What to see in Paris art galleries, from a show of new paintings by Dana Schutz to an exhibition of lava-like works by Jean-Marie Appriou.
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As Art Basel returns to Paris at the Grand Palais, the city’s vibrant scene of art dealers are presenting new exhibitions timed with the influx of collectors and global attention.
From renowned international contemporary figures like Dana Schutz to art history stalwarts like Sturtevant, here are eight must-see shows.
October 13—December 20, 2024
Le Grand Parc (2024) © Harold Ancart. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
From twinkling nightscapes of groves, to kissing trees with bright red crowns painted like plump lips, New York-based Belgian artist Harold Ancart opens a window into nature with his upcoming solo exhibit “Maison Ancart” at Gagosian. Trees are the central figures of this show’s paintings, which were “conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom,” according to a statement from the gallery. Fields, mountains, and trees are recurring motifs throughout the artist’s body of work. His art has previously been featured at other behemoth galleries like David Zwirner, and on the concrete walls of handball courts in New York City. Ancart’s imagined landscapes, created using oil sticks, are a delight that you won’t want to miss.
Sylvia Snowden Sandra Billups (1982) © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)
France’s first solo exhibition of works by acclaimed American painter Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942) will be presented by White Cube. The show will feature the artist’s powerful “M Street” series. Created between 1978 and 1997, the collection of emotionally charged paintings captures the lives of the residents of M Street in Washington, DC, where Snowden has lived and worked for more than 45 years. Snowden’s practice digs deep into the African American experience, with a palpable intensity on every canvas built through her raw, impasto brushstrokes and kaleidoscopic whorls of limbs. This Paris exhibition coincides with her first European museum show at the Hepworth Wakefield in the UK and marks her full-circle return to the city, where she first studied at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumièr in 1962. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s “Inside the White Cube” series, a curated exhibition series featuring accomplished, non-represented artists from around the world.
Rashid Johnson Untitled Standing Soul (2024). Photo: Walla Walla Foundry © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Animism is the belief that all things, even inanimate objects, have souls. It’s why Marie Kondo suggests you thank your timeworn shoes for your time together before donating them to your local thrift store. American artist Rashid Johnson compels you to contemplate body and soul as he explores animism in his new exhibition “Anima,” opening at Hauser & Wirth Paris this month.
“Interiority has always been essential in my project … There’s a sense of soul searching, a sense of intimacy that is necessary for me to explore,” the artist explained in a statement from the gallery. The exhibition will showcase “Soul Paintings” and “God Paintings,” two series of works Johnson has been developing over the past several years. Several bronze sculptures by the artist will also be on display. Their wispy metal twists to form skeletal masks that could have been summoned into 3D from one of his paintings.
Jean-Marie Appriou. ©Jean-Marie Appriou / ADAGP Paris, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
French artist Jean-Marie Appriou is an elementalist, wielding marble, glass, bronze, and even lava, to create his mythological sculptures. His work has been displayed across France from the Louvre to the Fondation Louis Vuitton; now, Perrotin gallery promises to transform its space into an immersive stage where visitors can explore the inner workings of Appriou’s cosmic universe.
The show will feature sheer silk robes like kimonos, engraved to depict floating bronze jellyfish or stout little penguins. One of Appriou’s particularly captivating artifacts is a molten glass orb with plaster fractal faces embedded within it, like a comet that has fallen to the earth carrying evidence of humanoid alien life.
Untitled, Kader Attia, 2024. Photo by Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of Galerie Mor Charpentier
In celebration of the opening of its new Parisian location at 18 rue des Quatre-Fils, Galerie Mor Charpentier has announced “Pluvialité,” an exhibition featuring Algerian-French artist Kader Attia’s work. The gallery is known for its support of artists from the global south whose work tackles socio-political issues. Attia’s practice explores themes of identity, memory, and the concept of repair through different mediums. The exhibition, Attia’s first show in Paris in a decade, will feature works on canvas, repaired objects, and a dynamic installation. The installation is a study of time and nature, comprised of a battery of rain sticks supported by unipods, arranged like wind turbines, spinning at different tempos.
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Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul
Photos of the works: Dawn Blackman. Installation views: Charles Duprat © Sturtevant Estate, Paris, 2024.
Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery is celebrating the 100 -year anniversary of the birth of groundbreaking American conceptual artist Sturtevant, promising a “sexy funky show that goes through time and thought.” Sturtevant is best known for her pioneering work in appropriation art in the 1960s, where she created near-exact replicas of works by other famous artists. She began her practice long before the concept of “appropriation” was widely understood in the art world. Sturtevant most famously replicated Andy Warhol’s silkscreen works, including his famous Flowers series and portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol himself once remarked, “I don’t know why people are so upset. I only do what Sturtevant does.” He was highlighting the blurred lines between original and copy that Sturtevant sought to explore. “Expanded Horizons: American Art in the 70s” is on view at Ropac’s gallery in Pantin, with major works by Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Judy Chicago.
Dana Schutz: The Sea and All Its Subjects, David Zwirner, Paris, October 14—November 16, 2024. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. © Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz’s surreal paintings are as comical as they are revolting. A number of the paintings in her upcoming show at Zwirner’s Paris location, called “The Sea and All its Subjects,” are of figures trapped in sisyphean tasks. One of the paintings, The Optometrists (2024), depicts an anthropomorphic cyclops in a knitted sweater crawling through a pit of loose eyeballs and other spherical objects, seemingly picking out his favorite. The New York-based artist is known for her visual storytelling, constructing complex narratives of subjects involved in their own realities. “The Sea and All its Subjects” will be Schutz’s second solo show with the gallery, following her major institution presentation “Dana Schutz: Le monde visible” (The Visible World) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris that ended earlier this year.
Bracha L. Ettinger Untitled (2013-2023). Courtesy the artist and High Art
For artist, writer, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, painting is a medium for tending to historical wounds with compassion. Her feminist psychoanalytic background might explain the rorschach quality of the inky, spectral figures in her abstract artwork. Her paintings are deeply emotional, sometimes haunted by regret, other times imbued with gentle wonder. A statement from High Art Paris describes her work as “a monumental architecture of female sign language.” For Ettinger, who lives between Tel Aviv and Paris, “Trust after the End of Trust” is an artistic and theoretical concept that extends her broader exploration of trauma and subjectivity.
