Nalini Malani makes paintings of the utmost fluidity, befitting the vertiginous contingency of the world around her - and around us. Thus figures from different times and different cultures, figures giving substance to the principle of difference in its essential polymorphousness are awash in tides and currents of evanescent colour. Some we will recognise without difficulty, reminiscent as they are of ancient deities and monsters. 
In her preoccupation with crossing different visual forms and mediums, the still life dominates the work of Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi. From the very beginning of her life as an artist, Shahbazi has devoted much of her work to expanding the boundaries of photography by using photographic motifs in other media, such as painting, graphic prints, or objects such as carpets. Her photographs of still lifes, based partly on works by the Old Masters, can be seen in both Paris and Rotterdam until January 2009 and at the Hammer Museum in LA until April 2009. 
From the age of 16, Gregor Schneider has been transforming the interior of the home he inherited from his father in the small town of Rheydt, Germany. He has added new rooms, separated others, removed mod-cons, and blocked up windows, adding fake ones in their place. Architecture is again central to Schneider's exhibition at la maison rouge for which he has created a specific installation. He invites visitors to follow a sweet fragrance that takes them to the other side of the walls, leaving behind the white exhibition room for dark parallel spaces where they discover who inhabits them, who haunts them, and are confronted with their own fear of the unknown. 
The retrospective exhibition of Eija-Liisa Ahtila's works, co-produced by Jeu de Paume in Paris and K21 in Düssseldorf (where it shall be shown from 17 April this year), includes nearly all the artist's works in film, photography and sculpture over more than 15 years - this is not an exhibition to visit in a hurry.
Continue reading "AOIFE ROSENMEYER ON EIJA LIISA AHTILA AT THE JEU DE PAUME, PARIS" »
Entering the gallery a deliciously coloured array of what at first glance appears to be leftover Christmas baubles lies scattered on a stainless steel gurney. As if being offered hardboiled candies, we are in reality presented with opalescent bombs, casts of hand grenades that would break more than your jaw if they were live. 
Continue reading "STEVE PULIMOOD ON MONA HATOUM AT CHANTAL CROUSEL, PARIS" »
Elisa Pône's installations and videos reek of gunpowder. First of all simply because the artist often works with fireworks as a very consistent material in which there is a mingling of noise, smell, beautiful sights and the final starburst, spectacle and whiff of war, Pascalian entertainment and explosions. Judicaël Lavrador reports. 
For the first time a French artist under the age of 30 has taken over the entire 4000 square metres of the Palais de Tokyo in this exhibition entitled 'Cellar Door' by Loris Greaud. Described as 'a colossal organism engendered by an original music score that distends through space and time', the exhibition reflects Gréaud's wide-ranging interests and experience - as well as being a cross-disciplinary artist, Greaud is an enthusiast of architecture and quantum mechanics, a graduate with a degree in graphic arts, a former student of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Cergy, the founder of a studio for experimental film, a producer at an electronic music label, and director of his own business. Greaud (below) will be taking part in an event at the museum tonight at 7.30pm. 
'The Anxious' presents the works of five artists - Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Rabih Mroué, Ahlam Shibli, Akram Zaatari - who share a sense of personal involvement in dealing with the subject of the war in the Middle East. 
Jim Coverley makes extraordinary works out of pillowcases and nails, which, like the work of a careful surgeon, are transformed with stitches, cuts and folds into sculptures which have both an emotional and symbolic resonance. 
Photoquai, Paris's first biennale dedicated to photography, is a truly ambitious event given that the museum has only just celebrated its first year in operation. Recognising the lack of a platform for art being produced beyond the major Western countries, the organisers have focused on photography and video emerging from the countries represented in the museum's own collection - Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. This major international relations offensive connects many of the museums and galleries of these less visible regions with 30 arts venues and sites around Paris. 
Continue reading "REBECCA GELDARD ON PARIS'S NEW PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNALE" »
Trees ripped and rent from the ground litter the forest floor in man-made trenches like the victims of a violent eco war; a cloud hovering over a single, remaining tree appears like a nuclear mushroom on the build - Adams' photographs offer a stuttering, repetitive ride through the issue of the age - ecological imbalance. 
Continue reading "REBECCA GELDARD ON ROBERT ADAMS AT THE FONDATION CARTIER, PARIS" »
In his figurative drawings and mixed media tableaux Simon English, for his first solo show in Paris, adds to his already eclectic range of references an odd mix of famous French names - Marie-Antoinette, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Jean Genet and Zinedine Zidane. English may be the new kid on the Parisian block, but, as he said in a recent interview, 'the visual diary is expanding to incorporate a curious set of cross references. It's all getting mixed up, and it's as if the twin-towning committee don't know who is French or English anymore.' 
Continue reading "SIMON ENGLISH AT GALERIE DU JOUR AGNES B, PARIS" »
'La Maison', Amar's current show at RX gallery in Paris, seems educated by an ongoing interest in the afterlife of not just objects, but spaces, situations. In the seventeen colour photographs of interiors included in the exhibition, Amar concocts narrative scenarios through familiar yet unexplained setting elements, a metaphorical slide show encouraging the act of finding, and transforming, that which has been abandoned.
Showcasing 104 exhibitors from 17 countries on its eleventh edition, this year's Paris Photo is ready to show why it's still the premier international fair for still photography. Its popularity is on the increase, too - 40,000 visitors are expected to fill the Carrousel du Louvre from Thursday to Sunday (15-18 Nov).
The 1977 book entitled The Third Mind was, in fact, a meeting between two minds. William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin deployed their programmatic literary device, the cut-up - the more or less random cutting-and-pasting of disparate text fragments - to concoct a volume full of surreal half-narratives, the result seeming so other-worldly, even to its creators, that the book appeared to come from a foreign source, literally a third mind. For his curated show at the Palais de Tokyo, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has gathered a selection of works by 31 artists, including Burroughs and Gysin, all of whom he takes to be important reference points for his own practice. 
Continue reading "THE THIRD MIND AT PALAIS DE TOKYO, PARIS" »
Until 3 November the gallery within the French department store Galeries Lafayette is showing the work of 10 artists in an exhibition entitled "Antidote". This series of exhibitions was started in 2005 by Guillaume Houzé, the great-great-grandson of Théophile Bader, the founder of Galeries Lafayette. The exhibition showcases the work of Pierre Ardouvin, Eric Baudart, Michel Blazy, Etienne Bossut, Didier Marcel, Mathieu Mercier, Marlène Mocquet, Laurent Montaron, Sylvain Rousseau and Tatiana Trouvé. 
The animations and photographs by Casas Brullet in her upcoming show at Galerie Francoise Paviot explore ways in which something as evanescent as body language can plot a tale encompassing time
and space.
Last weekend in Paris the gallerist Yvon Lambert hosted a charity sale called 'Art Protects' to raise money for AIDES, a French organization which campaigns against the disease. 450 artists donated a work of art, including Olafur Eliasson, Erro, Jochen Gerz, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Candida Hofer, Anselm Kiefer, Zoe Leonard, Christian Marclay, Ettore Spalletti, Mario Testino, Lawrence Weiner and Erwin Wurm. Each work was sold for 100 € (£68) but no details about the artist were given prior to the sale. Only once the purchase had been made could the buyer discover the artist's signature on the back of the work. 
Continue reading "LAETITIA CHAUVIN ON ARTPROTECTS AT YVON LAMBERT, PARIS" »
'As long as there's a Darfur, as long as there are people saying "Hey, you don't belong here" to others, it only seems realistic to continue investigating the terrain of racism.' Kara Walker Her first major solo exhibition in Europe, 'Mon Ennemi, Mon Frère, Mon Bourreau, Mon Amour', covers the extensive range and breadth of Walker's work from her early cut-out silhouettes in the mid-1990s to her more recent animated films. The show closes 9 September. 
This summer, the Palais de Tokyo devotes the entirety of its exhibition spaces to a programme of and around the artist Steven Parrino, who died in a motorcycle accident in January 2005. Parrino is considered by many as a model of a radical and uncompromising artistic activity who combined in his work Pop culture, Greenbergian modernism, the aesthetics of Hell's Angels and Minimal Art. 
Can you paint something you've never seen? Go tell Joachim Patinir that, the 16th-century creator of some of the most otherworldly, psychedelic yet credible landscapes in the history of Western art. At a time when explorers could only bring back their altered recollection back home, Patinir reflected on the growing idea of landscapes of the imagination. Sally Ross, whose new landscapes are about to be unveiled at Baumet Sultana in Paris, is also a painter of the unseen.
In 1996 Christian Marclay plastered more than 5,000 blank musical notation sheets in public spaces throughout Berlin during a month-long sound festival. Members of the public filled them in with standard musical notations as well as scribbles, drawings and random marks. Marclay then photographed the graffitied sheets, selected 150 from the group, and compiled them into a book, creating a musical score called Graffiti Composition. Tonight French haprist Helene Breschand (below) will be performing the work at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. 
The show focuses on four artists' individually developed visual representations of the ideological, and literal, ruins of modernist architecture, what was once considered to be progress; they have been grouped together for their shared appropriation of the romanticism and effective pictorial subversion of the subject, hot and bubbling and about to explode as in the figurative title (pic: work by Knut Eckstein)
Influenced by the writings of Philip K. Dick and his idea of reality as that which does not disappear despite ceasing to be believable, Ikam and Fleri raise questions about artificial life through their highly rendered personages, designed to interact with their viewers.
Yinka Shonibare's 'Garden of Love' was unveiled this week at the Musee du Quai Branly, a new museum for 17th- and 18th-century ethnographic art. Shonibare accepted the museum's commission because for him it neatly inverts the fascination of looking at other cultures. 'In an African's eyes, Europe's culture in the 18th century is my fetish while theirs is the African mask. For a modern African artist, all of this seemed so exotic, I wanted to understand its meaning. I asked myself how could these people have all these beautiful fabrics? And then I understood there was a link here with the history of colonisation and all its excesses.' Laura K Jones reports. 
In Gail Pickering's recently unveiled three-part project , the artist's intuitive, promiscuous rereading of history lets itself take a flight of fancy upon a mysterious set of coincidences, one in which the fashion designer's retro-futurism finds itself equally at home as a cast of porn-actors reenacting 'Marat/Sade', Peter Weiss' seminal 1963 play.
The Fondation Cartier in Paris and its director/curator Hervé Chandès have given David Lynch the opportunity to unearth and exhibit a 50-year-old archive of his short films, photography, painting, furniture, shoe sculptures and even scribbles on Post-it notes. Laura K Jones went along to find out more. 
Continue reading "DAVID LYNCH AT THE FONDATION CARTIER, PARIS" »
Wim Delvoye's new exhibition in Paris features pigs as work, not pork. Catch the latest chapter in the Belgian artist's subversive long-term project.
For the first time, the filmmaker David Lynch, in an exhibition opening in Paris this week entitled 'The Air is on Fire', will be showing his paintings, photographs, drawings, alternative films and sound production. These works dating back to his childhood convey the scope of Lynch's artistic creation and offer a fascinating glimpse into his adolescent fantasies and adult preoccupations. The exhibition will be complemented by a program of events, including live performances and concerts created by Lynch.
In his videos and series of land art explosions the multi-disciplinary French artist Cyprien Gaillard questions a romantic view of vandalism and how we justify the various traces we leave on the landscape. Why is it that Gaillard's explosion over Robert Smithson's iconic 'Sprial Jetty' can be justified as a work of art rather than an act vandalism? 
'As an artist, I want to work on giving forms that are made with the Will of being Precise and Excessive. I aim for precision in my work; yet I want to work in excess, overwork with intensity and turmoil. For that is the only way for me to achieve working in chaos, in order to clarify it and confront the abysmal miracle of the unspeakable. I want to work in chaos, which means understanding Art as a mean to confront Reality, a way to know the world and a tool to live in my own time.' Thomas Hirschhorn sheds light on his exhibition at Chantal Crousel in Paris.
Continue reading "THOMAS HIRSCHHORN ON HIS NEW EXHIBITION AT CHANTAL CROUSEL, PARIS" »
'Cherrier's placement of the (male) human figure, aspiring for a sort of physical perfection which only really exists in Michelangelo's sculptures and superhero comics, at the heart of the butterflies' wings (here sometimes vividly real, sometimes cut out of bodybuilding drug leaflets and newspaper print) underscores the conflict of attempting to control appearances and fate, with ambiguous purpose.'
Air de Paris is currently showing new work by Philippe Parreno including photographs from 'The ultrasonic scream of the squirrel', a performance the artist put on last year in Paris with a ventriloquist. Also on view is 'Stories are Propaganda', a film shot in Guangzhou, China's most urbanised area, which Parreno made with fellow artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. 
In her two new series of photographs French artist Valerie Belin plays with the aesthetic concept of avatars from virtual worlds, stripping her subjects of their mortal fleshiness, and rendering their faces and skin so perfect and smooth that they look like plastic models of perfection. 
'Balkan Erotic Epic' is the latest series of photographs and videos by Marina Abramovic in which she and a team of amateur actors re-enact traditional rites involving sexuality and the body. 
'I've always liked the element of simplicity in compositions, the question of when a picture starts to be a picture: someone empties two pots of paint over a canvas, wipes over them three times, lets it dry and sells it to a museum. You can see it as simply as that. I want to reveal this simplicity. Squeezing out a tube of paint, going into it two or three times with the brush - that really fascinates me.' Anselm Reyle, whose latest solo show opened in Paris yesterday, discusses his aims and methodology. 
Continue reading "ANSELM REYLE AT GALERIE ALMINE RECH, PARIS" »
Referring to the visionary projects of Modernist architect Oskar Hansen, six contemporary artists - Michael Hakimi, David Maljkovic, Paulina Olowska, Dan and Lia Perjovschi, Maya Schweizer and Clemens von Wedemeyer - look at Modernism as a social project and an aesthetic code, through its architectural and urbanistic expression. 
On a recent trip to Europe American art critic Jason Edward Kaufman found it overrun with shows by American artists - Cindy Sherman at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, David Smith at the Pompidou, Mike Kelley at the Louvre, plus survey shows of American art at the Grmialdi Forum in Monaco and the Pompidou... 
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