Exhibitions
Paris Gallery Weekend 2019
Our highlights from the exhibitions opening this weekend
VNH Gallery | Candida Höfer, Faces des Espaces
A spectacular exhibition of new works offering us a journey through the history of Parisian architecture while emphasizing the stylistic characteristics of each construction, each emblematic of a particular period. As we have come to expect, Höfer maintains both her documentary fastidiousness for and profound interest in buildings’ exterior and interior architecture. An array of built masterpieces is presented, each of them chronicled with the clear and unflinching eye of one of photography’s great masters. Until June 15th
Perrotin | Jean-Michel Othoniel, Oracles
For this exhibition, which brings together fifteen minimalistic, enigmatic sculptures made of glass or metal bricks, the artist has systematized the use of a module that entered his work in 2009, after a journey to India. On the road from Delhi to Firozabad, a city with an age-old glassmaking tradition, he was struck by the stacks of bricks accumulated by people in the hope of building a house, and by the countless altars covered in offerings and multicoloured necklaces. Since then, he has called on the knowledge of Indian glassblowers to blow blue, amber, yellow and grey glass bricks. Othoniel has imbued his ‘brick’ with a modular versatility, enabling him to traverse the languages of both sculpture and architecture. He has found a universal element, a common denominator between cultures and one that threads together the history of humanity’s built environments. Until June 8th.
Galerie Lelong | Samuel Levi Jones, Let Us Grow
At first glance, the work of Samuel Levi Jones appears to be steeped in the tradition of constructivist or at least orthogonal abstract painting. A variety of coloured rectangular surfaces join and overlap to form a dynamic ensemble. And yet, these are not paintings, but groupings and collages of fragments of fabric that the artist has chosen and stitched together. These fragments come from a deconstruction, a pillage. Jones meticulously skins the bindings of outdated books which are supposed to assert their authority in their field: medicine, history, law. He also makes use of materials from other domains, such as American sport. For his first exhibition in Paris, entitled Let us Grow, the artist has produced a set of new works. In addition to using obsolete institutional publications (encyclopedias, law books, manuals of medicine, etc.), Jones has worked with vintage portfolios, boxes and bindings for French art prints, thus addressing a new European material relating to art history. Until July 13th.
Galerie Jérôme Poggi | Djamel Tatah, Vois-là
Tatah’s paintings emphasise a certain solitude and air of detachment. Not quite bleak but certainly melancholy, the tone is achieved by assembling selected fragments of isolated human figures and arraying them in, or rather against, a flat, perspectively limited space – backdrop redolent of minimalist compositions almost unto themselves. The life size figures are derived from his own photographs and common iconographic sources collected from the internet and the press. Tatah reworks these sources by directly projecting them onto the canvas. The painted characters and watching individuals are painted side by side – but not completely together – creating a striking and meditative silence.
Tornabuoni Art | Arnaldo Pomodoro, 1955-65
Organized in close collaboration with the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, the show highlights the years 1955-1965, a pivotal period in the artist’s career, thanks to exclusive archival materials and new to the public artworks. The exhibition documents Arnaldo Pomodoro’s early creative development from 1954 onward, a decisive starting point of this period being his move to Milan the same year. There, the sculptor begun weaving wefts made of embossed signs, creating visual conditions that blurred the line between pictorial relief and sculpture. The exhibition brings together for the first time more than 30 of Pomodoro’s most iconic works of the period 1955- 65: bas-reliefs and sculptures, and in signature combinations of dull metal and high-shine, made up of dense rhythmic markings, they resemble both mechanised components and archaic relics of ancient civilisations. Until June 13th.