Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan au Grand Palais

Installation view of Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan
Grand Palais

It's difficult to know how to put Anselm Kiefer's installation at the Grand Palais' ephemeral space  into words.  Pour Paul Celan might be inspired by the poetry of the German language writer, but there's something about these works that allows them to exist in a realm above and beyond the mere human world of expression and emotion. Kiefer is attracted to Celan for his creation of a language in the silence and blind spots of language. If Celan speaks what cannot be spoken, writes what cannot be written, in this series of massive works, Kiefer paints something that cannot really be painted. The works are material objects that don't so much represent as give visual and textual articulation in a space where the ability to find form through materials no longer exists. These works are unlike anything that we know art to do.

Anselm Kiefer, Denk dir - die Moorsoldaten, 2019-2020

On entering the hangar-like space, visitors step into a dark world, filled with enormous, monumental canvases sitting on moveable bases. I was fascinated by the contradictions immediately thrown up by enormous canvases on wheels—all of the intransigence of the past layered onto their surfaces is undone by the suggested transience of their place in an ephemeral space. This undercutting of the monumentality of his works is, of course, typical of Kiefer's tendency to undo his most definitive claims. Indeed, we find it repeated at every level of every work in the exhibition.

Anselm Kiefer, A la pointe acérée, 2020-21

Looking across the floor of the space to works such as A la pointe acérée, the gold shines out from the centre of composition, like a successful alchemical experiment looking over a field of snow and dirt and ash. Words fall down the side of the huge canvas, where words, landscape and a mythical promise merge into one. This is Kiefer's characteristic bringing together of elements that cannot coexist anywhere but on his canvases.

In typical Kiefer style, it's difficult to call these works "paintings" because they are not exactly paint on canvas in the way that we think of it. Rather, Kiefer adheres any number of ephemera to the canvases, ranging from dirt to clothes, shoes, gold leaf, glass, straw, axes falling out of the sky, rocks and lead books. In one of the first pieces we come across, a shopping trolley full of burnt coal or rocks sits at the centre of a cyclone of celestial ash above a field of fallen soldiers' gold-dipped clothes. Through the attachment of these conceptually and materially loaded objects, the work tells a deep, complex history. As Celan writes, death is the moment of reawakening, creation is forever connected to destruction. Further, beyond the story of Celan's poems, beyond the narrative representation of his poetry, the world's of Kiefer's canvases go deeper, have multiple layers and levels of meaning, metaphor, and references to myth and history. 

Even on a single canvas, when Kiefer paints, what would seem to be the most transparent of mediums, he cakes it on and forms it like clay to tell a story about what happened that is anything but straightforward or linear. Stories are told about the violence of history, about soldiers traipsing through mud, losing their shoes and their limbs. There are stories about forgetting, about being buried, being saved, being protected and being buried. The works in the exhibition are intended to be a bringing together of German and French history, but at the end of the day, this exhibition is about so much more. It asks how do we remember our past, how do we bring our knowledge, even as it has disintegrated, into the present, to redeem our future? Do we remember in the interests of creating a different future?

Anselm Kiefer, Monh und Gedächtnis/Poppy and Memory, 2020-21

In a signature Kiefer installation, a lead plane, still standing, but without windows has become a bed for dead poppies and a shelf for lead books. The significance and symbolism of the work is infinite: a lead plane without windows that might never have flown, covered in books, objects that remind us of a country that burnt its books and its Jewish people. Without books, planes, people, what's left to us is a blindness and an ignorance. We have let go of knowledge that we should never have forgotten. The plane may not be going anywhere, but its presence reminds us of a past that is still with us, recalling all who died on and beyond the battlefields. Remembrance, death, and the promise that it never happen again is everywhere alive in the graveyard that is this exhibition. 

Anselm Kiefer, Arsenal, 2021

In one of the most intriguing installations, shelves of matter and material are displayed as the "arsenal" of the artist. At face value, I assume we are meant to understand the shelves to be filled with Kiefer's ammunition, but the objects are so much more. The structure both reveals Kiefer's tool box and takes the form of an archive of a past that reaches well beyond his own. It is a display and a documentation of the (left over) materials of his artistic practice, comprising many battered objects and desecrated materials that we have seen in earlier sculptures. The objects collected, organized, archived, and sometimes put in drawers range from garden chairs, through the model of a wedding dress, a box of bicycles, shards of glass, ash, dirt, lead sheets, and a wealth of other dusty, dirty ephemera. But the installation is also a materialization of memory, of a past that we have already forgotten, a past that stretches into the depths of the twentieth century. It is a past that belongs to all of us, a past that we have nevertheless deemed no longer useful. On the one hand, we no longer have enough space in our world for the rubble of our material past, for glass shards and dead flowers. On the other hand, for Kiefer, this past is the very substance of who we are.  

Anselm Kiefer, Arsenal, 2021
Detail

Anselm Kiefer, Arsenal, 2021
Detail

In a world in which the past is so quickly erased by the swipe of a finger, or the closure of a window on a screen, Kiefer's practice is about stuff, about material, about the weight of a past that will not go away. These shelves hold the substance of memory in all its multiple and metaphorical meanings. As my friend Loren said as we stood, looking up at the shelves of broken treasures with the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the background, it is as though Kiefer carted the weight of history from his studio to the Grand Palais. As Loren observed, these monumental installations are so far and above the significance of one person's memory, even of Germany or France. It is as though Kiefer has collected the detritus and reignited the history of human kind. We see the remnants of a world left to decay and disintegrate through the passing of time. In this sense, the installations are of an unimaginable magnitude.

Understandably, the first response on entering the space is the overwhelm of the size of these works. It is difficult to deny that we are seeing the work of a towering artist's ego, someone whose work dwarfs that in other exhibitions around town. Kiefer certainly makes art that takes over enormous spaces. But in this gesture towards the life of the universe, it's as though his work becomes the greek myth itself, like something religious whose plots and themes are speaking the truth of our existence form ancient to classical and into the twentieth century. Of course, the Holocaust has ruptured any hope of continuity. Thus, it is as though the work is happening outside of any concern for Kiefer as an individual artist. While the Nazi Holocaust was at the centre of every painting in Kiefer's earliest days, today, the bigger the artwork, the more ethereal and mythically relevant the "paintings" have become. In the same way that the concern for violence and destruction spreads further and wider than any one genocide, so the works are about something more than him as an individual artist. Nevertheless, it's difficult not to think of Anselm Kiefer labouring in his studio over the months of Coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions, the artist constructing an understanding of history, culture and being in our time. 

Georgia O'Keefe @ Centre Pompidou

Georgia O'Keefe, Grey Blue and Black Pink Circle, 1929

It was a great pleasure to visit the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Particularly because a number of people had said that the exhibition wasn't very interesting. Sometimes low expectations can lead to the most enjoyable exhibitions! 

Georgia O'Keefe, Series 1 - no. 4, and Series 1 -  no. 3, 1918

For me, the most surprising discovery at the Pompidou exhibition was that O'Keefe was an abstract painter. In my—and no doubt many others'—minds, O'Keefe was a painter of flowers bursting into bloom in the shape and form of vaginas and other female body parts. But really, O'Keefe was an explorer of colour and light, shape and definition of form through colour from the earliest works on. We see an ongoing interrogation of colour as light to create dimensionality, often in forms that become abstract thanks to their push at and beyond the picture frame. It is true that O'Keefe's paintings recall the female form, but they are also about much more: O'Keefe brings a connection between abstraction, the woman's body and nature to the development of modern art. On the one hand, as we know, the paintings represent a mass of skin and blossoming flesh, ripe for the picking. In this, the connection to surrealism is also very apparent. Like the surrealists, however, this obsession with the woman's body also connects to a dreamlike tendency. This can be seen especially in surrealist works painted in the 1920s and 1930s by artists such as Ithell Colquhoun. Thus, on the other hand, we are under no illusion of the reality of O'Keefe's sensuous forms. 

Georgia O'Keefe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932

Beyond O'Keefe's skilful use of colour, the exhibition shows her deep understanding of colour. I was in awe at her sophisticated grasp of the relations between colour, how different colours interact on the canvas, how the introduction of white or black changed the mood and tone of the representation, how shape informs the perception of colour. This is not surprising given that she was actively painting over decades when these questions were being asked by painters in her midst. However, what is surprising is how the exploration of colour comes together with a very precise and careful use of her medium of paint. She is also interested in transparency and opacity, shapes to look at and look into, as well as the more abstract and pure philosophies of colour and paint. Thus, O'Keefe is, in many ways, doing much more than her contemporaries.

Georgia O'Keefe, White and Blue Flower Shapes, 1919 

I was also delighted to see the connections between O'Keefe's paintings and explorations in lens-based media that began to flourish in her lifetime. Her focus on the shape and contours of the natural world, the turning of leaves into abstract patterns in light and shade (and for O'Keefe, colour) are consistent with what photographers around her were doing. The flowers becoming abstract may be recognized as Mapplethorpe before his time, but they also resemble some of the images that were being produced in abstract photography. From Man Ray's surrealist photography to postwar German realism by artists such as Karl Blossfeldt, O'Keefe's painting is absolutely of its time. In addition, O'Keefe's painting is incredibly cinematic. I kept finding myself thinking about the images of 1920s and 1930s avant-garde filmmakers: in closeup, exploring the object in detail as it burst out of the frame. This idea of motion inside and outwards from the four sides of a frame, the explosion, the moment of waking up in the process of coming to life was of course the concern of the filmmakers in her midst. I couldn't help using the language of cinema when I was thinking about how to describe her work. The soft petals, skin of the woman's body, in "close up," represented the very desire of the film theorists for more than the human eye could see. The same can be said of the undulating landscapes that double as naked women. In particular, their capture of the sensuousness of the body was considered to be the raison d'être of the cinematic camera.

Georgia O'Keefe, Sky Above Clouds/ Yellow Horizon and Clouds, 1976-77

In addition to the photography and cinema connections, O'Keefe's concerns were familiar from what Mondrian was doing. Even though her work is not about line and breaking the boundaries of geometrical form, it's about flatness. In this, particularly in the later landscapes, O'Keefe's work is about perspective and seeing the world anew. And when the flowers and other natural forms burst out of their frames, they challenge the threshold in a different, but related way to Mondrian. The abstractions of landscape that the exhibition called the Cosmos were all about interrogating perspective through a fascination for areas of colour.

Georgia O'Keefe, Pelvis with the Distance, 1943

Ultimately, with all of these references, it's difficult not to see O'Keefe's art as steeped in European traditions of painting. Which, in turn, make this retrospective at the Centre Pompidou a well overdue event. It's a great shame to think that without her famous photographer husband bringing her work to the public eye, these great paintings may have gone unnoticed altogether.

Ron Mueck, 25 Years of Sculpture @ Thaddaeus Ropac, London

Ron Mueck, Old Couple under an Umbrella, 2013

The most arresting thing about Ron Mueck's sculptures, some of which are on view at Thaddaeus Ropac's London Ely Street gallery, is their size. These works are always the "wrong size." They are diminutive or oversized, but never life-sized. Everything else about these carefully crafted figures is as realist as realism will allow, but their size makes them all at once, curious, tragic, frightening and poignant.

Ron Mueck, 25 Years of Sculpture
Installation View

Although many of the same works are on show in London as were in the Mueck exhibition at Fondation Cartier in 2013, I saw them from a new perspective. I was particularly struck by the sculptures' overwhelming focus on life and death. They are not necessarily reflecting on the cycle of life, but about birth and death. There is little in the exhibition that would suggest the joy of life being lived in between times, despite the blurb on the gallery website. In all the works of mothers with their children, life is just beginning, and often shows the exhaustion that brings for the mother. In others, life is coming to an end, through expiration, or through growing old. In the well-known, Dead Dad, 1996/97, life has already left the figure who lies supine on a plinth. In Youth, 2009/10, a young black boy lifts his t-shirt to examine a wound on his midriff. The resonance with St Thomas poking at Christ's laceration is immediate. However, of course, this young man is black, and as visitors we are hard pressed to ignore the immediate thought of the danger and threat of the streets for people such as him today. The figure tells a multitude of stories—biblical, art historical, and a simple narrative of urban life—that makes him very familiar. At the same time, his diminutive figure makes him vulnerable and his sensuous, life-like skin gives the urge to protect him. He is both realist and a representation of violence—or not. Perhaps he has simply cut his torso accidentally. 

Ron Mueck,,Youth, 2009.2010

Thus, we are constantly moving between the stories associated with the figure and marvelling its status as an art object. Moreover, we keep questioning our responses. In the sculptures that depict dead beings—an oversized chicken, a tiny father, a huge skull which shows its signs of production—the vividness of the decaying skin can be somehow repellent. The melancholy has been removed from the body as matter. Similarly, the baby just born, lying on its mother's stomach with the umbilical cord still attached is overwhelmed by the blood and mess of bodies opened and connected, emptied of emotion. 

Ron Mueck,Dead Dad, 1996-97

And yet, they are both empty and overflowing with emotion. By turns, there is a sadness and poignancy to the fact that some of them are like masks, they are not full faces. The masks are sad or angry, violated in some way, even if that violation happens in the form of a baby being born. Amid the well of emotions, there is intimacy to the figures. This often comes in the multiple figures, for example, the mothers with their children, or the enormous couple under a beach umbrella. The couple are complete with wrinkles, sun spots, hairs sprouting in unsuspected places. The physical body stripped bare reveals an emotional vulnerability. Indeed, the figures are often at their most vulnerable - the father, naked on his death bed, a man wrapped in a blanket, perhaps trying to survive on the streets. Even the old couple are caught in an unguarded moment, enjoying the depth and longevity of their relationship together as she bends her head to look into his eyes, he gently rests his hand on her arm. 

Ron Mueck, Mother and Child, 2003

Wandering through the exhibition, I felt as though I was walking in the land of the giants, particularly as I watched other people hover over tiny figures, or look up to massive ones. When others surrounded the miniature figures, I started to sense a discomfort, wanting to protect them. Then as I moved up close to the giants as if gawking at them under a microscope, I felt as though I was intruding on their privacy. The complexity of Mueck's sculpture, as well as our responses to it, envelop them in endless intrigue. That said, this exhibition included a series of stills of Mueck in his studio, unveiling the mystery of these life-like compositions. Which is to say, we may see how they are made by the artist, but the photographs only served to underline that the sculptures might be constructed, but we nevertheless continue to behave towards them as though they are beings. Dead or alive, it doesn't matter.

Gerhard Richter: Drawings @ Hayward Gallery

Gerhard Richter, 22. Juli 2020, 2020

This small exhibition in the HENI Project Space at the Hayward Gallery offers a peaceful respite from the crowds milling around the Southbank Centre. Surrounded by this series of drawings and watercolours, it felt like I was seeing Richter, the old man still thinking about issues that have preoccupied him for over six decades. The works are, in the vein of pencil drawing as a medium, very delicate. Nevertheless, they are filled with familiar scratchings and scrapings, erasure and redrawing that we know from Richter's paintings. Similarly, the rubbing of the pencil sketches so that the definition of the line is smudged remind of the characteristic obfuscations of his paintings. 

Gerhard Richter, 24 juli 2020, 2020

In some of the scrawls and scratches we see faces beginning to emerge, reminding of those faces and figures studied in the drawings of Leonardo. Pensive faces, gaping mouthed cherubs and hands, eyes, noses, in the same way that artists have practiced these forms in their drawings over centuries. This debt  to the renaissance masters and their use of the drawing as a medium to explore the possibilities of expressing emotion has to be a conscious exploration. It is as though Richter asks this question (like he does in his paintings): what is this medium I am using? What is drawing? In many ways, Richter explores the medium what drawing is, as if it were a painting. Line is not a simple, one dimensional phenomenon in Richter's drawings. Line is heavy and straight, it is gentle and flowing, dark and airy, shown through multiple different intensities of the pencil. In addition, there are multiple forms of line, multiple meanings of line: scraggy, confident, rethought, playful.

Gerhard Richter, 27.4.99 (1), 1999

He also includes interesting explorations of time and space. Space in the drawings is fragmented, reflected, refracted, made multi-dimensional and superficial, it is created and destroyed, but space is always multiplied, though not necessarily in a geometry and dimension that we can compute. In this play with space on the paper, we see Richter push his art into abstraction. 

Gerhard Richter, 31.08.2008, 2008

Included in the exhibition are a handful overpainted photographs. If I didn't know how involved Richter was in his exhibitions, I might have assumed that the gallery's curator had added these works out of some unexplained desire to confuse. But Richter has surely included the overpainted photographs to push still more insistently at the definition of what a drawing is. By placing them in an exhibition of drawings, they question the definition of a photograph. Is a photograph a form of drawing, preparation for a larger, more ambitious (and colourful) work to come? Is photography the way to engage with the history of painting and representation? Again, we find the process of erasing, smearing, obscuring through the use of grey paint over a photograph that he uses in the drawings. For Richter, the photograph as support for painting or drawing as an idea for painting puts the emphasis on the process, the application of the medium. This enquiry is as important as the questions that surface about definition of the medium itself. 

Gerhard Richter,  21.11.2017, 2017

If Anish Kapoor spent his lockdown reflecting on the violence and rage of the world in which we are living, as well as the need to bring animals and humans inside out and drag them through their undoing in the abattoir, Richter spent his in a very different way. The old man approaching the end of his life was deep in thought about his medium, about representation, about the impossibility and unfinishedness of all expression. 

Alex Katz, Mondes Flottants, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

 

Alex Katz, Floating Worlds, Installation

Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

I have never been a big Alex Katz fan. I know that he's an important 20th century painter, and that the high society women in sometimes gaudy colours are sophisticated critiques of capitalism and the art market. But, there's something about the hyperrealism that I find off putting. The works in current exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space are, however, a different story. The paintings of water of different types, in different states are mesmerizing, even when they are painted in glaring blues and greens.

Alex Katz, Hommage to Monet, 5, 2009

A few of the works in the exhibition include people. I couldn't help notice how the human figures interrupt the cool, flow of the water. The human disturbs the expanse of blue that is nature's existence. Even though Katz painted these reflective works a decade ago, I was struck by their resonance with today's alerts for our devastation of the environment. In works such as People (2012) featuring people, the bathers horizontally dissect the water, interrupting, the figures seemingly conversing, playing, bathing, create a wave around them. The peaceful aqua blue of the sea is forced to change direction, lap around them.

Alex Katz, Reflection with Lilies, 2010

The paintings are also about reflection, about light as it dances across the surface of the water, and in this, the water, comes together with paint. The sea and painting have been partners in exploration of the limits of what we see and know. For centuries, artists have used the sea as a way to move beyond the human world, and in Katz's works that push is found at the limits of abstraction. Abstraction enabled through the marriage of paint, blue, water and light is brought to the fore of the paintings. Without depth and sometimes without any articulation of orientation or definition of space, we are left looking at the flow of paint that is the flow of the water.

Alex Katz, People, 2012

Another thing that is striking about these works is that we often don't know whether we are looking down at the water, across it. We lose orientation, in space as well as time: is that the moon shining on a night sky reflected in the water? Is it a grey day and raining? Is that a sea covered in mist? Is it a reflection, upside down in a lake? The intrigue and ambiguity of what we see in the image contributes to its oscillation between abstract and figurative. Again, the ambiguity like the abstraction comes in their bringing together of water, paint, perspective and light bounding around the canvas, reflecting and refracting off the water.

Alex katz, Wave 4, 2000

Ultimately, these works are more personal, more intimate, more reflective than anything else I have seen by Katz. And in the oasis that is Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin gallery, housed in a renovated 19th century red-brick boiler house - its xenethal lighting makes the experience one of a calm, cool summer afternoon, far away from the noise and pollution of the city

Anish Kapoor @ Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor
Installation @ 27 Bell Street, London

I opened my London season of gallery visits with Anish Kapoor's latest creations at Lisson Gallery. I can't remember the last time I was so inspired by an exhibition. I realize many people reading this will not get to London to see this exhibition, but hopefully, there will be other opportunities to experience the works. As we walk into Lisson's main gallery space, we are met by Anish Kapoor's Sacrifice (2019). A steel structure draped in red resin that immediately brings associations of the innards of a slaughtered being. Whether that being is animal or human is not so important as we are overwhelmed by the mess of blood still dripping out the gutters that have been installed for this very purpose. The bloody entrails of what we imagine to have been a ritualistic killing—whether of the industrial or mythical kind—globbing and bubbling into their disintegration is gut wrenching. Sacrifice is filled with trauma and the slow painful death that we sense viscerally, even if we do not see the murder taking place. The rest of the exhibition offers no escape from the gaping wounds of a world filled with death, destruction and no promise of rebirth.

Anish Kapoor, Inhuman, 2020

The shapes and forms in sculptural and painted works remind us of things as variant as vaginas, bleeding wombs, monsters running rampant through volcanic landscapes, fire and rage of mythical proportions. The body and the natural landscape join forces in agony, screaming for help, watching their own disintegration at the hands of an unrelenting force. It's mindboggling to think that this is what Kapoor produced in lockdown, while we were all on Zoom meetings, avoiding people in the supermarket and getting depressed on our sofas. 

Anish Kapoor, All There Under my Skin III, 2020

The Lisson gallery flyer mentions Kapoor's engagement with the history of art, reminding us that artists from Leonardo all the way to Francis Bacon have been obsessed with raw flesh and meat. Halfway through the exhibition, it becomes clear that Kapoor is not making vague references to his predecessor's concerns, but rather, that he draws specifically on the work of Francis Bacon, if not others. Kapoor followers will remember the Rijksmuseum's coupling of Kapoor's Internal Object in Three Parts (2013-2015) and Rembrandt's Carcass of an Ox. The artist's debt to Rembrandt is well known. And in the works on view at Lisson Gallery, the debt to Bacon is unmistakeable. Even before seeing the three-dimensional frame in the corners of the untitled works on paper, Bacon's gaping mouths, bleeding wounds, distorted and deformed flesh, screaming with pain are so clearly haunting Kapoor's intense and angry abstract compositions. As much as the triptych Diana Blackened Reddened (2021) might be about fertility and hunting, it is also about Francis Bacon's Second Version Triptych 1944. As Tate's website blurb quotes, Bacon's is a work that reflects "the atrocious world into which we have survived." One gets the feeling that Kapoor's triptych is saying something similar. 

Anish Kapoor
Installation @ 27 Bell Street, London

Francis Bacon, Second Version Triptych, 1944 1988

And then, we must not forget that these works are also about painting. Where the raw flesh of a body slaughtered body hangs limp over an unrelenting steel frame, so paint is filled with emotion and rendered alive in the accompanying paintings. But, by extension, paint is as connected to death in these works as Damien Hirst's Cherry Blossoms are to life. It is as though Kapoor were saying something to the effect of painting cannot be separated from flayed bodies, oozing entrails and violently desecrated souls. Painting is about the destruction of our humanness. In turn, if Kapoor is so intent on seeing our bodies slashed and slammed in the abattoir of existence, then he must also be saying something about the modern condition. Certainly, there is not much to look forward to—unless of course, the pleasures of the flesh are also captured in these visceral distortions. Certainly, the proliferation of bleeding orifices and spewing volcanoes would strongly suggest that death and sex are never far apart.

This exhibition is breathtaking from beginning to end.

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms @ Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020
Detail

Damien Hirst's Cherry Blossoms are like nothing else shown at the Fondation Cartier in recent years. Likewise, the Cherry Blossom paintings are, at first glance, unlike much of what Hirst has produced over the past decades. This is apparently his first institutional exhibition in France, and that makes the exhibition even more unusual. One would expect to see sharks in formaldehyde, dots and diamond studded skulls in his inaugural exhibition. And yet, the lush, delightful oil paintings seem to find their perfect home in an exhibition set inside the glass house of Jean Nouvel's dynamic building, itself in the lush gardens of the Fondation Cartier. With the light streaming in at the end of the day, glinting on the surface of paint and making the colours sparkle, it's difficult to imagine the Cherry Blossoms anywhere else.

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020
Installation @ Fondation Cartier

While these luscious and sensuous paintings are quite different from anything we have seen Hirst make over the years, there are obvious similarities to the visual candy and the dot paintings. If the dot paintings are about control and systematization of colour, the uniformity of the application of paint, the formal geometicality of the canvas, the cherry blossom paintings are the very opposite. Thick globules of paint are lovingly applied with fingers, sticks, and brushes, left to coagulate and blister unpredictably over time. The intensity of paint still in the process of drying mimics the ephemerality of the blossoms that will, eventually, wither. And yet, in this, they continue the artist's career-long preoccupation with death, the body, the disintegration that comes with the passing of time — in a dead animal, a promise of renewal in medicine cabinet. 

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020
Detail

Up close to the paintings, I was reminded me of Cy Twombly's mid-career works in which congealed paint sometimes falling off or moving around the canvas makes visible the presence of the artist's body that was once there. The difference, however, from Twombly's paintings is that the traces of him on the canvas are revellations of the artist thinking, even in the doodlings. Hirst's blobs and globules of paint are intensely physical and emotional. They are the manifestation of an artist at one with the canvas, delighting in the possibilities of his medium. Unlike much of Hirst's other work from the past 35 years, they are the work of a painter playing in his studio, alone with his paints. On these brilliant canvases, we see Hirst free from the demands of the structures, grids, formal principles that overwhelm his work of the past thirty years. It is as though he lets go of all the pressures of being an artist from whom the world has expectations.

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020
Installation @ Fondation Cartier

It is also refreshing to see how non-masculine these paintings are. They may be huge in size, and placed side by side in his studio, forming one enormous frieze of cherry blossom trees, but they are not big powerful works expressing an overblown male ego. This is not to say that these canvases are delicate, but they are ephemeral. It is as though they capture the lightness of air blowing blossom from the trees and swirling in the air. There is no control to the blobs and daubs, but rather, they appear, like a rainbow in the sky. Indeed, the arbitrariness of their application gives them movement as they blow in the wind. 

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020
Detail

On display at the Fondation Cartier, the abstraction of the compositions is underlined by the fact that they are placed out of order. That is, they were painted as trees across multiple canvases in the studio, but the panels are separated on display, mixed around so that the figure of the tree is often lost. We are left looking at abstract canvases of colours. Up close we are left to ponder the colours which, surprisingly, are not all pink leaves and brown tree trunks. There are bright oranges and greens, purples, reds, yellows, greens. And every colour comes in a spectrum of shades. The result is that each canvas is a different tone, a different temperature, a different hue, has a different personality. This, of course, is Hirst's lifelong obsession with abstraction, played out in his exploration of colour, scale, application and the tension between technical virtuosity and the aleatory.

Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020
Detail

I overheard one of the guides saying that because the paint is so thick, much of it has still not yet dried. And when it does, the colours will change, they will become dull, like the falling of blossom from the trees as the seasons move from one to the next. The transience of Hirst's paint, the abstraction of the compositions, and the sensuous joy that we experience in their presence fills them with surprise and joy. But, let's not forget, these works are also pervaded by the promise of death. After the sun has stopped shining over fluttering blossom, the only thing for them to do is to die. 

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand @ Gagosian

 

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand
Installation View @ Gagosian

Popular wisdom would have us believe that Damien Hirst is all sparkle and no substance. It's just visual candy, as one critic put it in 1993 when Hirst burst onto the contemporary art scene. Critics love to tell us that his work is superficial, mass cultural trash. I have never understood this estimation, and always wonder if these same critics have ever been face to face with these conceptually complex and aesthetically gorgeous art works? If ever anyone was in any doubt about the value of Hirst's sculpture, the current exhibition at Gagosian's rue de Ponthieu gallery will surely convince that this is contemporary art at its most sophisticated.

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand
Installation View @ Gagosian

The exhibition features pill cabinets made between 1996 and 2021. Row upon row of candy coloured pills—it's that candy reference yet again—in cabinets with mirrored backs and locked sliding glass cases. As if these objects were precious paintings, they are perfectly framed in shiny, mirrored aluminium. From the start, I couldn't decide if I was being plunged into the pill aisle at Rite Aid or a gallery filled with priceless art works. The mirrored display cabinets, lighting, reflections and all those candy-look alike pills can be found in both contexts. The cabinets also seem to be indicating that as the ultimate consumers, there is nothing more tempting than our own image. We watch ourselves in the mirrored backings, however, our faces and features are blurred. Our figures studded with pills and our vision is made foggy, as if we are under the influence of a mixture of pills.

The pills themselves are mesmerising. We move up close to study them on their shelves, and our perception shifts from looking at an art work to studying pills (many of which are fabricated in Hirst's studio). Then, as we start to recognize some and wonder about others, our salivary glands are activated. They look so delicious that we want to pop them into our mouths, and enjoy their flavour. This is, of course, the problem. The works discourse on the pharmaceutical industry, our dependence on pills, the ease of access, that feeling of gratification when swallowed. All of these thoughts are aroused by looking at the pills on their shelves. And because the lighting is designed to arouse our desire to buy, the works are as much about shopping as they are about popping pills. The title of the exhibition reminds us of the impossibility of filling the emptiness of these desires. Our hope and hunger to escape through pills is sure to remain unsatiated when consuming from these Cathedrals Built on Sand.

Damien Hirst, When the Heart Speaks, 2005

As is the case with Hirst's animals in formaldehyde, the pills on shelves in glass cabinets explore notions of aesthetics. As much as the works are about the pharmaceutical industry, our insatiable desire to be fixed with a pill, they are also about the art industry. The sparkling frame and shining object on the gallery wall makes them gorgeous to look at. They are precisely the eye candy that Hirst has been accused of producing. But they are much more. The cabinets are aesthetically pleasing, addressing us on an intellectual, visual, emotional and physical level as we are pulled towards and away from them, drawn into their spell, to wonder at the meticulous detail of their making and as we try to get a better glimpse of ourselves. Each work asks something different of the viewer: some create intense confusion as we are tempted to find patterns in the layout of the pills on their shelves. Others are best viewed from a distance, like cabinets of curiosity filled with once living beings now dead and stuffed.

The cabinets also engage the ongoing tensions between industrialization of art and culture as opposed to the hand made art work. The stainless steel cabinets are industrially produced, and of course, the pills are supposed to be industrially produced. But many of them are made individually by hand in Hirst's studio - itself a form of the manufacture of art.

Damien Hirst, Cathedrals Built on Sand
Installation View @ Gagosian

In one of the lovely surprises in the show, as we walk around the corner into the office space, we are met by small blue and pink cabinets at eye level. Both are filled with viagra; a blue case for the male, pink for the women. Gender is not usually found in the medicine cabinet, but when it comes to viagra, Hirst makes a his and hers display. When we get upstairs and see the reiteration of the blue and pink cabinets we start to smirk. The perfect blue and pink cabinets downstairs are a reinforcement of the gendering of illness and virility, but upstairs, after several repetitions, we start to realize the hyper articulation of gender in the medicine cabinet. Does anyone really believe in the blue = male and pink = female categorizations today? That said, our response is not straightforward. As we are pulled up very close to the pink and blue cabinets to examine the pills inside we are looking at something quite different from the others. Lo and behold, who has manufactured the pills? Pfizer, the manufacturer's name on everyone's lips in our age. And so, the cultural criticism digs deeper. The same manufacturer saving us all from death and eventual extinction by the virus has organized virility along clear-cut gender lines that are easily coded in blue and pink boxes.  

Pinault Collection @ Bourse de Commerce

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011

I had seen plans and 3D models of the renovations to the Bourse de Commerce, but nothing prepared me for Tadao Ando's magnificent refurbishment of what was built as a wheat exchange. On entry to the museum, it's impossible to resist the structure's pull to stand under the dome. While the evening sun shone through the lattice iron work of the cupola, some visitors stood unsure of how they were meant to respond. The natural inclination is to look upwards, where we see the original frescoes celebrating the history of trade between the continents. Needless to say, the frescos tell a story of colonialism, racism, and oppression. This history stays with us as we wander through the circular building. It is impossible to forget the history into which we have stepped. 

Marlene Dumas, Mamma Roma, 2012

François Pinault is known for his eye for contemporary art that challenges its world. Thus, it is no surprise to see that all of the works on display in these inaugural exhibitions are concerned to challenge the purveyors of power. Whether it be the excoriating portraits of Marlene Dumas and her fellow South Africans, such as Kerry James Marshall, or Ryan Gander's mouse appearing to have eaten its way through the wall by the elevator, the works are constantly challenging all that their surroundings. Dumas's depictions of violated sexuality, racial injustice, and brutality of the powerful over the powerless scream at us from their walls. There is no mistaking what these exhibitions want to convey. The building may have been constructed at the intersection of industrial modernity and colonial power, but art of the centuries since has unravelled the legitimacy of this power.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (Paula), 2012

From the very first steps inside the museum, the challenge to power is not simply represented, but felt. Urs Fischer's irreverence sets the tone. His central installation is both monumental and searing in its critique of the monumentalism of art, commerce and white male sexuality—effectively everything that the history of the Bourse de Commerce encapsulates. As we contemplate the installation, we realize that Fischer and his friend Rudolf Stingel are concerned to undo the narrative of power that we look up to. Beneath the grand narrative of colonization and the triumph of French nationalism of the ceiling frescoes, Fischer has placed a wax sculpture of Giambologna's Abduction of the Sabine Woman (1579-1583). The original sculpture, on view in the Loggia in Florence, shows a woman desperately struggling to free herself from her male captors. Demonstrating an irreverence and dismissal of its history, Fischer's work is a candle that will burn for six months. Already, when I visited one month after opening, the captor's head was in a state of disintegration. Surrounding Fischer's statue, his Stingel has installed wax—also in the process of melting—chairs of all kinds from around the world. Board room chairs, airplane seats, indigenous seats. Thus, the artists transform monuments into ephemeral objects that, ultimately, cannot be looked up at or down on. They are in the process of disappearing.

Reflections of the late afternoon sun

Speaking of chairs, Tatiana Trouvé's eight chairs, The Guardian dotted throughout the museum are one of the delights of the permanent exhibition. The chairs cast in bronze, copper and filled with the bags, shoes, pillows and books in marble and onyx are all at once curious, inspiring, sensuous and sad. It is as though the owner of the objects under, next to, or on the chairs has just stepped away and will be back any moment. Trouvé's use of materials against themselves—marble that looks as soft and comfy as the pillow it represents, books made of onyx that we feel the urge to turn the pages—creates an impossibility. The impossibility of the materials and the absent owners come together in intriguing, playful sculptures that somehow distract us from the paintings in the room. The chairs are also indicative of the frequent shifts of attention that we experience as we wander—iron lattice reflections on the cupola's frieze, a double staircase for operation of the wheat exchange, a medici column, and arched passageways. Trouvé's chairs tell of yet another history having taken place in the building. 

Tatiana Trouvé, The Guardian, 2018

There are so many wonderful works on display that it's difficult to pick a favourite, but I was delighted to see Louise Lawler's installation, The Helms Amendment series (1989). The 94 black and white photographs of a plastic cup, each given a supporting senator's name and state —red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. Among other things, I didn't know that the Democrat/blue and Republican/red colour coding for American political parties wasn't introduced until 2000. The photographic series was Lawler's response to the US Senate vote in favour of an amendment to government spending, which in 1987 saw the refusal of funding for AIDS education, information and prevention materials, under the pretext that it encouraged homosexuality. Most powerfully, the six abstainers and naysayers do not get a cup in Lawler's series. A quotation from the amendment accompanies the naysayers names: "none of the funds made available under this Act to the Centers for Disease Control shall be used to provide AIDS eduction, information, or prevention materials and activities that promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual sexual activities."  

Louise Lawler, Helms Amendment, 1989, detail

The seemingly benign empty plastic cup, its reflection, and the black silence surrounding it incites viewers to reflect on the deep political divisions of our time. In addition, the fact that 94 of the senators voted to uphold the amendment surely prompts wonder and outrage at the ongoing violation of human rights and senseless discrimination of the political system. The work's eerie relevance in 2021 gives further cause to pause at the mechanisms and institutions of power and manipulation that are critiqued throughout this, Paris's newest museum.