serene reverie into the figure, originally conceived for a body of water.

George Condo and Jameson Green embrace metamorphosis, using it as a vehicle for anthropological exploration. Condo’s self-declared 'psychological cubism' dissects the human psyche through fragmentation and distortion, revealing its most sensitive aspects. In Study for Metamorphosis I (2006), the protagonist possesses an undeniably human spirit despite her animalistic appearance, while the compositional techniques pay homage to portraiture masters like Rembrandt and Velazquez. On the other hand, Jameson Green’s Head Study #26 (2024) is morphed beyond recognition, using an imagined hybrid creature to confront the challenging themes of racism and corruption.

The grotesque is deeply rooted in art history, yet it defies the ideals of harmony, proportion, and beauty. This is epitomised by Thomas Schütte’s landmark Wicht series (2006), a collection of twelve grotesque heads, of which one is featured. The bronze head, mounted high on a steel console, explores the complexities of the human condition, recalling the distorted medieval stone heads included in this exhibition. Often tucked under roofs, cornices, or atop columns in ecclesiastical buildings, these grotesque heads contrast with the serene saints and apostles that adorn the same spaces. Their exaggerated expressions lend them an air of irreverence, prompting James Lingwood to compare Schütte’s Wicht figures to ‘gargoyles looking down from the sides of medieval cathedrals.’[1] While their original purpose remains uncertain, some scholars interpret them as marginal jokes, lightening the solemnity of religious settings, others view them as caricatures or evil spirits. Regardless of intent, they have been described as ‘the most original physiognomic inventions of the art of the Middle Ages.’[2]

Stefan Rinck’s small-scale contemporary carvings engage with this same grotesque tradition, echoing the hybrid, exaggerated forms of the medieval heads. Carved from natural materials like sandstone or diabase, Rinck’s sculptures mimic the rough-hewn textures of their medieval counterparts, instilling a sense of permanence in his creations. His practice also draws on medieval illustrated encyclopaedias known as bestiaries, which catalogue real and imaginary animals, further rooting his work in the visual and conceptual language of the Middle Ages.

During the medieval period, expressive faces were linked to sin, while an ordered, expressionless face reflected discipline and morality. Conversely, Renaissance and Baroque artists sought to capture the essence of the individual, often at the expense of beauty. With the rise of humanist philosophy in the fourteenth century, the artistic focus shifted from the divine to the human epitomised through an exceptionally rare portrait of King Louis XI of France (circa 1469), attributed to Jacob de Litemont. King Louis XI’s profile is starkly contrasted against a dark background, with his regal status signified by a rich red velvet robe. Nevertheless, his face is unidealised, marked by a crooked nose, heavy features, and baggy eyes. Devoid of flattery, this harsh portrayal reflects the period’s tendency to depict sovereigns with a ‘disarming and intimate sincerity.’[3] The shift towards naturalism intensified in the seventeenth century with Caravaggio’s radical use of live models and violent scenes. Followers like Pensionante del Saraceni (active in Rome circa 1610) emulated his work, particularly in A Boy Being Bitten by a Freshwater Crayfish, embracing his aptitude for theatrical, violent imagery.

The transition towards naturalism paved the way for social satire, as seen in the works of Martin Kippenberger, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Developed in the nineteenth century, it remained a potent force in fine art and popular culture, influencing Kippenberger’s sardonic critique of the artist and art market. His provocative sculpture Fred the Frog Rings the Bell (1990) depicts a crucified frog, his alter-ego, externalising the existential anxiety of exhibiting one’s work. While Kippenberger’s grotesque satire reflects personal turmoil, Sherman and Kruger use unsettling imagery to explore identity politics. In Untitled #140 (1985) from the Fairy Tale series, Cindy Sherman transforms into a pig, exposing what lies behind a polished façade. The self, she suggests, is a stage, shaped through metamorphosis. On the other hand, Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Striped 2) (2019) overlays a disturbed male face with declarative statements, using monumental scale and advertising techniques to expose the power structures behind identity, desire, and consumerism.

Each work on view simultaneously delights and disgusts, confronting the viewer with distorted faces, surreal imagery, and hybrid forms, oscillating between the hellish and the carnivalesque. On Ugliness highlights the power of the grotesque to defy artistic conventions through exaggeration, fragmentation, and metamorphosis—an enduring genre that has captivated civilisations throughout history.

[1] James Lingwood, quoted in Public/Political: Thomas Schütte, Germany 2012, p. 157.

[2] C. Little, Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, p.5.

[3] J. Dupont, ‘A Portrait of Louis II Attributed to Jean Perréal’, The Burlington Magazine, 1947, vol. 89, p. 236.

SKARSTEDT LONDON

8 Bennet Street, London SW1A 1RP

www.skarstedt.com

Chantal Joffe @ Skarstedt Paris - "The Dog’s Birthday" Exhibition

Chantal Joffe: The Dog’s Birthday

Skarstedt Paris

April 3 – May 31, 2025

Skarstedt Paris presents The Dog’s Birthday, Chantal Joffe’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition in Paris since 2001. 

As Olivia Laing notes in their essay, ‘Losing Time Again,’ ‘the paintings that comprise The Dog’s Birthday are concerned with time, especially lost time and the possibilities of time’s recovery that art presents. As the bathetic title suggests, they are focused on ordinary domestic activities – ironing, reading, washing, eating – and small festivities, a plethora of ways of passing and marking time. Time has been spent logging what would otherwise be casual moments, haphazard and unstaged. People loiter about or play with their phones, take baths, gather around a cake, cuddle a dog. It’s exactly the cargo contained in almost anybody’s iPhone library, a log of days.’

There is a particularly French precedent to art that focuses so intensely on the domestic and the quotidian, from Bonnard’s baths to Vuillard’s intimiste interiors.

 ‘I made this show,’ Chantal Joffe says, ‘thinking about Paris – about Vuillard in particular and how he painted in apartments his family lived in, and how the family dramas play out against the changing wallpaper and the newspaper reading of the everyday – and how for him colour is tone and tone is everything.’

 At the same time, the paintings in The Dog’s Birthday are freighted with a curious unease, a desire to stop time in its tracks, to freeze the frame on even the most inconsequential moment or ordinary scene. The works were made in the long shadow of grief, in the wake of a series of family bereavements. One might think again of Vuillard, and of a painting like At Table (1893), with its cast of mourning sisters at a cluttered table. But Chntal Joffe’s paintings are equally preoccupied with literature, and especially the work of Marcel Proust. Appropriately for a Paris show, the book that Chantal Joffe is reading in several of her self-portraits, including Reading in Bed (2025), is In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s mammoth meditation on time and loss, and the complex mediatory role of memory in navigating grief and change.

To quote from Olivia Laing’s essay again, ‘Time is not totally lost when it has passed into the past, so long as it can be recalled. Any event, any moment can be summoned back. But the potentially recoverable nature of past time has to be set against its plasticity, the way it is redrawn and recoloured by the changes in perspective, context, awareness that occur as the individual is drawn inexorably along the tracks of chronological time.’ 

In these extraordinary paintings, there is an accommodation between the desire to cling to time and the possibilities that art offers to experiment imaginatively with loss and leaving.

The previous exhibition Self-Portraits is on view at Skarstedt Paris through March 29.

SKARSTEDT PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

"Self-Portraits" Exhibition @ Skarstedt Paris

Self-Portraits

Skarstedt Paris

February 13 – March 29, 2025

Skarstedt Paris presents Self-Portraits, an exhibition that delves into the multifaceted nature of self-portraiture, exploring its significance as a means of self-expression throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether rendered in traditional or groundbreaking modes, each work on view delves into the paradoxes, nuances, and idiosyncrasies that make each identity unique, thereby connecting the artist’s individual ethos with universal values and themes.

Across the exhibition, the boundaries of self-representation dissolve into bold experimentation, where themes of transformation, temporality, and vulnerability intertwine. Jean Dubuffet’s Self-portrait from 1966, one of the six he ever made, would become the cover image of the Pompidou retrospective in 2001. It is part of the L’Hourloupe series, a cycle that sets a creative protocol between 1962 to 1974, a veritable exploration of a new language that touches on all artistic spheres explored by the French artist. Using sinuous, labyrinthine graphics, Jean Dubuffet composed schematic spaces like constructs of the mind. The surreal and the introspective converge in André Masson’s Le Voyant - Ville Crânienne (1940), a poetic synthesis of ink and gouache that evokes the fractured nature of identity as seen through a surrealist lens. The self emerges as both seer and subject, a fragment of the subconscious shaped by unseen forces. This notion of transformation continues in the conceptual play of Cindy Sherman, whose Untitled Film Still #24 (1978) disrupts the idea of self-portraiture as truth-telling. By embodying various personas through costumes and cinematic framing, Cindy Sherman dissolves herself into archetypes, exposing the performative masks society demands and the fluidity of personal identity. Martin Kippenberger's Untitled (1992), part of his series of Hand Painted Pictures, interrogates the conventions of self-portraiture by embracing irony and subversion, presenting the artist's identity as a fractured, performative construct. Through a deliberate amalgamation of self-deprecation and painterly virtuosity, Martin Kippenberger critiques the commodification of the artist's persona while questioning the authenticity of self-representation itself.

Georg Baselitz, by inverting his figure in Der Anfang ist der Abgang (The Beginning is the Departure) (2017), offers a meditation on the destabilization of the self. His deliberate subversion of form mirrors the psychological disorientation of self-reflection, confronting mortality and the inexorable passage of time. Similarly concerned with the interiority of human experience, Eric Fischl invites viewers into a deeply introspective yet playful meditation on the act of self-representation in Cat ‘n Hat (2024). By positioning himself in a jester’s hat, Eric Fischl underscores the inherent absurdity of the artist’s role—laying oneself bare before an audience through the act of painting. This duality, at once vulnerable and self-aware, reflects the paradox of creation as both an intimate exposure and a performative gesture, where humor becomes a defense against the weight of self-examination.

More than fifty years earlier, Pablo Picasso articulated his anxieties regarding his place within the art historical canon through works such as Buste d’Homme (1964), produced during a prolific period of introspective self-portraits that utilize a pared-down style to express the urgency of his feeling in his later years that he had “less and less time, and…more and more to say.”[1] Similarly, Francis Bacon’s late Study for Self-Portrait (1979) uses intense light and shadow to highlight the creases along his forehead and other visible signs of age, investigating himself as a means of simultaneously investigating the human condition, traumas, and violence. Turning to self-portraiture “because [he] had nobody else left to paint,”[2] this intimately-scaled work questions at what degree of distortion the work can still be a representation of the self. Juan Gris’s Autoportrait (1911-1912), rendered in the language of Cubism, deconstructs and reassembles the figure into facets of geometry. The fractured planes not only speak to the multiplicity of the self but also to the structural interplay between form and meaning in modernist art.

The tactile intensity of Frank Auerbach’s layered compositions further complicates notions of self. His visceral approach to works like Self-Portrait II (2024) transforms the portrait into a locus of memory, each mark carrying the weight of time’s erosion on identity. Similarly, Chantal Joffe’s vibrant palette and bold brushwork in a new painting imbue her portrayals with a raw immediacy and a diaristic quality that captures the precarious balance between strength and fragility, echoing themes of femininity, motherhood, and self-examination. Louis Fratino likewise fills his canvases with a quiet familiarity, using the queer body as a mirror for the vastness of memory and emotional expression. Throughout the 1980s, Robert Mapplethorpe also reflected his commitment to themes of gender expression. In Self-Portrait (1980), we find him draped in a luxurious fur coat, exuding an elegance in the style of Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego, whose playful fluidity of gender and self-reinvention are echoed by Mapplethorpe in a manner that suggests Robert Mapplethorpe’s rejection of traditional binary definitions of gender.

Through the subversive materiality of grease and pigment, David Hammons challenges the very medium of portraiture. His Untitled (circa 1970) resists conventional depictions of identity, offering instead an enigmatic interplay of texture and absence that critiques cultural and societal narratives, particularly as they relate to race in America. In making his body both the image and material of the work, David Hammons literally gives his viewers a reflection of his experience as a Black man in America. These themes continue in Untitled (SAMO) (1981) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. With its economy of means, Jean-Michel Basquiat conveys the reality of his place in American society and the visceral emotions that accompany it. His refusal to depict his true likeness in preference of a mask-like figure gets to the heart of self-portraiture’s role as a personal mode through which to explore identity, culture, and posit one’s own social commentaries. In making himself appear almost as an African mask, his experiences as a man of color in 1980s America act as proxy for the universal experiences of others like him.

Together, these artists reveal the self as a site of tension and transformation—a space where cultural, personal, and artistic identities collide and evolve. The works in Self-Portraits invite viewers to explore the shifting terrain of representation, where each artist unearths the essence of individuality within the universal human experience.

[1] Pablo Picasso quoted in Marie-Laure Bernadac, Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972 (London: Tate Publishing, 1988), 85.

[2] Francis Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 150.

SKARSTEDT PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

Andy Warhol @ Skarsted Gallery, Paris - Who is Who? An Exhibition about the Influences Art History had on Warhol’s Oeuvre

Andy Warhol: Who is Who?

Skarsted Paris

October 14 – December 21, 2024

Skarstedt presents Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, an exhibition that delves into the myriad influences art history had on Warhol’s oeuvre. This exhibition traces his art historical appropriations throughout the 1970s and 1980s, featuring seminal examples of works from series such as Heads (After Picasso), The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, After de Chirico, and The Scream (After Edvard Munch). By holistically examining Warhol’s dialogues with art history, Who is Who? offers new insight into Warhol’s interests: his relationship to icons, both religious and secular; his collapsing of the boundaries between high and low; his interest in mass reproduction; and his perceived place within this grand lineage. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication authored by Bernard Blistène. 

Warhol’s reinterpretations of iconic works simultaneously elevated their status even further while embedding himself into that place of prominence. As Germano Celant observes, “But the history of art is itself a concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too in the magma of his imagination…he turned [these artists] into dead flowers, so that the absolute subjectivity of art became once again a problem of media communication: a reproduction, cut and edited, with unnatural, technological colors.” In using the art of others to speak to contemporary themes, Andy Warhol likewise placed himself within the history of artists appropriating other artists, a theme which began with the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and continues today in artists such as Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman. 

No discussion of art historical lineage would be complete without an ode to Leonardo da Vinci, and no subject would better serve Warhol’s own interests in the iconic than the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was indeed one of Warhol’s earliest subjects, begun in 1963 following the painting’s celebrated visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was a sensation—a celebrity in its own right, not unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom he was also painting at the time. Warhol returned to the icon again in the 1970s in a suite of paintings that includes Mona Lisa Four Times (1973), a nuanced painting that not only exhibits his continued fascination with the subject, but highlights his more painterly experiments of the 1970s, its deep tones of black and brown anticipating the Reversals he would make at the end of the decade. 

Warhol’s religious background, which has only recently become a more prominent focal point in scholarship on the artist, is most directly acknowledged by Warhol himself in his works derived from Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Two examples of The Last Supper appears alongside Mona Lisa Four Times, one illustrating his silkscreened versions of the entirety of the composition, the other a hand-drawn intimate composition focusing entirely on the central Christ figure. In exhibiting two remarkably different examples from this series side-by-side, the viewer can glimpse the ways this particular image fueled Warhol’s many themes. The smaller, hand-drawn example not only exhibits Warhol’s newfound penchant for tracing silkscreened images onto his canvases—a practice he began around the time he started working with Jean-Michel Basquiat—but it provides a quietly tender, contemplative tone, a revelation of his own faith, and a rather vulnerable admission of his feelings in a chaotic and tragic 1980s. Meanwhile, the double silkscreened version of The Last Supper makes plain the notions of celebrity as culture that generated Warhol’s entire oeuvre. This series serves as a prelude to the artist’s own untimely death, encapsulating his fears and the collective grief of his community at that time, while revealing his secret faith. Using a copy of a copy of the original fresco, his choice of source echoes earlier works that explored how mass reproduction can alter our perception and emotional response to images, taking all that is perceived as good and holy within Christ and subverting him to illustrate all of the profane and horrible truths of the world. 

This pull towards the mystical and sacred extends even to Warhol’s secular art historical appropriations, as seen in The Two Sisters (After de Chirico) (1982). Using de Chirico’s 1962 painting of Orestes and Pylades as a reference, Andy Warhol infuses de Chirico’s interest in Greek mythology with his own fascination with the mythology of icons, be they historical figures, Hollywood celebrities, or quintessential pieces of Americana. Andy Warhol took up de Chirico as a reference point following the latter artist’s lauded 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which notably excluded much of de Chirico’s work due to its repetitive nature—an important element of both of their practices that Andy Warhol here nods to in the four-quadrant composition of The Two Sisters. 

Warhol’s fascination with religion, the afterlife, and legacy was bound up in fears of his own mortality, informed by his childhood illnesses, the loss of his father at a young age, and the attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas—all events for which similar threads can be found in the life and work of Edvard Munch. In The Scream (After Edvard Munch), Andy Warhol takes Munch’s most iconic image as an eerie kind of memento mori. Likewise, in his old age, Pablo Picasso became more and more focused on his own impending death, and in the 1960s created a series of skeletal drawings of heads, which Warhol used as the basis for a series of paintings. Head (After Picasso) (1985) is itself rendered on a black ground, allowing the sparse head to appear on top of the canvas, as if it was the face of vitality and life itself surging out from the darkness, facing death head-on, defiant and triumphant in its vividness before such darkness.  

For all of their myriad connecting influences and ideas, Warhol’s decision to paint each and every one of these works are to some degree a question of where he himself stands in relation to these other masters. Indeed, as he cheekily said in reference to Picasso, “When Picasso died, I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime, and I thought, ‘Gee, I could do that in a day.’” Although tongue-in-cheek, Warhol was ever the observer, keenly aware of status and legacy. Perhaps by getting closer to his own idols, he was able to further claim a spot for himself in their pantheon.  

SKARSTED PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris

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Eric Fischl @ Skarstedt Gallery Paris - "My Old Neighborhood" - Inaugural Exhibition of the Paris Gallery

Eric Fischl: My Old Neighborhood

Skarstedt Paris

October 18 - December 18, 2021

Skarstedt announced the inauguration of its new Paris gallery, renovated by Jacques Grange, at 2 Avenue Matignon with My Old Neighbourhood, the exhibition of recent paintings by Eric Fischl.

In My Old Neighborhood, Eric Fischl stages moments of human interactions set outdoors, on daylit sidewalks and front yards of suburban streets. One of the central themes in the artist’s oeuvre, the vision of American suburban life has fuelled some of his most resonant and provocative works. Here, Fischl’s protagonists are sharing moments of improbable intimacy and proximity in the public space - the realm, distinct from the sense of privacy permeating the artist’s earlier explorations of the other side of the American Dream. Engaged in personal reflections, the characters appear exposed, as if driven to the street by an unknown force. Houses and cars form a grid-like backdrop of angular colour fields yet look unused and detached from the scenes unfolding in the foreground. 

Constructing inexplicable emotional tension, Eric Fischl’s poignant compositions portray mundane scenes of a residential neighborhood which border on the sense of emergency.

Citizens of suburban dystopias, Fischl’s characters rarely make eye contact, struggling to connect with each other. Often shown naked amid clothed street observers, the figures project a sense of fragility and unease. In Private Property, an unclothed woman is confronted by policemen, the bright sunlight shimmering on the skin to exacerbate her defencelessness and the strangeness of the scene. In The Old Man Stays Behind, three masked individuals attend to the naked protagonist suggesting a promise of human connection, yet emphasising one’s feeling of vulnerability among others, transformed and heightened by the events of the past eighteen months.

Using photographs and collage as starting point, Eric Fischl constructs compositions which oscillate between collective dramas and individual renderings of human nature, pinpointing moments imbued with unresolved conflict and existential angst. Generating diverse narrative associations by juxtaposing various layers of signification, the works in My Old Neighborhood present affecting situations which retain a degree of uncertainty and evade direct social or political interpretation. As the artist explains: “I paint from a position of not knowing. I’m guided by association and intuition, and I am in search of an experience filled with meaning.” Capturing deeply personal reflections on American society today, the works are thus quasi-autobiographical, an aspect further highlighted by the title of the series.

Executed on large scale, the paintings envelop our visual field, triggering a visceral, almost bodily response which draws the viewer into the scene. In Cul de Sac, two figures turn towards the running woman from the extreme foreground of the composition, as if inviting us to enter the pictorial space and join them as characters of the script. Observing the woman as she runs to an apparent dead end, we feel involved but helpless, bewildered and acutely conscious of anxieties of the present moment. 

As Eric Fischl observes, “What you see in My Old Neighborhood are a series of scenes in which something inexplicable or surprising or irrational is taking place. In most of the paintings the audience is triangulated with male observers who are confused witnesses to the event. The audience shares their confusion and the feeling of being frozen in place by what is going on. When something occurs outside of the expected or hoped for and the nature of it strips you of your armour, this is the definition of tragedy. Ambiguity is at those moments the only way to process understanding.”

For the first time in Europe and with the support of the Louvre, Skarstedt also presents Eric Fischl’s sculpture titled Tumbling Woman, in the context of FIAC Hors Les Murs at Tuileries Gardens. The new series of paintings and this emblematic sculpture embody Fischl’s mastery in the representation of the human form. FIAC Hors Les Murs opens to the public on Tuesday 19th October and Tumbling Woman will be on view from 8th October - 20th November 2021.

SKARSTED PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

Juan Munoz, Sculptures at Skarstedt Gallery, NYC

Juan Munoz, Sculptures 

Skarstedt Gallery, New York

Through June 9, 2012

Sculptures by Juan Muñoz on view at Skarstedt Gallery in New York is comprised of a selection of the artist’s iconic sculptures from the 1980’s and 1990’s. 

Juan Muñoz belongs to a generation of artists that dominate contemporary figurative sculpture and installation. The artist regarded himself a “storyteller,” making his sculpture a means by which to tell his stories. Muñoz treated each installation as unique believing a different context gave the works new power and meaning. His reoccurring characters, the dwarfs, the Chinese figures, the people on the balconies perform as actors rather than individual sculptures. One of his main concerns throughout his career has been the interplay between the figure and the surrounding architecture. His work, and in particular his large-scale installations, explores just that. 

Many Times is a work that evolves out of Juan Muñoz’s “conversation pieces.” Similar figures were first seen in the Palacio de Velazquez in Madrid, for the centerpiece installation, Square (Madrid), as part of an exhibition Muñoz staged there in 1996. These almost life-size, foot-less figures stand on their cut-off trousers interacting with one another in varied postures of gesticulation and conversation. Despite their uniformity in clothing and facial expression, signifying the stereotypical Western view of different ethnic groups, in this case the Chinese, Muñoz is able to create an ongoing and ever-fluctuating narrative simply through the body language of his figures and in turn their own juxtaposition in space. 

Juan Muñoz was a master at breathing new life into old and stereotyped motifs exemplified in such works as the solitary Krefeld Dwarf. The simple human presence of a lone dwarf is rejuvenated and despite his small stature, he stands alone with such gravitas, reminiscent of the dwarfs in Las Meninas by Velazquez, one of Muñoz’s heroes. Informed by Velazquez’s work, Muñoz referenced the important role of the dwarf in the Spanish court of the time: "The dwarf was the only person that could criticize the court, because of his physical distortion, he was allowed to distort or exaggerate reality."

JUAN MUNOZ was born in Madrid in 1953. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include those at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, in 2009; Guggenheim Bilbao in 2008; Tate Modern, London, in 2008; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., in 2001; the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2001; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, in 1999. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1986, 1993, and 1997 and in Documenta IX in 1992 and Documenta XI in 2002. In 2000, he was presented with the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Spain's most prestigious art award. 

SKARSTEDT GALLERY

20 E 79 NYC 10075, USA

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