Our Europe editors narrowed down the best gallery shows to visit in the French capital during a busy FIAC week.
Kate Brown &
Naomi Rea
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Frieze London has barely closed and already the art world has set its eyes across the English Channel to Paris. The art fair FIAC is opening to VIPs tomorrow, and many of the city’s galleries are mounting shows of their own to impress the visiting collectors and tastemakers.
Here are our European editors’ picks of gallery shows worth checking out around the French capital this week.
Insatallation view, “Louise Bonnet: Bathers” at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris. ©Louise Bonnet / Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin l Paris l London. Photo by Nicolas Brasseur.
The Swiss painter’s first solo exhibition in France, “Bathers,” includes seven new paintings of her signature human figures with exaggerated features and overly emphasized extremities. Referencing Renaissance and Old Master painters, as well as the art-historical tradition of bathers, the faceless nudes are often tinged with the uglier emotions that make up the full gamut of human experience, including shame, grief, and sorrow.
“Louise Bonnet: Bathers” is on view at 57 rue du Temple, Paris.
Mathis Altmann Teutonic Disaster (2018). Courtesy of the artist and the Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris. Photo credit: Romain Darnaud.
The recently inaugurated Fitzpatrick Gallery has opened in a prime location in Paris with a large group show that showcases gallery artists Jill Mulleady, Amelie von Wulffen, and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, alongside other rising talents like Puppies Puppies and Sophie Reinhold. The 33 artists in the exhibition inaugurate the new gallery, which was founded in 2020 as a new manifestation of the former Freedman Fitzpatrick, which ran from 2013 to 2020 with locations in Los Angeles and Paris.
“Still Time” is on view at 123 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris.
Tarek Atoui’s studio view, 2021. Photo by Julien Hassan Chehouri.
The Lebanese artist is showing a new series of hybrid listening devices titled “The Whisperers,” which continue to probe his interest in how sound can influence our perception of the world. The works, which use different materials to conduct and amplify sound, draw from experiments with kindergarteners on the acoustics and vibratory frequency of objects, water, wind, voices, and rotational movements.
“Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers” is on view at 5 rue de Saintonge, Paris.
For the Belgian artist’s first solo show in Paris, and his third with David Zwirner Gallery, Harold Ancart will present a new group of sculptures of pools. He has been working on the series, which are colorfully painted concrete reliefs containing basins and staircases, since 2017.
“Harold Ancart: La Grande Profondeur (The Deep End)” is on view at 108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris.
Ahead of his major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2022, Thaddaeus Ropac is bringing together the artist’s works focused on landscape and water. Éric de Chassey, the director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, curated the show, which spans 50 works made between 1989 and 2020, ranging from gentle landscapes to larger works that question the boundaries of reality.
“Alex Katz: Mondes flottants Floating Worlds” is on view at 69, Avenue Du Général Leclerc, Paris.
William Kentridge, Sibyl, 2020 (film still). Courtesy Kentridge Studio and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright William Kentridge.
The South African artist is presenting a new series of drawings and his acclaimed 2020 film Sibyl, which considers the question of fate. Three large Indian ink drawings of trees, each with melancholic, pensive names—Finally Memory Yields, Not Everywhere But Anywhere, and An Argument Mired in Nostalgia—are among the largest tree drawings the artist has created and will be shown at his upcoming Royal Academy show in London in 2022.
“William Kentridge: Finally Memory Yields” is on view at 79, rue du Temple 75003 Paris.
Max Hooper Schneider Fossil Epizoon (Dyrosaurus) (2020) Courtesy: the artist and High Art, Paris/Arles. Photo credit: Paul Salveson.
The Los Angeles-based artist will present a series of new animated robotic sculptures, which consist of unsettling assemblages that marry mundane a consumer aesthetic with nature, and high technology. His strange and sophisticated kinetic works are informed by his interest in environmental collapse, as well as his background in biology and landscape architecture.
“Max Hooper Schneider: Damaged by Miracles” is on view at 1, rue Fromentin 75009 Paris.
Courtesy Frank Elbaz.
For her upcoming exhibition “Grace, No Gridlock,” the U.S. artist is creating a site-specific exhibition at her Paris gallery, Frank Elbaz. Hicks was in Paris to help install the large installation, which includes a dangling mass of spiraling textiles that were hand-ripped and woven in the gallery space.
“Sheila Hicks: No Grace, No Gridlock” is on view at 66 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris.
