Subodh Gupta, 'Black Thing', 2007
Indian Focus
Until 30 September
L'Espace Claude Berri
This past spring the esteemed French filmmaker Claude Berri opened a handsome space in the Marais designed by Jean Nouvel. He will use the gallery to both showcase his collection and sell art in cooperation with other galleries. The current show has quickly caught up to speed with the surge of interest in contemporary Indian art and includes stars of the current heat wave. From Rina Banerjee's pendant assemblages of colonial curiosity and Subodh Gupta's porcupine-like menace of a wall sculpture to Bharti Kher's hypnotic paintings of bindis layered on canvas, the show is the first to feel like there's an aesthetic emerging from the claim of India's contemporary creative voice.
Tatiana Trouvé
Tatiana Trouvé
Until 29 September
Pompidou
The Italian-born winner of the 2007 Prix Marcel Duchamp has created a group of new work for her victory lap of a show. Finely wrought black on black drawings of Trouvé's 'Remanence' series in graphite and sheet metal are distillations of her fascination with spatial dimensionality. Bronze sculptures of rope, evocative of the kind of material hangings of Eva Hesse, rise and fall charmed like venomous snakes. Playing with perspective while creating corridors that seem to extend ad infinitum, the show entitled, "4 between 3 and 2," is a broodingly brilliant display and perhaps her strongest show yet.
Virginie Yassef
Virginie Yassef
Until 27 September
Jeu de Paume
The artist creates films of participants building structures out of faceted geometric blocks, the endless combinations of which are satisfyingly strange. In another playful installation, a sort of Trojan elephant stands in the middle of a room surround by walls lined with chairs in the style of the architect Gerrit Rietveld. A banal Billy bookshelf by Ikea is transformed into a candy coloured, Judd-like wall stack. In "The second left first," Yassef proves to be a rare example of a contemporary artist willing to confront the high and low of the built environment.
Christoph Büchel, 'Dump', 2008
"Superdome"
Until 24 August
Palais de Tokyo
"Superdome," which is in fact a pleasure dome of several heady summer solo shows, includes Arcangelo Sassolino's bottle hurtling machine, Jonathan Monk's often dumbfounding, meditative works on time and distance, Daniel Firman's gravity defying taxidermied elephant - akin to a heinously good one-line Maurizio Cattelan joke - and to gild the lily a Christoph Büchel installation entitled "Dump" which is, unsurprisingly, a dump. Will we ever glean the method to the Palais de Tokyo's madness?
Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy
Until 22 September
Pompidou
Having won the 'New Discovery Award ' at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in 2005 followed by a debut at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London in 2006, the octogenarian Tichy is being celebrated at the Pompidou. He has made cameras out of "tin cans, children's spectacle lenses, rubber bands, scotch tape, and other junk found out on the streets." Many of his prints - almost entirely of women from the small town of Brno in the Czech Republic where he lives - were obsessively worked over within the confines of his dishevelled flat.
Looking forward to September: Wolfgang Tillmans expands his outposts to show for the first time with Chantal Crousel; a relocation and expansion of the major contemporary design venue Galerie Kreo; a much anticipated group show at Belleville's Cosmic Galerie (September 17) entitled 'Occupancy by More Than 6'682'685'387 Persons is Dangerous and Unlawful', with works by Pierre Bismuth, Gardar Eine Einarrson, Angus Fairhurst, Jonathan Monk; and Jean-Marc Bustamante at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
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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