Daido Moriyama
Alberto Garcia-Alix and Daido Moriyama
Until 10 May
Kamel Mennour
Daido Moriyama, a Japanese photographer with a well-deserved cult following, offers a new collaborative body of work entitled "Far from home." For this project Alberto Garcia-Alix, a Spaniard known for sexually-charged images quiets his pitch to play the Western photographer who looks East, and vice versa. They trades roles, interchange styles, and produce a body work that blurs the aesthetic limits of black and white, including still lives, portraits, and urban landscapes.
Alkis Boutlis
Alkis Boutlis
Until 17 May
Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve
The Baroque-reaching Boutlis commands impressive graphic skill. Mordant, oozing nudes traipse across this artist's creative imagination. The Greek artist at times calls to mind a less anatomically inclined Wangechi Mutu while retaining the perversity of George Grosz. A number of small priapus-studded sculptures seem to pop like props straight from the drawn page.
David Renggli
David Renggli
Until 17 May
Galerie Chez Valentin
The Swiss artist David Renggli is currently the focus of a solo exhibition at Chez Valentin, and a part of a larger ongoing exhibition that puts his work in context with other compatriots at the Centre Cutural Suisse. In his solo exhibition, the audience is treated to meditations on the challenges of abstract representation, material disintegration and the occasional good old showstopper. Take an elaborate wooden structure and deftly create the appearance of its weight balancing on nothing more than a burnt cigarette to see how much applause you earn.
Sam Durant
Sam Durant
Until May 17
Praz-Delavallade
Constructing architectural models on mirrored platforms, Sam Durant invites his viewers to take a look from all angles. Closer investigation of these otherwise plain, small-scale models reveals a somewhat more sinister premise. From the colonial to the present, a series of historically significant gallows result (including a mock-up of the one from which Saddam Hussein was hung). Ever the politically-minded practitioner, Durant works on paper charting the wrongs of capital punishment.
Wade Guyton
Wade Guyton
Until 14 June
Chantal Crousel
A mid-westerner, known for overlaying linen canvases and printed book pages with computer printed imagery, has mounted his first show at this venerable Paris gallery. This time his trademark vivid colors are left behind for a more decidedly monochromatic palette. The body of work has evolved from a series of linen canvases primed for oil painting, which were repeatedly run through a large-format printer. Geometric patterns play on themes of the printing process - only here the errors of happenchance are allowed.
Kader Attia
Kader Attia
17 May until 28 June
Galerie Anne de Villepoix
The latent ire that lingers in the outskirts of the Paris has long made international headlines. The French-Algerian artist Kader Attia is deeply influenced by his experience growing up in the city's conflicted suburbs. For his first solo exhibition in America, earlier this year at the ICA in Boston, he cast children out of birdseed and exposed their effigies to ravenous urban pigeons. In other recent work he fashioned praying women from delicate sheets of aluminum foil.
Lothar Hempel
Lothar Hempel
24 May - end of July
Art Concept
The graphic coyness of Lothar Hempel's silhouetted figures does not easily translate into sculptural media. He is often at his best in the simplest of terms, maybe a fashion designer in the 1920s in love with children's illustrations. This exhibition takes his bold, cut-out geometries of color, and recombines them in a manner that will tickle viewers with a sense of intelligent play.
Esther Tielemans
Esther Tielemans
Until 31 May
Galerie Zurcher
Tielemans creates multi-panel paintings, each assemblage of which is never content with mere two-dimensionality. In a way, her paintings read like splayed-open, candy-colored altarpieces. Evocative of the problems that Clement Greenberg elicited when he heralded the new form of abstract painting of Pollock et al as a direct confrontation of the flatness of painting, Tielemans works with mixed success to counter similar challenges of the essential concerns of painting.
Alec Soth
Alec Soth
Until 15 June
Jeu de Paume
"I often say that when I make a portrait, I do not 'capture' the other. If the photograph represents something, it's the space between me and the subject," says the plain-spoken Minnesotan Alec Soth - hence the title of his first solo exhibition in Paris, "L'Espace entre nous" (The Space Between Us). Soth fills the Jeu de Paume with works from three series, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006) and Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), invoking the rich colouring of William Eggleston and a sense of loneliness and detachment reminiscent of other American masters such as Stephen Shore and Walker Evans.
Valerie Belin
Valerie Belin
Until 8 June
Maison Europeenne de La Photographie
Belin has the power to turn a picture-perfect face into a shallow mask. Her work is constantly testing the line between the reality of a studio-lit composition and the representation of a subject's façade. You're never quite certain what draws her to her work among the traditionally costumed Moroccan brides, oil slick machinery, ripped body builders, Michael Jackson impersonators and similarly eccentric subjects, a veritable Diane Arbus menagerie.
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic. He lives in Paris.
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