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. 

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.

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. 

Martha Jungwirth, Geh nicht aus dem Zimmer @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Martha Jungwirth's unique abstract paintings are often at odds with what she says about them. The title of the exhibition being a case in point. "Don't leave the bedroom" is the first line of a poem by Joseph Brodsky, about hunkering down and staying home. While her painting is intimately connected to her body and expressionistic, its brilliant colour and sensitive form reaches out to all of us in the world beyond the bedroom.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Jungwirth is also quoted as saying that, for her, painting is about abundance and the plenitude of colour, and while we see this in her use of bright, intense colour, some of her paintings are as spare as any abstract paintings we would ever see. Strokes over brown paper are her signature. On exhibition in the first floor gallery, a burst of yellow paint on clean cardboard is bold and energetic without need for the distraction of other elements. Similarly, though the colours are rich, glorious and often filled with joy, the most striking of her works are arguably those in a single colour palette. The vivid fuschias are resplendent under Thaddaeus Ropac's skylight, but the paintings are also thoughtful and reflective. 

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025
Detail

Perhaps the varied significance of Jungwirth's paintings are not contradictory? Maybe these different aspects of the same painting sit comfortably together? For example, the vivid and confident colours contribute to the paintings' gentle femininity, their inwardness and simultaneous struggle against expectations. They are not only boistrous and bold. Indeed, there is something else about these paintings that makes them soft and delicate, intimate, beyond colour.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Jungwirth says that her painting is intuitive, but what does that mean when translated into paint? She explains it further in this lovely video on the gallery website. Jungwirth literally reacts to something she hears or sees and the emotions flow through her body onto the page or paper. This spontaneity and the resultant traces in paint and pencil that allow us to see the artist's hand at work remind me of Cy Twombly's large canvases, even though the end result of Jungwirth's looks quite different. The similarity is in the intuition that drives the image - looking at brush strokes that resemble writing in paint, we see both artists in process, moving across the support, thinking, improvising, suggesting as they go. The intense coagulations of paint that arise when Jungwirth stops —or perhaps they are the squirts of paint coming from the tube that enable her to begin? —are moments of pause, interruption, and simultaneously, potentially heightened emotion. Similar markings can be found on Twombly's paintings as he moves across and around his canvas.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Even though Jungwirth's strokes are entirely abstract, we see the physicality of the drawing and painting. Witness, for example, the different pressures she applies to the tool, the brush, the dirty finger prints around the edges of the brown cardboard surfaces that she uses as support. In some of the drawings, we also see traces of a face, a body part, an eye, suggestions of a hand. But it's not so much the forms discovered in the drawings as it is the recording of the hand as it moves over a page that centre Jungwirth's painting and drawing in her body. It's as though we are watching the body move, as though she translates her inner responses to events into images. Perhaps, even more than can be said of Twombly's paintings, Jungwirth's are made to be felt, sensed, before they are intellectually understood.

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The paintings on display at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery are inspired by the Brodsky poem, inspirations which then appear in drawings, doodlings made at home, in front of the television, showing current events, others' artwork. The drawings are Jungwirth's intuitive response. She calls the drawings diaristic, made by only half looking at the paper. Jungwirth draws and paints on paper, meaning that the works are fast, and enjoy a fluidity thanks to the even surface of the cardboard / paper. In this, the paintings themselves are like drawings, immediate, with minimal temporal duration, expressions of the body. They are in this sense, automatic writing in paint. Her paintings are marks that arrive before consciousness.

Georges de la Tour, Entre Ombre et Lumière @ Musée Jacquemart-André

Georges de la Tour, Le nouveau né, c. 1645

It was no surprise to see the extraordinary creations in and of light in Georges de la Tour's paintings now on exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André. De la Tour has a reputation as the seventeenth-century master of artificial light. Even if his paintings are rarely shown, the proliferation of copies and fakes makes them ironically familiar. Other than his crafting of light, perhaps the most exciting element of these paintings was the exaggerated intimacy of the scenes, the way that figures hovered around candle or torch light in small, enclosed spaces, always at night time, always in meditative poses. Even when the figures are in action, they are stopped still, reflecting, thinking, as if caught in a photograph. 

Georges de la Tour, La Madeleine Penitante, c. 1635-40

There was something about these paintings that made me see them as well ahead of their time. The use of light as more than illumination of a scene, often becoming the very subject of the scene, such that many other details of the paintings fade into the background. The fact that all the women, whether it is a religious figure or a peasant, look to be the same model hardly matters once we are pulled into the private world of her thoughts, effulgent in an illuminated space. That said, their pensive faces and often deliberately positioned hands are quietly expressive, even if we cannot access what those emotions are.

Georges de la Tour, La Femme à la Puce, 1632-1635

As the line between secular and religious becomes blurred in the paintings, it hardly matters if we are looking at the Virgin and St Anne or a pregnant peasant woman, a contemplative villager or a saint, La Madeleine or a prostitute. What matters is that all the figures appear to engaged in a transcendent experience and invite us into their private world. Though de la Tour was clearly a man committed to the scriptures, particularly as they were represented in painting, he was more interested in composition, lighting, and creating internal emotional worlds through soft orange glowing flames. 

Georges de la Tour, Les Joueurs des dès, 1651

So little is known about de la Tour during his lifetime. From records, it is know that he was born and lived in Lunéville, a small town in Lorraine. Where he learned, not just to paint, but to create worlds of mystery and contemplation through candle light, is itself a mystery. While historians continue to debate the unknowns of de la Tour's life, the lack of information also means that we are free to let our imaginations roam as we contemplate the paintings. There is widespread opinion that he must have visited Italy and been exposed to Caravaggio's painting - because of the light - but Caravaggio was doing something very different with light. Caravaggio's light and shadow was conceived and executed to energize, to sweep his figures into scenic action, and create perspectival lines. De la Tour used it for the very opposite reasons: to create secret, inward worlds. I saw a number of other resonances, for example, El Greco's long delicate fingers and hands placed in strategic positions, as well as his figures huddled around a flame in paintings such as An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, 1577-79. 

El Greco, An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, 1577-79

There is also something about these works that made me think that de la Tour was the Manet of his day, painting people on the street as the result of their environment, in unforgiving worlds. His paintings of old peasants against grey backgrounds, in what look to be theatre costumes reminded me of Manet's street portraits. Like Manet, de la Tour seemed to have empathy for those who had been left out of the prosperity of their time, giving them dignity and personality through painting where they may have had little in life.

Georges de la Tour, Vieillard, and, Vieille Femme, 1618-19

Though the Musée Jacquemart-André's exhibition spaces are themselves small and at times too intimate as viewers are squeezing past each other moving between rooms, the hanging of the paintings was quite wonderful. That said, the lighting often conflicted with the light given off by the painting. Each painting has been lit to ensure that the only place from which to look at it without glare is directly in front. However, this was not always possible with the crowds. Nevertheless, a patience with the crowds will bring the rich rewards of these quiet meditative works. 

Philip Guston, L'Ironie de l'Histoire @ Musée Picasso

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969

The recent exhibition of Philip Guston's paintings doesn't explicitly address the "irony" of history that is mentioned in its title, but the connections are clear. At least, there are various possible interpretations, all of which are plausible. Staging an exhibition of Guston's political work at the Musée Picasso, alongside works by Picasso, itself strongly suggests an ironic repetition of history. Though the connection between the two artists is evident, it was brought into the foreground in this exhibition. Guston was influenced by Picasso's deformed and mutilated figures in his depiction of the Nazis' bombing of Guernica, as well as his repeated satirisation of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. When Guston moved to figuration after sixteen years of painting abstraction, wanting to represent the violence of late 1950s and 1960s America, and the absurdity of president Richard Nixon, he had a ready example in Picasso's depictions of the same from thirty years earlier. 

Philip Guston, Poor Richard, 1971

Juxtaposing Picasso's political portraits and Guston's Nixon paintings and drawings, together with some of his depictions drawn from the media representation of the Second World War, the war on America's streets in the postwar period, and the violence of the Vietnam War demonstrates a repetition of history that is logical as well as ironic. Once Guston moves to his representations of white supremacy in the American South and his deformed, grotesque bodies, intertwined in bloody revolt, he expands Picasso's vocabulary. In addition, this connection highlights just how political Guston was. His engagement with the corruption of power in the satirical portraits and drawings of Nixon, especially when his face is one big scrotum and his nose an erect penis, seems as essential to the resistance as marching on the streets. Despite the pushback from artists and critics in his time, Guston's work from the 1960s and 1970s is incredibly radical once he returns to figuration. The return was anything but a turning away from the search for freedom of expression and liberation as some said of these paintings the time. Though perhaps we have to be in an era of explicit American violence all these years later to see the irony.

Philip Guston, Painting, 1954

Included in the exhibition are two exquisite abstract works, hung to illustrate Guston's ties to abstract expressionism. I was drawn to these two works both because they were new to me, but also, because they show Guston's connection to Mondrian. In this work, we see the vibrations and rhythms of Mondrian, as well as the direct, spontaneous expressive brushwork of De Kooning, without the references to self. The Structure of a work such as Painting (1954), its short, thick horizontal and vertical strokes makes the painting appear predetermined. Contrarily, the cloud of red and orange, literally floating on a pink and creamy background gives it a mystery and a surreality. (Note that the reproduction doesn't do the painting justice).

Philip Guston, Large Brush, 1979

Of course, Guston is continually painting himself, if not his personal subjective self. Rather, he is always looking for his self as artist. His persistent question through the exhibition and across his oeuvre is, what is the place of the artist within the idiocy and violence of this country at war? In one of the most disturbing paintings that could well be a self-portrait, a brush is dipped in a saucepan of red paint. It is as though the paint is boiling over, streaming down the sides of the pan as the brush is taken out, getting ready to paint. Of course, the red paint is recognizeable as blood. The painting is disturbing because it brings together the social violence and the artist's responsibility to that same violence, a responsibility taken up in representation. 

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1980

The exhibition finished with a series of works painted between Guston's first heart attack and his death a year later. Guston had a looming sense of his own death, but this didn't stop him painting, it just meant smaller canvases. In his final year, he painted curious, misshapen objects often looking like the spoils of war: bombs, a patched up grey teapot/satchel/elephant, what could be a landmine, all floating in a background of grey paint. To the end, death, violence and the battlefield were the preoccupations of this great American painter.

The greatest irony that will occur to many visitors to the exhibition is still another one. As we watch the United States whither in the face of the current administration's corruption and blatant power grabs, it is for artists to speak truth to power. And ironically, some of the most outspoken critics of current American politics (if we can even call it that as it is more like gangsterism) are the country's comedians. I came away from the exhibition wondering whether more American painters would take up Guston's mantle and speak out against the current regime, thus extending the lineage from Picasso. 

Christopher Wool @ Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill

Christopher Wool @ Gagosian
Installation

The works in this exhibition - many paintings on paper - were quite different from what I associate with Christopher Wool's art. Known for his stencils, screen prints and spray paint, I think of Wool's post-pop conceptual paintings as fast, flat, and without surface texture. By contrast, the small works on display in this latest London exhibition were filled with dense, thick paint in gestural sweeps, curves, and coils. Similarly, in the works exhibited here, Wool ventures beyond his familiar black and white into pink, ochre, grey and sandy. The lyricism and poetry of thick brushstrokes over silkscreen, spraypaint, and stencils make the works closer to expressionism than to pop or conceptual. Indeed, at moments they reminded me more of Philip Guston's early expressionist works and at other times verging into impasto with their thick build up of paint on a fragile surface.

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018

Most of these paintings are reworkings, rewritings, modifications of Wool's earlier works. He takes old editions and in a process of erasure, addition, digital modification, creates entirely new works that are also deep with self-referentiality and self-replication. As if to announce his need to rethink, repeat and simultaneously erase, or make something entirely new of what already exists, Wool has crossed out earlier signatures and dates on the prints and re-inscribed with new date and signature. Such recycling is both like a dance that circles back on an earlier work, and a starting again, revealing obsessions and an announcement that "this is how I have developed as an artist."

Christopher Wool @ Gagosian
Installation

There is also a noticeable theme of doubling, mirrors, repetition and copying being explored in the works on exhibition. Works such as a series of Untitled black oil and inkjets on paper from 2022 explore two halves of the same, though the shapes differ. It is as Wool has folded the print in the middle and pressed the paint across the fold. In other works in which different modes of paint application layer the paper, the lines between two halves are sketchier, but nevertheless visibler. At still other times, coils and curls are painted over the two halves of a page as if to create a shadow between one and the other, though it's not clear which is the object and which the shadow. In a further repetition, the winding, twisting coils of industrial materials made into sculptures can be seen as mirroring the paintings on the wall. 

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2021

As mentioned, also on display at Grosvenor Hill are Wool's winding and coiling sculptures. Coils and loops and twists and turns echoing those made with spray guns underneath paint on the paintings are realized in three dimensions and placed on the gallery floor. The sculptures are fashioned out of found copper-plated steel and bronze. The twists, turns, and knots made me think of the confusion of my mind, moving in multiple different directions, following different rhythms and coming together in a poetic ambiguity. Sitting somewhere between industrially produced and hand made (with welding and obviously shaped), the sculptures are an enigma. But, their communication with the repainted monotypes gives them a sense of a whole they might not have on their own. 

As the press release for the exhibition put it so nicely, Wool is an artist pushing at the edges of abstraction. What wasn't mentioned, however, is his fascination with industrial materials, fabrication, waste, and all the processes between manufacture and demolition that have become so familiar in the twentieth century. I managed to see the Christopher Wool exhibition on its final day, and I am only sorry that I didn't go earlier and get the word out so that more people could have enjoyed it.  

Copyright Images Gagosian Gallery

Bridget Riley, Point de départ @ Musée d'Orsay

Bridget Riley, Cataract 2, 1967

This small exhibition, tucked away in an upstairs gallery at Musée d'Orsay, is a gem. I have to be honest and admit that I have never seen a solo exhibition of Bridget Riley's painting and art work, and likewise am no expert on Op Art. The good news is that my lack of knowledge meant that the exhibition was eye-opening, in more ways than one.

Bridget Riley, Straight Curve, 1963

Riley has often discussed the influence of Seurat's pointillism on her work, particularly, his ability to capture light and shadow through line, his balayé technique and the optical effects of both for the viewer. Seurat was a painter who was interested in how the viewer sees, how to create a harmonious frame through laws of colour and contrast and the ability of colour to irradiate such that the eye perceives light and shadow. The current Riley exhibition expertly demonstrates how she extrapolates his intention, does away with the representational, and elevates painting to an experience of vision through looking at abstract works. Placing some of the Musée d'Orsay's Seurat paintings, sketches, and drawings next to Riley's sketches and fully-rendered paintings was thus not only illuminating, but fully convinced of Seurat as inspiration for the British artist.

Bridget Riley, Untitled, 1979

Standing before these paintings, we quickly recognize that they anticipate us as viewers, playing with our eyes as they move. It's difficult to focus on a single spot because there are no details, just shapes that appear and disappear as we move our eyes around and over the picture plane. Riley's meticulously conceived and executed lines and shapes dance and vibrate, dancing before our eyes. Over time, it's not that something becomes revealed, but that we can no longer look, and must turn away as the painting gives us a headache. At least, this was my experience. The most sophisticated of the works on display do not even need us to move our eyes, but rather, we hold our eyes still when standing in front of a work such as Cataract 2 and the lines and curves vibrate like waves on the ocean, of their own accord. 

Installation View

As is often the case with single artist exhibitions, Bridget Riley, Point de départ offers insight into the complexity and meticulousness, the conceptual sophistication of the artist's work. But it also helped me to see Seurat's paintings from a new perspective. When looking at a painting such as Seurat's Bathers at Asnières, 1884, our attention is fully focussed on the curvature of the backs of the boys on the grass, remembering Seurat's use of white and colour and scrambled brushstrokes to create hazy limits between figure and environment. Next to Riley, Seurat's curves become fascinating, rippling from canvas to canvas, from thenineteenth century painting to the twentieth century abstraction. And when juxtaposed with the Riley paintings influenced by Seurat's The Circus, the harmony and gaity created through opposite colours becomes writ large across Seurat's painting. 

Bridget Riley, Blue Landscape, 1959

As might be expected with a Bridget Riley show, this exhibition is a treat for the eyes. Light and shadow, curves and movement create paintings that dance for us, perform for our eyes, giving us cause to remember the deceptions of vision, the fact that nothing sits still in this world. We are reminded that our eyes operate in a particular way, our retina creating the changing colours and movements, shadows where there is only colour. And maybe in the end, we will ask ourselves if we are seeing things, if things are really as they appear. All this in paintings that are intellectual, revealing, and as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.