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02/11/25

Kader Attia @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - 'Shattering and Gathering our Traces' Exhibition

Kader Attia

Shattering and Gathering our Traces

Lehmann Maupin, New York

October 30 – December 13, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Shattering and Gathering our Traces, an exhibition of new work by French-Algerian artist KADER ATTIA, marking his first solo presentation in New York in over five years and the US debut of several new bodies of work. Featuring sculpture, installation, collage, and film, the exhibition bridges Attia’s long-standing engagement with repair, identity, and postcolonial critique with a new body of work centered around shattering and gathering. Across the exhibition, Attia seeks to reconstruct interpersonal connection and understanding by engaging viewers in a collective and poetic space. This exhibition comes on the heels of a string of institutional presentations around the world, including the solo exhibitions A Descent into Paradise, which traveled to MUAC in Mexico City and the Amparo Museum in Puebla, Mexico, and The Lost Paradise at CAAC Sevilla in Spain. Additionally, Kader Attia is currently included in the 36th São Paulo Biennial, entitled Not All Travelers Walk Roads / Of Humanity as Practice, on view through January 11, 2026. He recently served as an artist in residence at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, through the institution’s “Les Hôtes du Louvre” (The Hosts of the Louvre) program, where he maintained an on-site studio.

Kader Attia grew up between Bab el Oued, Algeria and the suburbs of Paris. Drawing from his experience of living within two disparate cultures, he has developed a complex, multi-media practice that examines the intricacies of social, historical, and cultural differences across the globe, demonstrating how individual and cultural identity is constructed within the context of political domination and conflict. Often using artifacts, discarded quotidian objects, and wartime ephemera to create poetic installations, Kader Attia transforms the space of a gallery into one of introspection, allowing the viewer to become aware of the complicated and often inaccurate depiction of our multiple histories.

Shattering and Gathering our Traces draws on Attia’s background in history and politics to speak to the reconstruction of identity within the structures of contemporary society. As with much of his work, Attia introduces sculptural interventions across the exhibition through the use of fragmented mirrors, interactive elements, and familiar objects like suitcases to turn his works into sites of self-reflection by implicating the viewer in their activation. Here, Attia focuses on gathering in response to shattering; specifically, the artist positions gathering as a means of collective identity building by resisting the lure of individualism enabled by an increasingly digital world. In particular, the works in Shattering and Gathering our Traces address our contemporary fixation with technology and social media, which creates digital crowds of countless isolated individuals under the guise of connection.

Resonance /ˈrezənən(t)s/ (noun):
Resonance describes the amplified vibration of a system when stimulated at its natural frequency, as well as the quality of a sound that is loud and clear, or a deep connection and shared understanding between people or ideas

Anchoring the exhibition is an interactive site-specific installation entitled Resonance (2025), which seeks to foster gathering as an individuating space of freedom. Filling the main gallery, numerous bird cages hang by slender rope from the ceiling, each at a different height and with a small bell inside. Additional pieces of bulky rope hang from the bottom of each birdcage, extending the installation to the floor. As viewers navigate the gallery and brush against or even pull on the lower ropes, the bells within each cage move and tinkle, filling the space with sound. In this way, Resonance brings viewers into the experience of art as a tangible interaction between their gaze and body and the artwork; they are invited to interact with the installation as subjects, both concretely and metaphorically. Each bird cage could refer to an isolated individual expressing themselves under the guise of freedom, yet barely audible when they all speak at once—a cacophony similar to social media. Indeed, when engaging on various digital platforms, users think they are communicating with the whole world, while in reality they are part of a small echo chamber filled with like-minded individuals, as explained by Cass Sunstein 20 years ago in his book Republic.com 2.0. The artwork Resonance creates a space of gathering that allows both escape from and criticism of the alienating grip of algorithmic governance and the isolation of digital social networks.

Meanwhile, in the film La Valise oubliée [The Forgotten Suitcase] (2024)—which is on view in Not All Travelers Walk Roads / Of Humanity as Practice, the 36th São Paulo Biennial—Kader Attia takes the suitcase as a dynamic metaphor for both past obscurities and future potentialities, playing with the idea of an unfinished narrative. Kader Attia unpacks archival materials (primarily Algerian War [1954-1962] memorabilia like letters, photographs, and journal entries) from three suitcases attributed to three individual stories that interweave threads of our collective history: those of French artist and Algerian sympathizer Jean-Jacques Lebel, feminist decolonial thinker Françoise Vergès, and Attia’s own mother. Through this act of gathering fragments, Kader Attia tells the story both of his family and of the countless, nameless men and women who resisted and organized in the shadows against colonialism.

Kader Attia transformed three similar suitcases into sculptural installation works, which provide a tangible experience of the powerful symbolic abstraction that these items have on our psyche. Each suitcase lays open and is filled with shards of broken glass, brightly illuminated in a manner that casts sparkling reflections onto the walls. In these sculptures, Attia invites viewers to gather around that which has been shattered—and that which reflects. The shattered mirrors and their reflections materialize the traces that the suitcases carry as memories. These mnemonic traces are at once abstract, diverse, and unpredictable—they are the ghosts that make us what we are, individually and collectively.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

05/09/25

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva @ Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - "Anatomy of Space" Exhibition

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Anatomy of Space

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

October 16, 2025 - February 22, 2026

An in-depth survey of the visual language of Portuguese-born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992), this exhibition traces key moments in her career from the 1930s to the late 1980s through eight thematic sections. Particular focus is placed on her exploration of architectural space, where she dissolved the boundaries between real and imaginary urban landscapes, moving beyond formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism.

The idea of space is a central theme in Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s work; her compositions, featuring labyrinthine structures, chromatic rhythms, and fragmented perspectives, capture the essence of a world in perpetual transformation.

Born in Lisbon, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva trained both there and in Paris. Influenced by her studies in sculpture and anatomy, as well as by the great masters of the past—particularly Paul Cézanne—and the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, she developed a distinctive pictorial idiom in which the physicality of space merges with the dimensions of time and memory.

Curator: Flavia Frigeri

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO | BILBAO, SPAIN

www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

04/09/25

Alexandre Diop @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - "Run For Your Life !" Exhibition

Alexandre Diop

Run For Your Life !

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

19 September - 1 November 2025

Alexandre Diop

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Run For Your Life !, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Franco-Senegalese artist ALEXANDRE DIOP. This marks the artist's debut show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in London.

Alexandre Diop’s powerful mixed-media works explore themes of history, metaphorical archaeology and socio-political change, with this body of work focusing on the relationship between movement and time, represented by dance or migration. The title of the exhibition, Run For Your Life !, is an invitation to stand for change, show tolerance, and be alert to crises around the world. Diop’s practice is interdisciplinary; his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist allows him to create artworks that transcend traditional paintings.

Physicality is central to the artist’s process. Diop’s rigorous approach to his work—which he refers to as object-images—combines found and recycled materials such as scrap metal, wood, leather, and textile remnants with classical techniques like oil painting. The materials are sourced from scrapyards, urban streets and derelict buildings, and then transformed through an intensive process of layering, burning, tearing, stapling and collaging onto wood panels. His material language, while firmly rooted in personal and political narratives, also engages with multiple art-historical lineages. His work draws from movements such as Dada, Art Brut, Expressionism and the Viennese Secession, while maintaining a strong dialogue with both West African aesthetic traditions and the visual codes of contemporary urban culture.

Alexandre Diop’s practice is anchored in drawing. He combines calligraphic strokes, symbols, and layered images that are painted, drawn, or sprayed. Figures— both human and animal—emerge from textured surfaces that blur the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and relief. Their stance recalls the awareness of a dancer, attuned to the body’s own rhythms. In this sense, the works look inward: they stage a dialogue between movement and stillness, surface and depth, becoming mirrors through which viewers may glimpse fragments of their own inner reality.

At the same time, Alexandre Diop’s work confronts the world beyond the self. It reflects on how individuals are bound by external forces—systems of illegality, oppression, and exclusion. In A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025, a central figure cries out yet remains unheard, embodying the suffocation of life within unjust structures. The work echoes the story of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who won Olympic gold in 1936 under Nazi rule, and becomes a call for freedom, justice, and resilience against overwhelming odds. Alexandre Diop constructs new worlds where historical, political, and social narratives unfold, offering his figures a space to resist, endure, and reimagine history.

Artist Alexandre Diop

Alexandre Diop is a Franco-Senegalese artist whose powerful, mixed-media works interrogate themes of ancestry, beauty, violence and social transformation. Drawing upon his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist, Alexandre Diop brings a multidisciplinary lens to his practice, crafting works that are deeply visceral and formally innovative. Alexandre Diop was born in Paris, France in 1995. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Alexandre Diop’s work has been the subject of major solo museum exhibitions. In 2023, his work was presented with 18th century anatomical wax models of bodies and body parts in Anatomie at Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria. His residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami culminated in a touring exhibition, Jooba Jubba, l’Art du Défi, the Art of Challenge, shown in Miami (2022) and Washington DC (2023). In 2022, Alexandre Diop exhibited alongside Kehinde Wiley in La Prochaine Fois, Le Feu, presented by Reiffers Art Initiatives in Paris.

Notable group exhibitions include Les Apparitions, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France (2025); De Sculptura, Albertina Klosterneuburg, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2025); The Beauty of Diversity, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2024); Being Mortal, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria (2023); The New African Portraiture, Shariat Collections, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria (2022); and Le Mouton Noir, Gesso Art Space, Vienna, Austria (2021).

Alexandre Diop’s works can be found in the collections of Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; AMA Venezia, Venice, Italy; AMOCA, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Espacio Tacuarí, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria; MB Collection, Germany; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC, USA; Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France; Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida and Washington DC, USA; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; Stora Wäsby Public Collection, Stockholm, Sweden and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA.

STEPHAN FRIEDMAN GALLERY LONDON

5-6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ

www.stephenfriedman.com

28/08/25

Marguerite Humeau @ ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj - "Torches" Exhibition

Marguerite Humeau: Torches

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj

Through 19 October 2025

Marguerite Humeau, 2024

Photography by Eoin Greally

Image courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

In the immersive exhibition Torches, French artist Marguerite Humeau creates a richly affective opera that spans across time and space, asking questions about our shared origins and alternative futures. Sound and light bring Humeau’s sculptures and installations to life, weaving a complex and evocative narrative. Her works incorporate many unconventional materials, including beeswax, wasp venom, yeast and cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae.

In the exhibition Torches, the internationally acclaimed French artist MARGUERITE HUMEAU (b. 1986) invites us to rethink our past, present and future here on Earth – and guides us through the darkness with her art. Conceived as an opera, the exhibition presents the artworks in an array of interlinked acts, using sound and light as mainstays of the other-worldly narratives that have won Marguerite Humeau international acclaim. She is also known for incorporating unusual materials in her art, with examples including hand-blown glass, waxed felt, laser-cut steel, silk, and even yeast. The exhibition at ARKEN also presents a work featuring an ecosystem of cyanobacteria that will continue to multiply during the exhibition run.

Curator Sarah Fredholm explains the exhibition title, Torches, by pointing out that ‘the works, embodying characters, are like torches in the dark. They point towards new connections between all living things across time and place and show us the way ahead,’ she says and continues:

‘Even though the point of departure of Marguerite Humeau’s work is our crisis-stricken planet, there is still hope to be found. Her art shows us that we can still find fresh starts and new beginnings; all we need to do is to imagine other ways of existing, ways that are more closely attuned to the rich variety of the rest of life on Earth.’

Marguerite Humeau

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau’s works ask thought-provoking questions: What if elephants had become the dominant species on Earth? What would the world look like if we co-operated like ants or bees? Or if life could only be sustained high up in the atmosphere? Torches shows us new perspectives to marvel at and possibly learn from.

Says curator Sarah Fredholm: ‘With her art, Marguerite Humeau offers up alternative narratives about possible ways of co-existing here on Earth; ways where humankind does not take centre stage and where the boundaries between lifeforms, time and place are fluid and open to renegotiation.’

For the first time ever, Torches brings together all-new and earlier works by Marguerite Humeau. It is also the artist’s first solo show in Scandinavia. Furthermore, Torches constitutes the third and final part of ARKEN’s exhibition series NATURE FUTURE, in which prominent figures on the international art scene focus on humanity’s relationship with art, nature and technology. The previous instalments in the series were Refik Anadol’s Nature Dreams (2023) and Julian Charrière’s Solarstalgia (2024–25).

Marguerite Humeau was born in 1986 in Cholet, France, and lives and works in London. She holds an MA (2011) from The Royal College of Art, London. Her past exhibitions include solo shows at ICA Miami (2024), Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2021), Kunstverein Hamburg (2019), Museion, Bolzano (2019), New Museum, New York (2018), Tate Britain, London (2017), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016).

The exhibition Torches is presented in co-operation with the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), where it will subsequently be shown.

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art

Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj

www.arken.dk

Marguerite Humeau: Torches

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, 22 May - 19 October 2025

26/07/25

The Monaco Masters Show: Chagall & Léger, la couleur et la forme @ Opera Gallery, Monaco

The Monaco Masters Show:

Chagall & Léger, la couleur et la forme

Opera Gallery, Monaco

Through 31 August 2025

Opera Gallery presents ‘The Monaco Masters Show: Chagall & Léger, la couleur et la forme’ a masters exhibition with a special focus on MARC CHAGALL (1887–1985) and FERNAND LEGER (1881–1955).

With 2025 marking the 40th anniversary of Chagall’s death and 70th anniversary of Léger’s death, this exhibition explores the parallel experiences and respective influences of both Chagall and Léger. From their crossover within the avant-garde scene in the Montparnasse neighbourhood of Paris in the early 20th century, to their overlapping exile to the United States during WWII, to eventually settling as residents in the South of France (Fernand Léger in Biot and Marc Chagall in Vence and then Saint-Paul-de-Vence), the exhibition further explores how their time in France–where both artist’s formal artistic journeys began and ended–made an indelible influence on art history.

Notably, both Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger used colour to underscore their distinctive approaches to modernism. Léger’s work frequently celebrated the technological developments of modern life through the use of bold, flat primary colours and a graphic, stylised approach–emphasising his fascination with industrialisation. With cubism as a point of departure, Léger’s early interpretations of the avant-garde movement became known as “Tubism”– characterised by mechanical, often cylindrical forms. In Nature morte aux trois papillons,1952, even Léger’s depiction of nature and organic forms takes on a technical quality–rendered in bold colours, framed by black contour lines.

Alternatively, Chagall’s colour palette was more fantastical–with lyrical compositions evocative of dreams, nostalgia and the intangibility of emotion. In Chagall’s Le Peintre, 1976, the composition is divided into four distinct quadrants of colour–red, yellow, green and blue. An artist is depicted in the foreground, surrounded by figures and imagery of a folkloric nature–two lovers, a cityscape of Paris, a rooster–that appear simultaneously weightless, symbolic and fleeting. Here, Chagall uses colour as an emotive tool in his depiction of an artist surrounded by visions and memories of people, places and things.

At the core, both Marc Chagall and Fernad Léger’s work can be seen as a celebration of humanity’s enduring spirit, with Léger taking an idealistic view to the collective–framing the human figure as an intrinsic component of the modern, technological world. Conversely, Chagall’s work embraced tradition and symbolism, taking a more mystical lens to personal narratives in his paintings. ‘The Monaco Masters Show: Chagall & Léger, la couleur et la forme’ explores the broad range of existential themes that Chagall and Léger were exploring that continue to resonate today.

Additionally, the exhibition features a wider presentation of nearly thirty 20th and 21st century masterworks from artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fernando Botero, Alexander Calder, George Condo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Soulages, Manolo Valdés, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann.

OPERA GALLERY MONACO

1 avenue Henri Dunant, Palais de la Scala, 98000 Monaco

www.operagallery.com

The Monaco Masters Show: Chagall & Léger, la couleur et la forme

Opera Gallery, Monaco, 4 July - 31 August 2025

04/07/25

Renoir Drawings @ The Morgan, NYC - Exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and pastels of the French Master of Impressionism

Renoir Drawings

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

October 17, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879

Pastel on Ingres paper

The Albertina Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection, DL535

While the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) have become icons of Impressionism, his drawings, watercolors, and pastels are far less widely known. In fact, drawing remained central to his artistic practice even as his interests and ambitions changed over the course of a long career. This exhibition explores the ways in which Auguste Renoir used paper to test ideas, plan compositions, and interpret both landscape and the human figure.

Thematic sections cover the full span of the artist’s career, ranging from academic studies he made as a student, to on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life, to finished, formal portraits, to intimate sketches of friends and family completed late in life. In-depth case studies of favored themes and preparatory work for landmark canvases further illuminate Renoir’s practice of drawing.

Inspired by the major gift to the Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers, this exhibition is the first in a century to explore the artist’s works on paper in depth. Organized by the Morgan Library Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Renoir Drawings brings together nearly one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and a small selection of paintings, enabling visitors to engage with Renoir’s creative process while offering insights into his artistic methods over five decades.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director, and Sarah Lees, Research Associate.

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016

www.themorgan.org

17/06/25

Nathalie Du Pasquier Exhibition @ Nivola Museum, Orani, Italy

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Volare Guardare Costruire

Museo Nivola, Orani

May 17 – September 14, 2025

Portrait of Nathalie Du Pasquier

Photo by Ilvio Gallo

Museo Nivola presents Volare Guardare Costruire (to fly, to look, to build), a site-specific project by Nathalie Du Pasquier, a French artist and designer based in Milan.

Conceived especially for the museum’s spaces, the exhibition takes the form of a retrospective dedicated to the artist’s painting production from her beginnings to the present day. At the same time, it is an environmental installation that merges painting, architecture, and design. The exhibition unfolds through a series of structures designed by the artist, transforming the museum into a space to walk through, explore, and inhabit.

The exhibition thus initiates a dialogue between the artist’s ephemeral architectures and the historical structure of the building – the former washhouse of Orani, now the beating heart of Museo Nivola.

Inside these “rooms” and on the walls of the museum are works created from the 1980s to today, which tell the story of the evolution of Du Pasquier’s visual language: a lexicon made of figuration and abstraction, in which human figures and the narrative dimension gradually give way to the theme of still lifes, made of simple and everyday objects, which delicately evoke the human presence, and then again to geometric shapes and abstract constructions. The whole is bathed in a midday light that gives the paintings a metaphysical air, almost as if we were in front of modern versions of Morandi’s canvases or, in other ways, of the purist ones of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant.

The title, Volare Guardare Costruire, refers to three phases of Nathalie Du Pasquier’s pictorial production. Volare (to fly) evokes the moment of detachment from the design of design objects towards the freer practice of painting. And it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the works of this phase present scenes seen from above, with a bird’s eye view, a symbol of the power of the imagination, of its ability to soar high and expand freely.

Guardare (to look) refers to a second phase, to the need to abandon purely imaginative scenes to dedicate oneself to a quiet and precise observation of reality, even of the most everyday and apparently insignificant objects, which instead reveal to an interested gaze, extraordinary forms, precious details and the ability to understand within oneself the complexity of existence. They are visions that the artist defines as “very silent and very still”, which invite one to rediscover the pleasure of the sensitive world through silent and attentive observation.

Dissatisfied, at times, with the sensible appearance of reality, Nathalie Du Pasquier finally dedicates herself to Costruire (to build), creating original structures, small three-dimensional abstract constructions that are then portrayed with the brush, brought back to the two-dimensional plane of her canvases. Thus, she triggers a complex dynamic between reality and representation, which is a wonderful metaphor for painting.

With this exhibition, the Nivola Museum confirms its commitment to promoting the dialogue between art, design and architecture, offering an immersion in the visionary world of an artist who continues to reinvent the rules of seeing and building.

Nathalie Du Pasquier (Bordeaux, 1957) moved to Milan in 1979. Co-founder of the Memphis collective, since the mid-1980s she has devoted herself mainly to painting, developing an unmistakable visual universe where formal research combines with a profound reflection on space and perception. Her works have been exhibited at Villa Noailles Hyères (Toulon, France), Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, Denmark), GFZT Museum of Contemporary Art (Leipzig, Germany), Camden Arts Center (London), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and MACRO in Rome.

Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Luca Cheri

NIVOLA MUSEUM

MUSEO NIVOLA

Via Gonare 2 08026 Orani

museonivola.it

22/04/25

Ceramist Alain Vernis @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - "Black" Exhibition

Alain Vernis | Black

HdM Gallery, Beijing

9 April - 10 May 2025

HdM Gallery and Luohan Tang present Black, a solo exhibition by artist ALAIN VERNIS. The exhibition features over a dozen ceramic bowls, focusing on the artist’s exploration and enlightement of ceramics over the years.

Alain Vernis: The charm of simplicity

Alain Vernis's works are mainly pottery bowls. Since he set up his studio in the Haut-Morvan in 1985, he has started to make pottery with local clay. Alain Vernis didn’t learn from a master, he relied on his own exploration from kiln construction to firing. The primitive pit that he used then caused all of the pieces, shaped over ten years, to explode. He had no choice but to give up pit firing and build a new kiln. After years of adjustments, he came to discover the effects of diverse combinations of clay, water, duration of firing, type of wood. Black was once used by Taoism to discribe the invisible and intangible universe, “Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding. ” Darkness presents color and also the profoundness of Taoism. Alain Vernis uses black extensively in his works, shaping through “renouncement” and firing with “naturalness” . The combination of shape and glaze color explains the charm of simplicity.

Alain Vernis: Deep connection with Raku-yaki technique

The famous Raku-yaki technique of the Momoyama period in Japan in the 16th century is characterized by simplicity and naturalness. The seemingly "imperfect" works break the traditional aesthetic system of symmetry and glaze perfection, which is similar to Alain Vernis's works. Starting with a handful of clay, Alain focuses his perception on his hands and slowly kneads the bowl into shape, combining the beauty of form with the beauty of spirit. The surface of the bowl is either smooth or rough, with the glaze color bolding, and even natural flow appears. However, it was not until the 15th generation of Raku-yaki master invited him to Japan that he realized that he had such a deep connection with those masters of several centuries ago.

Alain Vernis was born in Sens, France in 1946 and currently lives and works in Morvan. His works have been exhibited in art institutions such as the Biracte Archaeological Museum in Burgundy, Guardian Art Center in China and Musée d‘art Moderne, Musée national de la Céramique, Musée de Bibracte, Musée Asrien Dubouché, Musée Bernard Palissy, Musée de Sarreguemines, Musée Joseph Séchelette in France.

HdM GALLERY

798 East Road, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

hdmgallery.com

13/03/25

Gauguin & Kihara @ Glyptotek, Copenhagen - "Gauguin & Kihara – First Impressions" Exhibition

Gauguin & Kihara – First Impressions

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

8 May, 2025 - 6 December 2026

Paul Gauguin

Vahine no te Tiare. Woman with the Flower, 1891

MIN 1828 © Glyptoteket

Paul Gauguin

Arearea no Varua ino. The Amusement of the Evil Spirit, 1894

MIN 1832 © Glyptoteket

Throughout his career, Paul Gauguin pursued the ideal conditions for life as an artist. Yet wherever he went, reality seldom lived up to his expectations. When reality fell short, however, imagination was given free rein in his artistic worlds. This is the starting point for the Glyptotek’s upcoming collection presentation, Gauguin & Kihara – First Impressions, which also features an important new acquisition grappling explicitly with Gauguin’s work.

The Glyptotek holds one of the world’s finest collections of works by the French artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). In recent years, many of the museum’s 58 Gauguin pieces—including paintings, woodcarvings, drawings and ceramics—have been on loan to renowned museums across the globe. Now, they return home to be shown together in a presentation, opening on 8 May, offering new perspectives on Gauguin’s well-known works.

This spring, the Gauguin collection is joined by the Japanese-Sāmoan contemporary artist Yuki Kihara (b. 1975) and her video work First Impressions: Paul Gauguin, recently acquired by the museum. Together, their works open a dialogue across time, cultural divides and vast oceanic distances.

Paul Gauguin

Landscape from Brittany with Breton Women, 1888

MIN 1826 © Glyptoteket

Paul Gauguin

Shepherdess from Brittany, 1889

MIN 1827 © Glyptoteket

Paul Gauguin: The eternal pursuit

Gauguin’s futile search for the ideal conditions for an artist’s life took him from Paris to Copenhagen, through Normandy, Brittany and Arles, and onwards to the then-French colonies of Martinique, Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. When reality proved disappointing, he let his imagination run free, creating artistic worlds on his own terms. ‘Who cares about accuracy!!’ he declared. The Glyptotek delves not only into this artistic journey but also into the physical, political and historical contexts that shaped it, examining how Gauguin depicted the places and cultures he encountered along the way.

Paul Gauguin

Skaters in Frederiksberg Garden, 1884

MIN 3213 © Glyptoteket

“Gauguin moved through the world in a way not unlike today’s tourists. Like the traveller who crops out souvenir stalls from their holiday photos and seeks out restaurants touted as “hidden gems” in various guidebooks, Gauguin pursued the idea of authenticity, often viewing his destinations through the lens of existing narratives and images. Having spent nearly a decade in the South Pacific, Gauguin may have lived too long in the region to be called a tourist, but this comparison opens a conversation in which Gauguin’s works are not solely a matter of his distinctive colours, uniform surfaces and bold contours. They also offer insight into the cultural, political and social contexts in which they were created, challenging us still today to reflect on our own time. Through what lens do we, as modern-day tourists and cultural consumers, view the world?” says Anna Kærsgaard Gregersen, curator of the French collection at the Glyptotek.

The collection presentation will be shown in the Henning Larsen building, which will, in coming years, house an extensive selection of the Glyptotek’s French collections. This initiative is part of the museum’s commitment to strengthening the presentation of French art and culture, its collection being among the most significant in the Nordic region.

Yuki Kihara: Striking new acquisition

Yuki Kihara (b. 1975)

First Impressions Paul Gauguin, 2018

the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,

the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen and Milford Galle

The Glyptotek has acquired a contemporary artwork that offers a modern interpretation of one of Western art history’s most iconic—and most controversial—artists. The new acquisition, and the museum’s first video work, First Impressions: Paul Gauguin (2018), is by the Japanese-Sāmoan contemporary artist Yuki Kihara.

The video work was co-commissioned by the Glyptotek and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It was previously shown as part of the Glyptotek’s special exhibition Paul Gauguin – Why Are You Angry? (2020), which later toured to Alte Nationalgalerie (2022). That same year, the work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale, where Kihara represented Aotearoa New Zealand. Now, the work returns to the Glyptotek as a newly conceived installation and permanent part of the museum’s collection.

“I remember thinking how strange it was to be in front of [Paul Gauguin’s] paintings, as if time and space had collapsed. Here we were as artists from two different parts of the world having a dialogue in two different moments in history,” says Yuki Kihara, reflecting on her first real encounter with Gauguin’s works.

Presented in the format of a talk show, the video work features a host and panel who are shown reproductions of Gauguin paintings from Tahiti (including two from the museum’s own collection), after which they share their first impressions. As the conversation unfolds, Gauguin fades into the background, giving way to the participants’ own perspectives and speculative stories about the paintings’ models.

Both Yuki Kihara and the talk show participants belong to the Fa’afafine and Fa’atama communities, the Sāmoan counterparts to Māhū, a Tahitian term referring to individuals endowed with spiritual gifts from more than one gender. In colonial times, the Māhū were banned by missionaries, but researchers believe that several of Gauguin’s figures may depict Māhū—a theory also discussed among the panel.

“With humour and gravity, Kihara directs the colonial gaze back towards the West, reclaiming her community’s power to shape their own narrative. This acquisition initiates vital conversations across time and place, holding the museum and Western art history accountable, and challenging us to acknowledge historical nuance and the contemporary voices traditionally excluded from discussions surrounding Gauguin’s complex oeuvre,” explains Anna Kærsgaard Gregersen.

YUKI KIHARA (b. 1975) is a Japanese-Sāmoan interdisciplinary artist based in Sāmoa. Her practice seeks to challenge one-sided historical narratives through performance, sculpture, video, photography and curatorial practice. With a particular focus on postcolonial narratives and representation in Oceania, she explores issues of race, gender, power and cultural appropriation. Yuki Kihara represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) with Paradise Camp, and she has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide, including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Powerhouse Museum and the Sainsbury Centre. Her works are found in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Australia and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Dantes Plads 7 • 1556 Copenhagen

www.glyptoteket.com

11/03/25

Jean Dubuffet @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "The Hourloupe Cycle" Major Exhibition

Jean Dubuffet

The Hourloupe Cycle

Pace Gallery, New York

March 13 – April 26, 2025

Pace Gallery presents a major exhibition of works from Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated Hourloupe cycle. On view at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street location in New York, the exhibition has been conceived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fondation Dubuffet last year.

It brings together a selection of important paintings, sculptures, and architectural models from public and private collections, including the monumental canvas Nunc Stans—among the largest paintings that Jean Dubuffet ever created—on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

One of the great innovators of post-war European painting, Jean Dubuffet looked to the margins of society—to the art of outsiders, mediums, the incarcerated, and the institutionalized—to liberate his own creativity. He coined the term “Art Brut” to describe the raw aesthetic of such outsiders, challenging the conventions of the period. Ahead of his time as both an artist and a philosopher, Dubuffet’s works posed fundamental questions about the nature of reality, leaving an indelible mark on the history of Modernism.

With the Hourloupe, Jean Dubuffet used his practice as a means to reinvent the everyday in an alternate world. He posited the parallel universe of the Hourloupe, which the viewer was invited to imaginatively inhabit, to critique the consensus of reality—as if one might step through a portal in the humdrum existence of waking life into an alternative space of fantasy and possibility. Pace gallery’s exhibition in New York showcases the dictionary of biomorphic forms that Jean Dubuffet invented as part of the Hourloupe’s visual language of experience and sensation. Charting the artist’s use of a recurring alphabet of forms across painting, sculpture, and architecture, the show reflects his lifelong effort to disrupt and refashion our modes of perception.

The Hourloupe cycle was the longest lasting series of Dubuffet’s career, comprising works created between 1962 and 1974. Pace, which has represented the artist since 1967, was the first American gallery to exhibit sculptures from L’Hourloupe in its inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work in 1968. A foundational figure in the gallery’s history, Jean Dubuffet has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions at Pace over the course of seven decades.

The Hourloupe style emerged in the early 1960s from Dubuffet’s Paris Circus period, the result of casual experiments with felt-tip markers. Creating absent-minded doodles in red, black, and blue pen while chatting on the telephone, Jean Dubuffet arrived at a visual language resembling a web of meandering lines. These lines create interlocking shapes of negative space, which lock together like puzzle pieces. Over the course of more than ten years, he produced some of his best-known drawings, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale public environments in this style, comprising the cycle known as L’Hourloupe.

Anchoring Pace’s presentation is Nunc Stans (1965), a 26-foot-long painting on loan from the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the first time. This masterpiece of L’Hourloupe contains an inventory of characters and forms that recur throughout the cycle and the exhibition. The work’s title refers to the philosophical concept of eternity—the notion that there is no such thing as past and present, but only an eternal ‘now.’

“If Dubuffet teaches anything, it is that there are no conclusions, and no true beginnings,” the late critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed. “There is only the middle, the presentness of life.”

The exhibition also includes the 1966 painting Fusil Canardier, in which Jean Dubuffet reimagines a punt gun as an animated creature, suggesting the metamorphic powers of L’Hourloupe to render alive what was previously inanimate. This uncanniness is reflected in the more figurative sculptures from the cycle, three of which are on view at Pace exhibition. In these large-scale works, including L'Incivil (1973–2014) and Le Facetieux (1973–2014), faces and limbs are abstracted and contorted but, like Fusil Canardier, retain a sense of anatomical familiarity.

Sculpture and architecture were central to Dubuffet’s process in the Hourloupe cycle. He realized his sculptural works first in polystyrene, which he produced by cutting through the material with a hot wire, creating maquettes for forms that would then be realized at a larger scale. The exhibition at Pace features Banc-Salon (1974–2024), a hybrid between a sculpture and an architectural bench, on which visitors are welcomed to sit beneath a sculptural cloud suspended from above. The show also includes the original nine-by-12-foot model of Dubuffet’s monumental, habitable environment, the Jardin d'email (1968), which the artist realized for grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands in 1974 and remains on view today. These works are presented with two wall-mounted ceramic compositions from 1965, as well as Comptoir amoncelant (1968), a still life of a food-laden counter. Together, these works express the artist’s aim to transpose domestic and quotidian scenes from our reality into the parallel universe of L'Hourloupe.

Pace’s exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet. Founded by the artist himself, the Fondation Dubuffet’s mission is to protect and promote the work of Jean Dubuffet.

JEAN DUBUFFET

Jean Dubuffet (b. 1901, Le Havre, France; d. 1985, Paris) believed that art must be part of ordinary life and sought artistic authenticity outside of established conventions and an annihilation of hierarchical values. Jean Dubuffet looked to the margins of the everyday—the art of incarcerated and institutionalized people, mediums, and isolated provincials—to liberate his own creativity, coining the term “art brut.” His interest in the tactile possibilities of abstract art, its texture and materiality, evolved early on with the use of media such as sand, glass, and tar—an employment of matter that characterized his work as well as the Art Informel movement of the 1940s and 50s. In keeping with his exploration of the quotidian, his use of line and color was redefined in his mature work of the 60s, dominated by his renowned Hourloupe series, the longest cycle of artwork in the artist’s oeuvre, which spanned twelve years from 1962 to 1974. Jean Dubuffet maintained an active career in his later years, prolifically creating paintings, works on paper, and monumental sculpture.

Jean Dubuffet’s work has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions throughout the world, including over thirty traveling exhibitions. He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas (1966); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1973, 1981); Kunst Foreningen Copenhagen (1988); National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan (1998); and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Deoksugung, South Korea (2006). Notable recent exhibitions include Metamorphoses of Landscape, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2016); Drawings, 1935–1962, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2016); The Photographic Tool, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (2018); Le Voyageur sans boussole, Centre Pompidou, Málaga, Spain (2018); L’arte in gioco. Matière e spirito 1943–1985, Fonazione Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2018); Jean Dubuffet and Venice, Palazzo Franchetti-Cavalli, Venice (2019); Jean Dubuffet, Barbican Art Centre, London (2020–2021); Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration, Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain (2022); and Jean Dubuffet. Rebonds: From One Work to Another, Fondation Dubuffet, Paris (2023–2024).

Jean Dubuffet’s work is held in over sixty public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London, among many others

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

14/02/25

Sophie Calle Exhibition @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Sophie Calle

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition by Sophie Calle. For more than forty years Calle has made work that draws from her life, transforming elements from her public and private relationships into intimate narratives. The exhibition features several series exploring questions about legacy and loss, topics Sophie Calle approaches with her typical humor and candor. Making its U.S. debut, catalogue raisonné of the unfinished focuses on projects Sophie Calle previously conceptualized but didn’t pursue. Each piece pairs fragments from the project with Calle’s text about its failure. Another series, Picassos in lockdown, comprises photographs Sophie Calle made at the Musée National Picasso in Paris during the pandemic. Each shows a painting covered for protection while the museum was closed. The exhibition also features a selection of works looking at death and remembrance through the lens of Calle’s relationship with her parents. This is Sophie Calle’s fifth exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, since 1994.

The series catalogue raisonné of the unfinished collects photographs, handwritten notes, comic books, and other documents, each paired with a short text describing the artwork Sophie Calle had originally imagined and how it came to (not) be. A red stamp across each text pronounces her reason for rejecting the work. The projects range from Calle’s request for museum visitors to propose ideas for her to enact (“Not exhilarating”), to an attempt to insert herself into a Mexican comic book collection that included the word “Calle” in the title (“Anecdotal”). Together, the series presents a sort of self-imposed salon des refusés, revealing glimpses of Calle’s process and celebrating the transformation of many dead ends into a final positive form.

In 2023, Musée National Picasso presented a solo exhibition of Calle’s work, timed to the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. The deliberately retrospective exhibition, titled À toi de faire, ma mignonne, (“It’s up to you, my darling”) included photographs Sophie Calle made while the museum was closed during the pandemic, recording the cloth and paper coverings that shielded Picasso’s paintings from light and dust. Sophie Calle has described her encounter with the paintings: “The Picassos were under protection, wrapped up, hidden. Underneath — a ghostlike, less intimidating presence,” she writes. Titled after the works they conceal, the photographs in Picassos in lockdown encourage the viewer to recall the original painting.

A third gallery presents selections from Autobiographies and other elegiac, family-focused works, pairing photographs and texts in frames or urn-like wooden boxes. In Autobiographies (Morning), Sophie Calle awaits her father’s last words, while Autobiographies (My Mother Died) reproduces notes about death from Calle’s diary and her mother’s. A glass-fronted box titled Necrology presents the obituary Sophie Calle commissioned for herself, hidden behind pinned butterflies to remain unreadable. The piece incorporates Calle’s commentary about her decision to obscure the writing: “So as not to attract too much attention from death, I decided it was best to cover up what I did not want to read,” she notes. In these and other works, Sophie Calle addresses her own mortality with characteristic honesty and wit, taking on the question of how we remember and are in turn remembered.

Sophie Calle was recently featured in Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Absences: Sophie Calle & Toulouse-Lautrec at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo. Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Finir en Beauté (Neither Give Nor Throw Away), held in the cryptoporticus at Arles as part of the photography festival Rencontres d’Arles in France. Her work has been shown in museums around the world and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London, among many others. Sophie Calle is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Praemium Imperiale Award in 2024, as well as the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

28/05/24

Artist Ana Karkar @ Almine Rech London - "Whole Cookie" Exhibition

Ana Karkar: Whole Cookie

Almine Rech London

May 30 — July 27, 2024

Almine Rech London presents Ana Karkar's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Whole Cookie.

The exhibition unveils a new series of figurative paintings by the French-American artist, in addition to an installation piece comprised of video, sculpture and literature. Composed as a temple to eroticism, it explores and universalises the many complex paradoxes of Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of both love and war, as well as fertility and sensuality. As the goddess of paradox, Ishtar is the model of unity in multiplicity.

Each of us reflects some of her discordance in ourselves, and this exhibition, Whole Cookie, explores how we strive to gather these conflicting parts into a semblance of order. Ishtar’s polarities and contradictions feed the creative spirit, but they also provoke insecurity and disruption. She represents chaos, going against order and principle, however this also opens up to possibility and potential. The destructive and harsh in balance with the empowering and transformative; society coexisting side by side with the cosmic.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are faced with the painted image of a sphinx, the guardian of the temple – and its riddle:

MINA (reads): ‘Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permissions of another’?

SPHINX: It’s a Madonna quote. From ‘Justify My Love’… Can we call room service?

MINA: Gosh, yes, I remember the video. Rather a Helmut Newton pornographic soiree situation.

SPHINX: So sick, yeah. I think I was conceived to that, maybe? (Laughs) In the desert.

MINA: Your father was a lion and your mother was an eagle owl— correct?

[Excerpt from an accompanying text written by Charlie Fox]

In Ana Karkar’s method of seeing others in the show exploring the interaction between humans and hybrid figures. Her gestural work is imbued with colour relationships, as expressed by a vibrant palette in which her bodies are twisted and blended in a dance macabre that evoke the work of Egon Schiele.

Ana Karkar’s work is influenced by cinematography and images in the collective unconscious, especially horror and erotic movies. Filmic elements are often noted in her paintings, however for this show, for the first time Karkar is exhibiting film work, in the video piece Queen of the Night in relation to her painting. This then takes its title from a particular terracotta relief from the Old Babylonian period, from Mesopotamia (now at the British Museum). Pervaded by ancient symbolism alongside post-Punk elements and underground culture references, the film tells the story of the divinely complex marriage of Ishtar and Dumuzi and is set to the soundtrack of Berlin-based band Noj remixed to the Witch house genre.

Like an altar, the film is presented as the backdrop to Karkar’s own sculpture of a goddess, subversively titled Queen of the Nightlife, under whose feet is positioned a text written by Karim Massoteau, MY ANGER, A HARROW WITH GREAT TEETH, HAS TORN THE MOUNTAIN APART, folded and marked ‘REUNIFICATION IN PROCESS’. Visitors can take a copy of this text with them as they leave the altar.

“Now clad in terror, opening her chest, she demands the destruction of the mountain but is met only with resounding silence.

Whiffs of Cypress and Cedar are smelled.

Fist clenched, she then summons all life in her body and weaves a storm, fury assembles in her heart, her folds, her veins, her very blood, and lava dribbling from her lips, unleashes the shockwaves of her orgasm all around.

She blows one blast of pitiless, pulsing, stroboscopic, energy.”

[An excerpt from Karim Massoteau's text]

Ana Karkar, via Ishtar, is insisting we face our shadowy contradictions. That we acknowledge who we are, in all our painful and wonderful complexity. At the same time, she steps forward to do the same.

ALMINE RECH LONDON

Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, W1K 3JH London

www.alminerech.com

25/05/24

Henri Cartier-Bresson @ Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg - "Watch! Watch! Watch!" Exhibition

Watch! Watch! Watch!

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg

15 June - 22 September 2024

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Henri Matisse at Home, Vence, France, 1944

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Srinagar, Cachemire, India, 1948

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Washington, United States, 1957

The Bucerius Kunst Forum is dedicating the first major retrospective in Germany since 20 years ago to the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). Divided into several chapters, the exhibition presents Cartier-Bresson’s portraits of well-known artists and writers alongside his early, Surrealism-influenced photographs and films, as well as his later observations of everyday human behaviour. With 230 black-and-white photographs as well as articles from magazines and books, the show covers Henri Cartier-Bresson’s life work, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century.

A co-founder of the Magnum photo agency, Cartier-Bresson was one of the century’s most famous photographers. As a photojournalist, art photographer and portraitist, he created timeless compositions that would shape the style of generations of photographers to come. His expressive art was seminal in particular for the genre of Street Photography. An unerring sense for the “decisive moment” in spontaneous encounters and situations was the hallmark of his works, many of them icons of modern photography.

Cartier-Bresson already acquired his first camera in 1932, a Leica 35mm, and he began to experiment with the medium. The resulting early Surrealist works as well as a selection of his films open the retrospective. They are followed by his well-known photo features and portraits of artists and cultural figures as well as his iconic images capturing spontaneous interpersonal encounters.

Born in 1908, Henri Cartier-Bresson lived nearly to the ripe age of 96, having experienced the entire twentieth century and chronicling what he saw in his photographs. As an eyewitness, he documented a number of major historical and political events. The exhibition presents as examples his photos of the coronation of the British King George VI in London in 1937, the liberation of Paris in 1944, Germany after the end of the war in 1945, the funeral of Gandhi in 1948, the end of Kuomintang rule in China in 1948, Russia after the death of Stalin in 1954, Cuba after the missile crisis in 1963 and the long-term studies he made in France.

Henri Cartier-Bresson cultivated long-standing friendships in the world of art and culture, from which he drew lasting inspiration for his artistic work. His intimate portraits of artists, writers and photographers such as Coco Chanel, Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Matisse form an important part of his oeuvre and are on view in the exhibition.

In addition, the show also includes a selection of Street Photography depicting everyday personal interactions, both at work and at leisure. These images illustrate the signature element in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs: the close observation and simultaneous analysis of human behaviour in spontaneous moments. Camera in hand, he deliberately sought out encounters with his contemporaries, capturing patterns of behaviour and snapping fleeting scenes that would otherwise have been lost in the hustle and bustle of the streets.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was long active in the communist movement, which would have a lasting impact on his political and artistic views. This was the source, for example, of his keen interest in portraying socially marginalised people. Key events in his life, such as his time spent as a German prisoner of war during the Second World War, along with several attempts to escape and his involvement in the resistance movement against the Nazis, motivated his commitment to documentary photography. With the founding of the Magnum photo agency in 1947, together with Robert Capa, Chim Seymour and George Rodger, his photo features took on an increasingly professional look. In the decades that followed, Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled to several continents on behalf of magazines and newspapers including “Life”, “Paris Match” and “The New York Times Magazine”. His photo features thus made their way around the world in millions of copies. In the exhibition, the original photographs are displayed alongside their reproductions in magazines.

A catalogue is being published by Hirmer-Verlag to accompany the show, with essays by Nadya Bair, Kathrin Baumstark, Clément Chéroux, Ulrich Pohlmann, Valérie Vignaux and Deborah Willis.

An exhibition of the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, and the Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, in co-operation with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

BUCERIUS KUNST FORUM, HAMBURG

Alter Wall 12, 20457 Hamburg

www.buceriuskunstforum.de

11/05/24

Artist Chloé Peytermann @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Bark or the Poney" Exhibition of Ceramic Sculpture

Chloé Peytermann: Bark or the Poney

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

10 May - 9 June 2024

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

Blue Love, 2024

Ceramic, 10 x 5 ½ inches

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

The Boat, 2024

Ceramic, 5 ¼ x 7 ½ inches

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

The Hug, 2024

Ceramic, 7 ½ x 3 ¼ inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY (formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery) presents The Bark or the Poney, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture by French artist CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN.

“It's hard for me to give up images / I need the plowshare to go through me / Mirror of winter, of age / I need to be seeded by time.”

- Philippe Jaccottet

Citing the a poem by Swiss Francophone poet and translator Jaccottet, Chloé Peytermann also wrote the following about this solo exhibition, her first with Maya Frodeman Gallery:

“Recently, in the workshop and in my hands, things took a surprising turn, and I was the first to be surprised.It was a turn towards a form of figuration, or an abstraction becoming figurative. Human characters and animals, often fanciful, shaped at speed, the fruit of an inspired gesture, in search of a fleeting emotion or a meaningful movement. Moments of tenderness, of doubt, of strangeness, of promise, are frozen, as it were, in the fired clay and the matte surface of the glaze. In these small paradoxical objects is an expression which swells up as it is pared down; waiting for its emergence, I stay somehow aloof, without feeling proud. The glaze is their skin, the ceramic material is there in all its power, revealing the spontaneity of touch, containing the form within a gentleness which holds on to time. Immutable snapshots of an instant, these clay sketches have found an anchor, taken their place and formed a society. They are characters looking at us and questioning us in our own epoch, but issued from a distant and legendary past. They seem to have withdrawn from our noisy world. They are waiting. Their melancholy is turning into a call.”

Chloé Peytermann captures human moments and connections in the form of enchanting ceramic figurines. These figures hint at humanity, but are never fully identifiable as man, animal, object, or something in between. Yet, they are embodiments of uniquely human emotions; moments of tenderness, doubt, strangeness, and promise become frozen in the firing of her beautiful enamel work. Often vaguely anthropomorphic, the figures are still, silent, and at times seemingly stuck, as if waiting for something, the zenith of the moment so whimsically captured.

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN graduated in 2006 with a diploma in ceramic design. Chloé Peytermann’s work is exhibited in many galleries in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Her work is also part of the permanent collection of the Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass in Geneva and the Atelier de Kahla collection. In 2010, Chloé Peytermann won the Kahla Kreativ competition. She has presented her work in many contemporary ceramic fairs internationally, notably in South Corea. Chloé Peytermann lives and works in Dieulefit, France.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com