From a major exhibition of Jenny Saville to some bright new stars, don't miss these stops in the French capital.
Anna Sansom
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The eyes of the art world are eagerly set on the French capital this week for the debut of Paris+ by Art Basel at the Grand Palais Éphémère. Coinciding with the highly anticipated launch of the fair, galleries across Paris are staging ambitious shows to attract collectors and art lovers. Here we pick some of the top gallery shows worth visiting.
Installation view of Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia’s work at Galerie Sator. © Gregory Copitet
“Inside, everything shifts like small monsters that the light has awakened by surprise,” says the Togolese artist Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia about his haunting show that draws on the Mina culture of West Africa and animism. In front of walls covered in layered pieces of burnt cardboard painted white, ceramic faces seem to scream. Beside a bush of phallic cones, irregular forms recalling animal hides hang suspended from ropes. Completing the composition are glass bowls filled with toxic beads and coals resembling decomposing matter.
Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia’s exhibition is on view at 43 rue de la Commune de Paris 93230 Romainville.
Tavares Strachan Most Fabulous. Photo: Tom Powell Imaging.
The second and third parts of Tavares Strachan’s trilogy of exhibitions which began at Marian Goodman New York with “The Awakening” see the Nassau-born, New York-based artist probe Black civil rights and the aftermath of colonialism.
For his Perrotin show, Strachan has created a triptych of Black Madonnas in Carrara marble, conflating the images of the madonna and child and Michelangelo’s Pieta with police brutality and racism. The sculptures portray South African activist Bantu Stephen Biko (who died in a prison cell after a hunger strike in 1977), Amadou Diallo (who was killed by New York City police in 1999), and Malcolm X, each being held by their mother.
Meanwhile, at Marian Goodman is a theatrical, performance and research-based exhibition that explores the Haitian Revolution and Black pride. A shimmering beaded curtain with the sentence “I am through with passing” in red sets a defiant tone. Each is a 45-minute-long “immersive experience” that requires reservation.
Tavares Strachan: ‘In Broad Daylight’ is on view at 76 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris Tavares Strachan: ‘In Total Darkness’ is at 79 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris.
Haegue Yang Descending Medusa Hands Bodhisattva Requiem. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. © Studio Haegue Yang
South Korean artist Haegue Yang delved into shamanistic rituals, paper-cutting traditions, and the sacred dimension of hanji, traditional Korean mulberry paper, for her new series of intricate, two-dimensional compositions. Sculptures made from jangling cords of bells or adorned with flowers, as well as Yang’s signature blind installations, are also on display in Yang’s fourth show at the gallery.
Miquel Barceló Taula goliàrdica (2021). Photo: David Bonet
“Music from far-away parties, today’s banquets and those from long ago—all on the same very long table,” says Miquel Barceló of his new series of still-life paintings on display at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The Spanish, Mallorca-based artist has moved away from sedimented surfaces to embrace the grisaille technique, whereby translucent layers of color are applied over a monochromatic underpainting, lending the works a sense of reverie. Horses and bulls are superposed with sea creatures, candles, and memento mori. In other paintings depicting tables laden with fruits, flowers, hares, and lobsters, Barceló draws on the 17th-century Dutch and Spanish still-life traditions.
Miquel Barceló: ‘Grisailles’ is on view at 69 Avenue du Général Leclerc, 93500 Pantin.
JennySaville To be titled (2022). Photo: Jenny Saville.
British artist Jenny Saville is renowned for her passion for painting flesh in a vivid, instinctive way. Her show in Gagosian’s space near the Tuileries Garden is filled with new portraiture paintings, sometimes featuring just a face and neck. A raw energy emanates from these luminous pastel works, all based on photographs, which have stenciled lines and markings that are loosely reminiscent of Willem de Kooning’s abstract works. They merge with the facial features in a liberating style.
Jenny Saville: ‘Latent’ is on view at 9 rue de Castiglione, 75001 Paris.
Chéri Samba Stupéfaction (2009).
In the last few decades, Chéri Samba has established himself as one of the leading artists from the Democratic Republic of Congo with his witty paintings that have won him international acclaim. Presented at the gallery are works dwelling on love, family, and political power, as well as self-portraits about Samba’s ambition as an artist. In one piece, Samba has depicted himself as a big red fish and, in another work, he gazes up, stupefied, at a copy of a figure from Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting, Winter (1653)—a reflection on his hard-won place in art history.
Chéri Samba: ‘Stupéfaction’ is on view at 118 Boulevard Richard Lenoir, 75011 Paris.
Installation view Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Courtesy Bendana Pinel Art Contemporain
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s multi-part, watercolor drawings of watchful reclining female figures spanning accordion folds take on a sculptural presence. The Chilean, Berlin-based artist—one of whose works was acquired last week by the Frieze Tate Fund from Sprovieri gallery—found inspiration from her childhood memory of a carved stone moai figure on Easter Island. The sinuous pencil lines, however, recall the stratified landscape of the Chuquicamata copper mine. The mythological works have a particular, three-dimensional quality thanks to the paper having been immersed in molten beeswax.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: ‘Sueños lúcidos’ is on view at 4 rue du Perche, 75003 Paris.
Adel Abdessemed Jam proximus ardet la dernière vidéo (2021) Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua © Adel Abdessemed, Paris ADAGP 2022
The exhibition, whose title quotes Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is Adel Abdessemed’s first exhibition at Galleria Continua—a show that reflects upon mortality, migration, war, and suffering. In one work, the Algeria-born, Paris-based artist stamps on a candle, in another he appears as the captain of a ship engulfed by flames; it is an allegory for the tragedy of lives that have perished in the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea that asylum seekers undertake. Elsewhere are burnt wood bas-reliefs based on images of the war in Ukraine.
Adel Abdessemed: ‘Out, Out, Brief Candle’ is on view at 87 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris.
Installation view P. Staff. Courtesy Galerie Sultana. Photo: Gregory Copitet
Ahead of their solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland next year, British artist P. Staff, based between London and Los Angeles, reflects upon the double meaning of “love life” in this multi-media show. Imbued with a sense of absence, the artist contemplates the vestiges of romantic encounters through resin-encased photo collages of hand-painted faces with deformed tongues and fragments of hair and skin, photograms of knives, scalpels, and blades, as well as black-and-white photographs of bottles left over from a party. The same bottles, filled with synthetic bodily fluids, are strewn around the gallery, while a red windbreaker is hung on a spiky stand.
P. Staff: ‘Love Life’ is on view at 75 rue Beaubourg, 75003, Paris.
