L'exposition générale @ Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

Installation Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain

After years of scaffolding and construction sheets covering the east side of the Place du Palais Royal, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain finally opened last October. Before upgrading from its digs on Boulevard Raspail, the Fondation had celebrated architect Jean Nouvel work his magic in a stunning renovation. Before thinking about the building, a few words on the exhibition.

Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée VI, 1994 and
Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020

The inaugural exhibition itself is vast and leaves little time for reflection as there are so many works. On display is a single work by each of the artists held in the Fondation collection. If not all the artists are represented, most are. Many people will be familiar with the works from past exhibitions at the Boulevard de Raspail gallery—a Damien Hirst Cherry tree painting, a Ron Mueck woman, a Sally Gabori abstract painting, Matthew Barney's Cremaster. There were also works that I had not seen before, for example, a wonderful selection of David Lynch's drawings, jottings, scribbles and scrawls. Some of them were clearly conception sketches for films—some very familiar shapes and ideas from Blue Velvet , Twin Peaks, Eraserhead—while others looked like reflective jottings made while on the telephone. It was a real treat to see Lynch's mind at work in the drawings.

Sarah Sze, Tracing Fallen Sky, 2020

Another work that fascinated my friend and colleague Oksana who joined me for the afternoon was Christian Boltanski's Ephémère (2017) in which linen cloths play and dance, inside moving fragments of projected light projected. As the cloth blows in the wind, light flickers and jumps, and then moving inside, it is like being inside an experimental film. Sarah Sze's installation, Tracing Fallen Sky (2020) was fascinating as it could be seen from above from a higher floor and below on its floor. In it, objects and monitors, and a model planet create a whole world that, in keeping with the innovative sight lines is also always moving. 

Christian Boltanski, Ephémères, 2017

The most exciting thing about visiting the new space was, however, discovering the building, its history, and Jean Nouvel's redesign. The building at 2, place du Palais Royal, was built in 1852 as a hotel to accommodate visitors to the 1855 Paris Exposition. By the 1880s, the ground floor shops had expanded to the point where they took over the entire building along rue de Rivoli. The Palladian architecture made for a grand bourgeoise building in the heart of Paris, showcasing the prosperity of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. As part of the renovation project of Barron Haussmann, the Grand Hotel du Louvre was designed as a luxurious symbol of developing industrialization and economic prosperity in the city.

Looking up and out

Jean Nouvel's redesign has maintained the symmetry and perspective of Palladio's interpretation of classical architecture and made it contemporary through introducing moving parts, reflections, windows onto the city offering unexpected perspectives. A walk around the vast building is filled with surprises and extraordinary perspectives. Particularly, looking up from lower floors at the building's arcade along rue de Rivoli, at times glimpsing the windows of the Louvre opposite, and at others, watching people pass was a wonderful sight. This is another paris museum for which visitors will spend a lot of time admiring the architecture as well as the art. But what is most noticeable, is how easy the space is. Big spaces (like the Louvre) can be exhausting to navigate, but at the Fondation Cartier, there was never any sense of being frazzled by other people. It is also large enough that there were very few people around and on a hot day, the chilly air conditioning made it relaxing and enjoyable.  I am looking forward to the Fondation Cartier's first exhibition, especially to see how they use the space to showcase their amazing collection. 

Tetsuya Ishida @ Gagosian Paris

Tetsuya Ishida, Recalled, 1998

Tetsuya Ishida paintings are filled with alienated young men, merging with machines, becoming them, dissected and packed in boxes, bodies trapped by buildings. The figures are tragic and yet, curiously identifiable. As the exhibition press release says, Ishida's style has a socialist realist tone and form, but at the same time, the figures fall into the surrealist nightmares of René Magritte. Most obviously the narratives reminded of Kafka's office workers consumed not always by institutions, but here, by machines, technology, and consumerism. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Convenience Store Mother and Child, 1996

One of the most disturbing aspects of Ishida's figures is that they are often sleeping, or catatonic, only ever active when limbs have become machine parts. Even then, the young men are comatose, at the will of the machine, everyday appliances, or architectural structures. Ishida's is a world in which human is no longer awake and machine has taken over. And worse, there is no attempt to challenge their colonisation. The young men and their machines also often occupy raked spaces, at times giving the impression that the figures are on their way to falling out of the painting. Otherwise, the spaces contribute to the surrealist tenor, suggesting that they are inside a staged performance, having lost all connection to authentic behaviour. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Gripe, 1997

While the paintings discourse on the alienation and mechanisation of daily life in urban 1990s Japan, anxiety and isolation brought about by economic decline and the so-called lost generation, their prescience of Western countries today is uncanny. Apparently, the paintings show predominantly Ishida's self image struggling with mental illness, alienation, and anxiety. However, the depressive mood and mechanical metamorphosis is easily identifiable to anyone working in a repetitive and repressive structural situations. The paintings show a world in which obedience and conformity are not negotiable, where the ability to negotiate has long been lost.

 

Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998

Adding to these Kafkaesque nightmares is the common presence of animals in the paintings. Once again the young male figures are enveloped by animals, usually of the insect type: cockroaches, lizards, walruses, animals with claws and tusks made to trap a body. The disquieting proximity of these terrifying scenarios to our own existence aside, this exhibition is a great introduction to an artist who for me, and I imagine many others in Europe, was previously unknown.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part @ Gagosian Paris

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

Blue is the colour of life and death in Sterling Ruby's sumptuous works seen through the window of Gagosian's rue de Castiglione space. Multi-media collages in lazulite blue, furious scrawls, water stained paper, and the reminder of flowers blown in the wind fill the walls behind human-sized bronze sculptures  of dead flowers painted blue. The flowers are mostly sunflowers charred with their heads bowed, what semblance of leaves disfigured by the elements. All of the flowers are in couples, bound together at their bases. Alternatively, they look at each other, their "faces" turned inwards, admiring each other.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

The flowers are somewhere between life and death. As the exhibition title suggests and the blurb confirms, they are saying their wedding vows, till death us do part. Beyond the obvious references to the mayhem and turbulence of life, the richness (and expressiveness) of art through the use of blue, if we anthropomorphise the flowers, and the traces of life in the paper collages, these sculptures are overflowing with emotion. In them, we see agony, the love of flowers that are bound together, the fragility and transience of life, sadness at the anticipation of passing. We also witness an energy swirling around the sculptures, as they weather their surroundings with dignity.

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9181), 2026

In Ghosts (9181), winds with the intensity of hurricanes batter the page and the vulnerable flowers in the corner. It is as though they have disintegrated before the storm is over. In Ghosts (9182), the threat has been and gone across fields of blue scrawls, having ripped through and left its traces in the form of diluted colour. Here, the flowers have escaped the path of the extreme event, but they are not without mourning and loss of their petals. 

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9182), 2926

While the marriage of the mixed media collages and bronze sculptures is unique and the different media are intimately entwined, I couldn't help finding the dead sunflowers expressing the undulations of human life to be, if not derivative of Anselm Kiefer's, at least, something that Kiefer has already done. That said, the small group of works is - as always for Gagosian's installations - beautifully exhibited. The works are powerful, and being inside the space gives the feeling of being inside a much larger world, a feeling made possible by the range of emotions and the intensity of their differences. 

Calder. Rêver en équilibre @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Alexander Calder, Black Widow, 1948

The Alexander Calder exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton to mark the centenary of his arrival in France is glorious. The curation of the exhibition looks as effortless as the works themselves, and yet, to showcase their weightless, ethereality must have been as carefully determined as the engineering of the metal sculptures. The simplicity and fluency of these incredibly sophisticated mechanisms, evoking the dreamy and the equilibrium of the exhibition's title was breathtaking. 

Alexander Calder, The Brass Family, 1929

Calder's early works are playful and fantastic, while at the same time being deeply connected to everyday life in modernity. His focus on city life—the circus, the velodrome, and other activities of industrial modernity—shows his engagement with his historical moment and the new kinds of movement /motion /kineticism introduced to daily life thanks to the manufacture of metal and other forms of industrial production. In his early years, he was also working for a sports illustrated magazine, and the National Police Gazette where he was hired to produce drawings of the circus. However, even though he was in many ways required to engage with modern life, his turn to sculpture and performance in the circuses were entirely his invention. In them, other than the wonder of the constructions, we see his interest in movement, flying and ethereality. From early on, he also shows a fascination for the physicality of the body, even though the body is rendered as a void through twisted wire. 

Alexander Calder, Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong, 1948

Similarly, his use of wire for technical and creative innovation to explore scale and the formal possibilities of his circus and other sculptures is fascinating. Calder used these everyday materials in exciting ways, pushing them against themselves to create delicate forms that were everything the material was not. In these sculptures, metal and other industrial materials become delicate, made into perfectly balanced creatures that fly and somersault, dance and play musical instruments. From the very earliest work, we see that Calder's use of wire is like line in a drawing often very simple. But while the objects look effortless, their conception and making cannot have been easy. 

Alexander Calder Jewelry 

I am not usually a fan of exhibitions that include the work of other artists, however here, works by Picasso, Leger, Miro and Duchamp are effective. They show that Calder was not an outlier,  that his work was closely related to that of his contemporaries, particularly in their common pursuit to take art out of its two dimensional frame, to reflect modern life, and to escape its bourgeoise pretensions. In addition, the juxtaposition with well known contemporaries shows that Calder's art was serious - despite its playfulness - engaging with the concerns of the time. Abstraction, movement, form, bodies, circus, sports, mechanical movement were all the subjects of representation to show modernity in their midst. Calder's sculptures may look different from the work of others, but there are many similarities. There is also something akin to Man Ray's light machines - and his photographs of light - in search of abstraction without weight and material. 

Alexander Calder, Aztec Josephine Baker, 1976

As his sculpture develops, many of the works become as much about the shadow as the sculpture itself. We see this in portraits such as that of Josephine Baker. Moving around the wire sculptures, when we look at them from different angles, we see the representations making different faces and the bodies move. And like the later abstract sculptures, these works are also about shapes, form, moving in space, constant kinesis. One of Calder's great inventions was to take sculpture out of its verticality, typified by a dependence on pedestals. He hangs sculpture from ceilings, attaches it to walls. And then he shifts beyond painting and sculpture to make works about time, and works that exist through movement of wind and the energy in the air. In some of his most sophisticated sculptures such as, metal creates the sound of the air in a way that we would not otherwise be able to hear. 

Installation @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Calder's works are also about unpredictability, a lack of control, and the creativity that comes with that lack of control. Because the works come alive when we are with them, in are presence, they transform, become different. These works are still and reflective, silent and dreamy, light, but they manage to be complex and contradictory. Monumental and invisible, making the atmosphere visible and audible. Always turning. Steel becomes completely whispy, itself an challenge their material. And yet, they occupy public space, even as they are ephemeral. Calder's feat is to create complex engineering structures, made to look like fabric blowing in the wind. 

Leonora Carrington @ Musée de Luxembourg

Leonora Carrington, Feeding the Table, 1959

The Leonora Carrington Exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg is stunning. The curation, the paintings, the flow of the exhibition, all come together to show the extraordinary work of this exceptional artist. Carrington is not unknown to anyone in the art world, and neither is she a stranger to the discourse on surrealism. But she did not enjoy the renown of her friend Max Ernst, of course, because she was a woman.

Leonora Carrington, Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, 1975

The exhibition includes her early notebooks and drawings. From the age of ten Carrington was filling pages with magical and mythical creatures in wild and wonderful narratives. There's no doubt that she had the most extraordinary imagination that becomes developed into intricately detailed, brilliantly coloured stories in which creatures morph and diverge across canvases, all somehow speaking to the others.   

Leonora Carrington, Artes 110, 1944

The exhibition text emphasizes the ardent feminism of Carrington's work, propelled by her suffering at the abuse of her father and brother. Her paintings show both the domination of women in the scowling faces of evil men and fallen women as well as the empowering levitation of women escaping the real world. The paintings are filled with anger and remorse, magic tricks and Greek legends. But what is most astounding are the figures; long, lean, with skeletal hands and feet, often emphasized. It is not always immediately obvious - because masculine and feminine are not always distinct - that the paintings are about pain and suffering. They often have a whimsical, joyful, at times humorous streak to them, encouraging us to laugh and smile at their playfulness. 

Leonora Carrington, The Lovers, 1987

Throughout the oeuvre, we see animals as the face of humanity, keeping women company, offering a place to sit, sharing the experience, comforting.  A head becomes three animal heads, a bird perched on a cow, or a pig asleep in a corner delight us with their imaginative depictions. Alternatively, animals are given the role of humans where men are noticeably absent or threatening. Often there was so much going on in the paintings that the cuteness of the animals was only discovered in time. But animals are also there to protect Leonora if we assume that many of the women are indeed, representations of her. Rabbits, cats, birds and other animals encircle her, a duck and a reindeer are dinner guests in Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, and various animals are more than onlookers in The Lovers. While they animals can take centre stage, they also come along for the ride. Often. like the presence of animals, the most compelling part of a painting is not the one that takes up the most space. In The Temptation of St Antoine, for example, the women holding the dress of the queen are vivid in their individuality.

Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of Ste Antoine, 1945

Despite the fanciful imaginative worlds, there are also erudite references to the great traditions of past art. Two curious figures peering over the top of the wall watching the woman feeding a bird are clearly drawing on the putti, angels, and children watching scenes of battle, beheading, and ascension in the Renaissance. The colourful dresses if the women holding the queen's dress in The Temptation of Ste Antoine remind of explorations in the same period, when new colours were being made possible and wealthy patrons were eager to see their wealth on display. Or the narratives that run across her Mars Red Predella, clearly referencing the surreptitious narratives of the form in its classical iterations.

Leonora Carrington, Mars Red Predella, 1947

While there were plenty of wizards and witches and all manner of beings ready to attack, overall, there was such joy in the paintings. Carrington was a committed feminist, vociferously speaking out about the madness she experienced under male domination, and yet, as I say, the stories she tells are always playful and sometimes funny, and there were moments of real lightness. As I walked around the exhibition, I couldn't help lamenting that feminism and identity politics today seems to have lost this ability to find different registers of criticism.

Brion Gysin, Le dernier musée @ Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Brion Gysin, Dreammachine, 1979

In his time, Brion Gysin was vital to the development of mid-century experiments in poetry, painting, and other media. The Musée d'art Moderne has staged a retrospective of Gysin who today looks like a marginal figure, backgrounded by the reputations of his contemporaries such as William Burroughs. It's difficult to know where to start the conversation about Gysin's work because he was so multifaceted as an artist. He worked in painting, photography, music, poetry. But no matter what medium he was working with, conceptually, he was driven by a desire to transcend. Gysin's constant striving for an art to exceed the material and institutional structures is palpable and admirable.

Brion Gysin, Magic Mushrooms, 1961

He had an early fascination with hieroglyphs, particularly in the form of Japanese and Arabic scripts. He saw these scripts, repeated, read from right to left, bottom to top, as a way of breaking out of familiar structures. In addition, he was drawn to their rhythm that he connected to a kind of unconscious expression, otherwise found in LSD tripping. When exploring a script as artistic figure, Gysin would always layer it with a grid, capturing the tension between structure and freedom, the physical and the transcendental. 

Brion Gysin, Naked Lunch, 1959

Another striking tension found in his work is that between the highly conceptual, thus intellectual, and a reach for a beyond. They are also visually abstract, and aesthetically beautiful, often with vibrant colours used to express highly intellectual ideas. Similarly, because there is no more to be seen up close than at a distance, the works tend to have an overall cohesion in spite of the methods of fragmentation that Gysin pursued. The exhibition emphasizes Gysin's contribution to and his work's resonance with Beat Poetry, particularly with the cutting up of written texts to create surrealist visual poetry. That said, rather than admiring his connections to the Beats, I was much more interested in the sheer breadth of his artistic pursuits, his ability to work in many different media, and to incorporate many different traditions and inspirations. Perhaps his interests were too broad and this is why he is posed as attractive for who he knew? 

Brion Gysin, Le dernier Musée, 1973

Among the highlights of the exhibition is Le dernier Musée, a series of photographs presented in thumbnail form taken from his window in rue Saint Martin as he watched the Pompidou Centre being built. The familiar structures and forms of the Pompidou centre echo the grids, squares and lines that preoccupied Gysin across his career. It is as though the architecture was itself influenced by his thinking. There was also something very nostalgic in these colourful contact sheets, as the images witness a moment, not just when the Pompidou was being built, but a turning point in the history and culture of the city. 

Brion Gysin and his Dreammachine, 1961
Perforated metal, electronic motor, light

It is also worth noting that because Brion Gysin is not as well known as some of the artists he influenced and those who were his inspiration, the retrospective at the Musée d'art Moderne was almost empty, while there was a long line to enter the Lee Miller in the adjacent galleries. Given the overcrowding of many of Paris's exhibitions, the slow and relaxed walk through this fascinating exhibition is a welcome respite. 

Normes Corps @ Palais de Tokyo

Cathy de Monchaux, Studio, Wounds, and Battles. Desire is the Reiteration of Hope, 2026 

I am always on the hunt for exhibitions without hoards of visitors and inspired by the promise of empty halls, I went to the Palais de Tokyo last Friday night.There is a large diversity of work on display throughout the building, loosely cohering around the theme of bodies on the margins. I was struck by how often the works challenged, reappropriated, or simply drew to attention the ways in which the design and construction of public space rarely pay attention to those who are not able bodied, or are without power in the social and cultural world. A lovely installation by Benoît Pieron, for example, sees street lights filled with confetti in liquid, reminding of snow globes. Rather than having lights guide our path or keep us safe in a dark street, Pieron's installation has us fascinated by the shimmering movement of the lint. A bench next to one of the light posts encourages us to look at, rather than, be guided by, light. Behaving in a way not prescribed by the organization of public space, Pieron challenges it through inversion.

Benoît Pieron, Vernis à Ombre, 2026
Installation View

Many of the works left no doubt that public space is commanded over by men. Among the exhibits is a film by Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative made together with street workers during lockdown in the EUR quartier of Rome. Made to mark the "celebration" of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the United States La Colonne della Colombo shows sex workers in the quartier imagined by Mussolini to celebrate fascism. It was empowering to watch their appropriation of the space—which today is actually a quartier of ghettoization—to celebrate people who are otherwise downtrodden. In full costume, seemingly happy to perform for the camera, the street workers indulged both live and film audiences in a carnavalesque, thus subversive, romp filled with humour and wit.

Pauline Curnier Jardin, La Colonne della Colombo, 2023

Another striking film shows aging women in prison, communicating with each other, creating community through the walls, much to the chagrin of a young male guard. Qu'un sang Impure (2019) is clearly drawing on Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour (1950) as we see the women passing gum, exhaling smoke, and expressing desire through the walls. However, unlike Genet's film, neither the women nor the film are restrained. The arousal, masturbation, and ecstasy of women often assumed to be sexually barren, is full throttle and confronting. We do not see genitalia though there is explicit masturbation, leaving nothing to the imagination. It is, once again, refreshing and liberating to see people so often cast out by those who dictate cultural and social desire, ignoring the norms and conventions. 

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Qu'un sang Impure, 2019

For me, the most striking in the suite of exhibitions was Studio, Wounds, and Battles. Desire is the Reiteration of Hope by British born artist Cathy de Monchaux. Doing justice to the intricacy and vastness of her work is almost impossible. Unicorns and other mythical creatures, pregnant women, bodies wrapped in what might be bandages or simple cloths, tightly wound to imprison, immersed in forests of intricately formed landscapes, a snake with skin covered in mouths that could easily be mistaken for vaginas, and the fantasies continue. Each piece is meticulously hand made from wire, paper, plaster, leather, rubber, velvet, woven, tied, wrapped and studded. The sculptures are spellbinding, and we don't know whether to be amazed, repulsed, or to recoil from their intimacies. Also included in the display of her work is a room whose walls are filled with drawings, ideas, early works from her studio. In it, we find an artist taken up with a forthright argument about women, the environment, and the entrapment of both in history, culture, and the world that we live in. It was exciting to discover de Monchaux's impressive work. 

Cathy de Monchaux, Maud's Pink, 1999

This is only a taste of what is on display at the Palais de Tokyo in Normes Corps. What a breath of fresh air to be at the Palais de Tokyo, not only to see some interesting, some brilliant, some puzzling art. The quiet and all but empty halls of the Palais de Tokyo were sheer pleasure after battling through crowds at some of the major exhibitions around town. And in spite of the relative calm, the art was filled with an energy that filled me with inspiration. It was also delightful to see so many young people in the museum, not only looking at art, but chatting, relaxing, and also enjoying the peaceful and generative atmosphere. 

Matisse, 1941-1954 Grand Palais

Henri Matisse, Spray of Leaves, 1953

I imagine that most people will be familiar with the odd Matisse painting, even if they didn't know it before going to the exhibition. It's difficult to visit an exhibition of Matisse's late work without seeing the infinitely reproduced popular art that it has become. That said, there were many surprises, including that the most reproduced were those made in his final years, works that are as interesting or radical as some of the earlier abstract painting. In addition, as a big fan of his studio paintings, as well as his use of colour to explore space and perspective, there are many reasons to brave the crowds at the Grand Palais for this exhibition.

Henri Matisse, Le lanceur de couteaux, 1943/44

Towards the beginning of the period on display at the Grand Palais' exhibition, Matisse was exploring movement, shape, music, and reaching for a  pure visual form. The colours in these paintings and throughout were gorgeous. The purples and pinks, female figures, leaves and other natural growth floating through water were also sumptuous for their expression of movement and dance. Matisse discovered these forms quite early in his career, but it took time to develop them into abstract expressions.

Henri Matisse, Interior in Yellow, 1946

As I say, it was a treat to see the interior rooms in blue, yellow, and red together in one space. The studio interiors are among the most avant-garde of Matisse's work. In them, we see black lines, and the four sides of the frame used to flatten space as well as the canvas. Ultimately, in these works, space is unsettled, difficult to perceive, making it a challenge to comprehend the spatial logic. It's interesting to think of these works in relationship to Picasso's work of the same period in which he is uses painting to tell a narrative. In a similar, but very different foreshortening and stacking of space, Matisse simply plays with perception. In many of the interior studio paintings, there is a window, open or closed, that nevertheless does not extend the space beyond the room. Windows work to put any realist space on the same plane as the represented interior. Alternatively, the windows might be paintings, and in the famous Red Studio we know this to be the case. In many of the interior spaces, there is also often a woman sitting, but she is also marginalized, even to the point where her face is behind a plant. Thus, it is not the human in the image who is important, but how bodies are organized within space.

Henri Matisse, Nus bleus, 1952

Though the colourful cut outs by nature are most familiar from reproductions, it was fascinating to be with them thanks to their sheer size and grandeur. Even a work such as The Snail and The Sheaf (1953) which is on permanent display at Tate Modern was impressive when together with other works of its size, including the stained glass windows. The final room of the exhibition gathered together silhouette cutouts in blue, including the four Blue nudes. It was a breathtaking close the exhibition. Thanks to these exquisite images, the finsal two rooms were intimate and expressed the artist's innovation. Seeing Matisse return to his lifelong interest in movement, form, and the role of the female figure in the search for purity of expression was fascinating.

Henri Matisse, Grand Visage, 1952

Lastly, also impressive was Matisse's lifelong obsession to find this pure, unencumbered form of visual expression. His journey through paint, paper cut outs, charcoals, illustrated albums, stained glass windows, in search of some kind of transcendence was fascinating. The search extended to his interest in music, the connections between jazz and painting, of course, the freedom of jazz. He is quoted as stating that he was looking for  this liberation in the lines and shapes and the expression of movement in the large works. However, it's not always easy to see the search in what can appear to be more decorative (hence their reproduction. In dots and stripes, grids and patterns, all disturbing space in the modernist paintings, the search is clearly identifiable.

Marlene Dumas, Liasons @ Porte des Lions au Louvre

Marlene Dumas, Liaisons, 
Installation, Louvre

On the wall at the entrance to the Porte des Lions on the west side of the Louvre, Marlene Dumas's nine mask-like faces bid goodbye to those exiting the Italian and Spanish painting halls. Each face is different, wears a different expression, is painted in a different colour, and has a varied resemblance to a mask. The faces are too distant for the visitor to engage with them as they can only be seen from the stairs leading up to Spanish painting, or from below. Thus, while  their appearance as one exits the Porte des Lions is bold and arresting, it is difficult to focus on any one out of the nine.

Marlene Dumas, Alpha's Light, 2025

Each face or mask fills its frame, as if replicating a cropped photograph, and typical of Dumas's faces, all identity is removed. The faces have no gender, sex, colour or identity. Rather, they are yellow and blue and green and orange, black and brown. Some are obviously masks, such as that on the right in the middle, or the blue one above it which looks like a horror movie mask, without a living being behind it. Others such as the blue on the top left is visibly traumatized with its distorted mouth and eyes rolling upwards. One way to approach them is to see each expressing an emotion: the pale blue in agony, yellow on bottom left could be a lightness, the black is alarmed, the orange on the right, suspicious and so on. 

Marlene Dumas, Red Rust, 2025

Liasons is also a comment on the history of the Louvre and, the inevitable traumatization that comes with colonization of cultures and identities. It is no secret that the Louvre is a magnificent collection filled with pilfered and misappropriated works. As the final stop on a tour through the history of Western European art, as its title suggests, Liasons comments on the connections, the coming together of styles and mutual influence over centuries. It sits in a gallery named Galerie des Cinq Continents, it creates a dialogue between five continents, specifically, creating connections between works from Africa, Asia, The Americas, Europe and Oceania. And given Dumas's not always joyful masks, all of the suggested emotions are on display from around the world.

Marlene Dumas, Bronze Moss, 2025

The faces can also be ominous and unsettling - they are not all celebration. Similarly, the mask-like appearance is unsettling: we are immediately prompted to ask what is lurking underneath the surface, like all of the hidden stories and meanings of art in the Louvre. Dumas says in interview that there is also a relationship to the sculptures in the Louvre's collection - and mentions Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Such sculptures are emotions in motion, whereas Dumas's paintings are very much emotions frozen behind masks. We are left to wonder what caused the emotions of faces with little agency on a wall at the exit.

Gallery hopping along Avenue Matignon

Ellen Gallagher, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2025

The thread running through the three exhibitions I saw this week was the grid. The work in the three exhibitions was very different, but there was a return to the most basic form of abstract painting: grids. They were all connecting their work to twentieth century abstraction, and at the same time, doing something daring and different. Ultimately, as abstractions, these paintins were all extending the possibilities of abstraction into the twenty-first century - especially Ellen Gallagher's three works at Gagosian's rue de Ponthieu space, and Bernard Frize at Perrotin's Avenue Matignon gallery. 

Ellen Gallagher, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2025

Ellen Gallagher's Fast Fish and Loose Fish saw three recent large-scale paintings begin on a compositional grid that remains visible beneath vibrant pink paint, silver and black painted paper amid threads of green and blue. Gallagher's three large scale works reminded me of layers of history and time being added to to already layered works. Silver and black, green and brown shapes float over pink like seaweed and figures floating to the ocean floor. The works were in the spirit of Miriam Cahn's paintings depicting immigrants falling to their deaths as they cross the Mediterranean. Gallagher's bodies falling through pink oceans that might be coral reefs, filled with bubbles, silver striations of the sun are black. These abstracted bodies are the victims of colonization and enslavement in America. Her layering of pink and paper over the grid still visible sends out the message that the old modes of Western control of representation are being wiped away. 

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction, 2018

My discovery of the day were the Korean artists on view at Almine Rech's Av. Matignon gallery. I was particularly drawn to Ha Chong-Hyun's luscious works that appear as if he has applied lashings of paint and then let it drip. In fact, he applies paint to the reverse of the canvas and presses on it until it seeps through to the other side of the canvas. The result is a densely textured paint that both observes strictly gridded, stripped down aesthetic, and simultaneously, is fully enmeshed with hemp cloth, resulting in cloth and oil becoming the shared content of the work. Dense paint takes on the varied weave of the cloth, visibly bleeds into a rigid structure that reminds of a minimalist grid. Ha Chong-Hyun's paintings are luscious and messy as well as rigidly geometrical, sensuous and yet totally reduced to hemp cloth. 

chung sang hwa untitled 82-6-25 1982

A similar adherence to the square and the sides of the canvas, the fundamental form of modernist painting was visible in all of the works in Forming the Monochrome: Masters of Dansaekhwa. The painters known as masters of Dansaekhwa, a Korean movement of the late 1950s were apparently inspired by Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism - hence the simultaneously pared down and dense texture of their canvases. The observation of grids, inside of which anything can happen, adds another point of reference to their work, with the early modernist works of de stijl being an undercurrent that motivates. I have never been a fan of Lee Ufan's sculpture, but seeing his painting in this context gave it a sense I had not previously realized: all of these works belong to an autonomous, apolitical art, made in a historical moment when Korea was anything but. 

Bernard Frize, Les 26 @ Perrotin, Avenue Matignon
Installation View

My final stop for the day was a glorious Bernard Frize exhibition at Perrotin on Avenue Matignon. Four floors of Frize's candy coloured stripes in which every stripe is different, every canvas is different and yet, everything is the same. Each painting is a series of nested squares, in which colours are dragged from one square to the next which is, in fact, one layer to the next. Frize has set himself the task of exploring the permutations of colours, squares, paint, and presumably time within rigid frameworks. Like the Dansaekhwa painters, but in a very different way, Frize takes a fundamental principle, and explores how far he can take it. And like his Korean predecessors, his paintings oscillate between very structured, highly constrained forms that enable the aleatory appearances of colour where it is least expected. Each painting is sealed with a resin, making them like table mats - giving them a smooth, mass reproduction feel that opens up another contradiction as it questions the space between art and mass reproduction. 

Erwin Wurm, Tomorrow: Yes @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Erwin Wurm, Tomorrow: Yes , 2026
Installation Taddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Erwin Wurm's solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space was delightful. Visitors were treated to Wurm's familiar sculptures of clothes without bodies, bodies without substance, limbs without torsos in bright and playful, often humorous spirit. Again typical of Wurm's sculptures, in all of the works on display, there was always something sinister lurking underneath the surface joy.

Erwin Wurm, Shadow (Substitutes), 2024

Some of the most delightful of the thirty works on display were the elongated and distorted clothes without bodies, some stretched into two dimensionality. Some exercising clothes, a slouching hooded sweat shirt presented as ghost like forms that were, nevertheless, very much alive. Wurm's clothes are surfaces without insides, and skin without flesh, that simultaneously, have everything to do with the absent human body. Looking at the works, visitors were also reminded of how posture is determined by clothes, and that clothes as a structure give identity, personality, motivation, and behaviour to those who wear them.

Erwin Wurm, Tomorrow: Yes , 2026
Installation Taddaeus Ropac, Pantin

A policeman's uniform and cap, again without substance or third dimension that would be given to it by a body inside draw our attention to the significance of clothing. After having fun with the colorful and dynamic Yellow Bird (Substitutes) and White Bird (Subsitutes), on seeing Regret (Substitutes), 2025 we are reminded of how the power of a man in uniform is only given him by the clothes that shape him. There is nothing substantial about his body, even though we behave towards it as if there is. The man is nothing without a uniform.

Erwin Wurm, Tomorrow: Yes , 2026
Installation Taddaeus Ropac, Pantin

At the entrance to the exhibition, two box people and two awkwardly posed, misshapen, bodyless suits without heads plunge us into a world of obedience and its opposite: individuality. Do we identify with the perfectly pressed, straight back, button down suits or the slouching, slightly goofy and relaxed suits? To which will we conform? A fabricated school house also underlines this idea in a different way by creating a structure into which we can step, but cannot fit. Chairs lined up at desks on walls are not made for humans, but for architectural symmetry. Again, the installation is funny and playful, but with a sinister lining that points to the imperative to conform to structures that disrespect human bodies and individuality. 

Erwin Wurm, Mind Bubbles in Installation
Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

A group of Mind Bubbles hang out together in the third space, with thin legs supporting thought clouds in various postures. The shapes are all at once sensuous - thanks to their bronze material - and fun, the idea of thought bubbles on legs, all with a different personality, a different set of ideas in motion, and somehow dark. The Mind Bubbles point out that we are walking thoughts, that the mind has taken over, and that we are without heart, without spirit, without anything but a head and picket legs. It is also interesting to watch ourselves tempted to anthropomorphize the shapes when the only thing that resembles people are the legs. Different positions of the legs see us attributing human characteristics to each shape, wanting to interact with them. 

Erwin Wurm, Director's Rest, 2023

Ultimately, the exhibition shows the charm of Wurm's sculptures, his commitment to engaging with the history of art - after all, bronze sculpture is as hollow as clothes without bodies, as superficial and perhaps as influential - and his zany vision of the world. While I enjoyed the stroll around these inventive forms, I couldn't help wondering if magic actually extended to profundity.