Thomas Huber,Vanessa Billy,Sonia Kacem @ Centre Culturel Suisse| Paris

Thomas Huber, Vanessa Billy and Sonia Kacem with exhibitions @ Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris
Thomas Huber: extase (ecstasy)
January 21–April 2, 2017

 

 photocredit: Thomas Huber, Fontaines, aquarelle, 53,5 x 72 cm, 2016 / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Thomas Huber: extase (ecstasy)
Nearly 30 years after his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Thomas Huber is literally taking possession of the large room at the Centre Culturel Suisse, where his work is wholly focused on the figure of Eros. This exhibition by the Berlin-based Swiss painter is made up of drawings, watercolours and large-scale wall paintings made on-site. “What I want to do is articulate the genius loci, that is to say, the exhibition space, by painting this Eros that connects us all.”.Protuberant and receding domes, constituted by gigantic vulva–fountains, are painted directly onto the walls. Reflectively imaged in these wall paintings, the exhibition space also houses a set of drawings and watercolours. For the artist, this manipulation by means of images offers magical possibilities: the representation of the space acts on the space itself. Huber thus transcends the image of the sexual organs, which are often considered unaesthetic, or even ugly, by giving them an aesthetic form, by making them “beautiful.”. The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book, also titled extase, containing a selection of 80 erotic drawings and watercolours taken from the 66 sketchbooks that the artist has used since 1972, and never previously published.
On January 25 at 7 pm, Huber will give a speech, titled Séance, in relation to the exhibition.

photocredit; Thomas Huber, Séance, 2009 / Collection privée, Genève © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Thomas Huber was born in Zurich in 1955. He lives and works in Berlin. The titles of his exhibitions are always carefully chosen. Of his many shows since 1982, the most recent include A l’horizon at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2016) and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (2017); Abyss, a permanent installation for the MONA in Hobart, Tasmania (2017); the major retrospective Vous êtes ici. Thomas Huber est au Mamco, at Mamco, Geneva, in 2012; and La langueur des losanges at Carré d’Art, Nîmes, in 2008. In 1988, the Centre Pompidou hosted his show 7 lieux. Winner of the Meret Oppenheim Prize in 2013, he is represented, among others, by the Skopia gallery in Geneva and Louis Carré & Cie in Paris. His bibliography is currently approaching 50 books.







Vanessa Billy: Dear Life
January 21–February 27, 2017

Vanessa Billy: Dear Life
The works brought together in this exhibition, made mainly using recuperated junk, form an environment that suggests “dirty” liquids of one kind of other: an engine slowly leaking oil, a baby on a “sea” of waste, a net with fluids draining out of it. By getting bodies to interact with this environment, Dear Life evokes human life and its transformations, and questions the notion of life forms in a wider sense. This show by Vanessa Billy revisits what is a regular concern in her work: political ecology, doing so through the circulation and activation/deactivation of energies and resources.
Vanessa Billy (born 1978, lives in Zurich) studied at Cooper Union, New York and the Chelsea College of Arts, London. She has exhibited at the Kunsthalle Saint-Gall; BolteLang, Zurich (2016); c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels; Limoncello, London (2015); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Piano Nobile, Geneva (2013); and Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz (2011).
image photocredit;  Vanessa Billy;Dear Life, 2016 / Photo: Gunnar Meier
Sonia Kacem:Carcasse
March 4–April 2, 2017
Sonia Kacem: Carcasse
Structures in wood and metal delimit “a world” (as the term is understand in video games) that visitors are encouraged to explore. Carcasse is composed mainly by lines and empty spaces, humorously twisting the idea that the artist is expected to “fill” the space. Sonia Kacem plays games with our perception, shifting between abstraction and fiction. Her bare sculptures sport ambiguous, flesh-like colours and have human given names, like figures in a strange interior.
Sonia Kacem (born 1985, lives in Amsterdam) studied at HEAD in Geneva and is in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, in 2016–17. She exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, and at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich, in 2016; at the Kunsthalle Saint-Gall and the T293 gallery, Naples, in 2015; and at Mamco, Geneva, in 2014. In 2016 the AHEAD foundation published a monograph about her work, Sonia Kacem - KIC.

practical information
Centre culturel suisse Paris
32-38, rue des Francs-Bourgeois
F-75003 Paris
+33 (0)1 42 71 44 50
 

Steve McQueen @Galerie Marian Goodman | Paris

Steve McQueen @Galerie Marian Goodman | Paris
January 9–February 27, 2016

"I want to put the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves, to their body and respiration." Steve McQueen
 

 

Steve McQueen , Remember Me, 2016; Acrylic paint on 88 neon borosilicate tubes;

photocredit: Galerie Marian Goodman

Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris is proud to announce an exhibition by Steve McQueen to launch the 2016 season. We present Ashes, his latest film installation, as well as several new works produced especially for this, his fifth exhibition at the gallery. Steve McQueen's latest projects comprise a wall installation formed of 77 dark blue neon lights, each a unique handwritten version of the phrase Remember Me, as well as two sculptural works, Broken Column and Moonlit.
Ashes is an immersive work composed of two films projected simultaneously on either side of a free-hanging screen. First is a portrait of Ashes, a young man from Grenada from where the artist's family also originated. Cracking a mischievous smile and taunting the camera, Ashes is seated at the prow of a boat sailing the Caribbean Sea. The footage was captured during the production of another work, titled Caribs' Leap (2002). Shot live on Super 8 film by the renowned cinematographer Robby Müller, the images illustrate the documentary aspect of McQueen's work.
Ashes's carefree demeanor and apparent freedom stand in contrast to the content of the second film projected on the other side of the screen and shot eight years later in a Grenada cemetery, in contrast to the idyllic postcard pictures of the Caribbean island. "Life and death have always lived side by side, in every aspect of life," said McQueen. "We live with ghosts in our everyday."
The intensity of the piece is derived from the juxtaposition of the two projections (life and death, boundless space and enclosed space) linked by an off-screen voice. McQueen uses a monologue to pull together the threads of a story that are absent from the images. Employing this narrative device, each viewer is rendered a witness to the drama through the oral testimonies of Ashes’s friends.

 

 Steve McQueen, Moonlit, 2016,Rocks, silver leaf 

 photocredit: Galerie Marian Goodman

Born in London in 1969, Steve McQueen has said "I discovered filmmaking, and that was it, a eureka moment. I was 19 years old." In 1993, as he was about to graduate from Goldsmiths, University of London, he showed his first video, Bear, at the Royal College of Art in London. This first video revealed some of the themes that the artist continued to explore in the 1990s, such as the relationship of the body to space. His work was recognized in 1999 when he was awarded the Turner Prize.
McQueen's work has been the subject of many museums around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery in London (2010), the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg (2009), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1997). In 2009, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. He participated in Documenta X (1997), Documenta XI (2002), and Documenta XII (2007). Most recently, his work was the subject of retrospective exhibitions, at the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) and at the Schaulager in Basel (2014). His last museum exhibition in France was in 2003 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will hold a new solo show of his work in spring 2016.
Internationally renowned as a filmmaker, McQueen has directed three feature films: Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), and 12 Years a Slave (2014). He won the "camera d'or" award at the Cannes Film Festival for Hunger and the Oscar for the Best Motion Picture for 12 Years a Slave in 2014.


contacts:
Galerie Marian Goodman
79 rue du Temple
75003 Paris
France

MELIK OHANIAN @ Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

MELIK OHANIAN | Stutttering

Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

December 12^th, 2014 - February 6^th, 2015 

 

Melik Ohanian, Stutttering,Exhibition view

Photo credits: Martin Argyroglo,Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

 

“Every situation is saturated with memory as well as perspective. Being aware of this delicate balance gives us authority over the present.” ¹

 

The Galerie Chantal Crousel is pleased to host Melik Ohanian’s fourth personal exhibition.

 

The starting point of the exhibition is an exibition. Stutttering (Stut/t/te/ring, spelled with three T) extends a previous exhibition titled Stuttering (spelled with two T) featured at the CRAC in Sète, last July. Whether it be in the previous title, You are mY destinY (2003), or in the series Word(s) (2006-2014), Melik Ohanian revises the rules of typography, sharpening the ambiguity of words and expressions. Here, the notion of echo (and reverberation) that spring from repeating a single syllable characterizes the interplay among his displayed works. Almost thirty works are presented at Galerie Chantal Crousel and at La Douane to demonstrate the quasi syntactic way the artist works, the various perceptions, the coexistences of different dimensions (scientific, political, social, historical) that have always undergirded his approach and that reflect, in a more collective sense, our own rapport with the contemporary, global and dematerialized world, as well as our imaginary.

 

Stuttering is also the title of a series of photographs presented on plasma screen at La Douane. Melik Ohanian took two shots of a same subject (various varieties at the Palermo botanical garden), always the same framing, but with two different focal points. Both photos are then rhythmically animated in a loop, imbuing the image with a sort of inner life. This series of works is at the intersection of a proto-cinema or the futur of photography.

 

The phenomenon of dematerialization is pivotal to the exhibition. Pulp Off synthesizes a century of work dedicated to memory. It sets the diary of Vahram Altounian, who witnessed the 1915-1919 Armenian genocide, and the analytical work of his daughter, Janine Altounian, published in 2009 ; the programmed pulping of the book, and the recent digital scan of the book suggested by the artist to perpetuate this memory today.

La Douane is presenting a fourth occurrence of the installation: the remains of the book covers ripped by the artist, suspended between two temporal strata of a virtual hourglass. It’s a moment between the ante- and the post-. In contrast, the Modelling Poetry installation is the algorithmic result of a possible meeting of two galaxies, a reality as elusive in its sheer scale as in its fictional quality. The generated algorithm springs from an astronomical probability that is rooted in a continuity of movements measured in billions of years. While Pulp Off examines a continuum in history, Modelling Poetry digs into a dizzying past and kicks off a countdown of four billion years.

 

 Melik Ohanian, Stutttering,Exhibition view

Photo credits: Martin Argyroglo,Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

 

A similar appreciation of time is evident in the work Shell, seven sculptures in concrete. The cowry shells’ ambiguity, imagined as a first trading currency or as a tribe’s divine ritual objects, is augmented by their neutral gray hue and their modifed size. We could also figure them as archaeology finds representing another age. Also visible in the same room at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Transvariation, a luminous wall animation. A star-studded wall with pinpoints of varying intensity light, orchestrated by climate data from 1882-1883 registered at the first international stations in the Arctic. The two works meld figure a desert landscapes, devoid of humankind.

 

The exhibition’s grasp of time in its multiplicity - neither present nor future nor past - paves the road for inner journeying. The theme of this exploration has always been present in the artist’s work, like a primordial condition of being of the world : Island of an Island (1998-2002) is an installation inspired by an expedition near Survey Island, off the coast of Iceland, Selected Recordings (2002-2014), photos of a wanderer, deliberately lack any indication of date or place, Seven Minutes Before (2004), a seven-screen video installation features cameras shooting the same spot as it is crossed by protagonists from different continents (an Armenian kemenche player, a Japanese koto player, etc.).  The presence of Red Memory in the exhibition is a new revelation. The photographs of Rajak Ohanian, the artist’s father, unveil to us how travel and cultural identities became a sensitive substance early in Melik Ohanian’s youth.

 

The notion of displacement is linked to the political dimension of Melik Ohanian’s work. The geographic zones that attract the artist all have a particular social context : White Wall Traveling (1997), on the abandoned docks of Liverpool, or DAYS, I See what I will See (2011) in migrant workers’ camps in Sharjah. For Return from Memory, Melik Ohanian visited a closed mine in Mexico just as the last miner appeared on the suspension bridge, a blending of a phantasmagorical vision with a resurgent industrial era.

On display at La Douane, the Girls of Chilwell was inspired by a little-known story of World War I, about a group of women who loaded munitions in a British factory that blew up in 1918. This time, the artist has used archival photos, shot on site, inside the factory, in order to make hyper-realistic white sculptures of the young women. The photo archives greatly helped in reproducing a part of their faces, but their bodies, hidden by the angle of the shot, had to be reconstituted. In 2005, Melik Ohanian launched the Datcha Project in a house in an Armenian village that was qualified as a "Zone of Non Production". For each each session, the artist invited people from a wide range of backgrounds to share a temporality of the space with no particular goal.

 

In exploring the Melik Ohanian’s various creative modes, we realize that the reasons for desertification (social, geographic, and geological) that are hallmarks of his work, tie in with another phenomenon, decantation : sample, wait, observe, extract. Thus, his Post-Images, for example, are a form of opposition to the news in the media. The artist only returns to the photos afterwards and only keeps a portion, a small island, a territory. The sum of the flux of data that individuals today ingest positions them in the hub of a complex network that combines politics, culture, and science. In this, Melik Ohanian questions the future of our collective memory as well as that of the individual. Will today’s society always be able to build emancipated identities, operable communities? Or will not learning about ourselves in our era wind up being so much praise for the standardization and the modes of boxed-in thinking? The exhibition Stutttering, via a travel through time and memory, brings us to reexamine the need of the attention.

 

 

=-=-=-=

¹ Extract from an interview with Melik Ohanian

 

contacts:

Galerie Chantal Crousel

10 rue Charlot

75003, Paris

France

T: +33 1 42 77 38 87

www.crousel.com

 

La Douane

11F, rue Léon Jouhaux

75010 Paris

T. +33 1 42 01 64 97

Paris: ANTHONY CARO`s last Works @ GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON

PARIS: ANTHONY CARO | Last Works @ GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON

image : Anthony Caro | Horizon 2012; 

photocredit:Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

SEPTEMBER 6 - OCTOBER 25, 2014
OPENING : SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th, 2014 FROM NOON TO 8PM

Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris presents an exhibition of recent works by Sir Anthony Caro. The show pays homage to the master of modern sculpture, who died a year ago.
Born in 1924 and knighted by the Queen of England in 1987, Anthony Caro is considered to be one of the greatest sculptors of the last fifty years. A former student of Henry Moore, Anthony Caro constantly re-invented the language of modern sculpture, experimenting with a wide range of different materials. Over the years, his work evolved from the radically abstract line of the sixties to an avant-garde exploration of space, always with a deep-seated artistic freedom.
Last Works, a selection of sculptures from his final two years comprising steel pipes, beams, discs and farm tools, reveal new facets of Anthony Caro’s work. Evolving from his exploration of how people view works in public spaces, the Park Avenue series suggests the movement, speed and horizontality so characteristic of the thoroughfares of New York. The captivating forms of a work such as Horizon condense in a few structured lines the astonishing creativity and boundless energy of an artist who never ceased exploring the language of abstraction.

image : Anthony Caro | Up along 2009; 

photocredit:Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

Sir Anthony Caro’s art has recently been celebrated with major shows at the Tate Britain (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2011), Chatsworth House and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK (2012), and Venice’s Museo Correr (2013). The artist is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Würth Ersteinn museum in France, which runs until January 2015. Sir Anthony Caro’s work also features in the world’s leading public art collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, New York Museum of Modern Art, London’s British Museum, Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

contacts:
​GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON
30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris 
T : +33 (0)1 42 72 14 10
www.danieltemplon.com