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. 

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. 

Eva Jospin, Grottesco @ Grand Palais

Eva Jospin, Grottesco
Installation view @ Grand Palais

Eva Jospin's solo exhibitioin, Grottesco at the Grand Palais is like no other. It is mesmerizing, amazing, and beguiling all at once. Jospin creates worlds, otherworlds, from cardboard, embroidery, shells, beads, and other delicate materials. The typical way to describe Jospin's work is that she creates forests, but there is something more going on here. The creations may be forests, but they are also like lost, forgotten planets. In some of them, it is as though the ocean was once there, but over time, has dried up, or moved elsewhere. The cardboard creations are like the remnants of a landscape left behind after a millennium of erosion through weathering. In this sense, they are ruins, complete with wild plants growing—plants made out of cardboard—as the only signs of life. But then, we see a hole, or an arch, tiny seashells crusting its (cardboard) contours, and we wonder if something might be living inside?

Eva Jospin, Promontoire, 2024

For all of the shapes and strata, steps and structures created through cardboard, we lose sight of the material. Even though it is everywhere. Cardboard is left behind in our minds as we wander through these mysterious wonderlands. The highly flammable and vulnerable material is forgotten as we look at structures in which we are not simply reminded of towers of babel, river beds, sinewy overgrown onetime riverbeds, and even a pantheon. We actually see them.

Eva Jospin, Duomo, fragment

Everything that these mythical creations are, they are also not. At the same time that they are not quite forests, they are also like forests. One thing I really enjoyed about the exhibition was how people were able to wander in and around the exhibits. In spite of their fragility, people walked inside, moved up close enough to examine the threads wrapped around a pylon, or the shells dotting a ceiling. And once there, up close, in tight with the works, we cannot help but be amazed at the incredible workmanship in each piece. The ability to transform an everyday packaging material into something so exquisite left me awestruck. Of course, Jospin is not the first artist to use cardboard, but the detail and the transformation into something unrecognizeable makes these works unique.

Eva Jospin, Diorama, 2025

Jospin refers to her works as dioramas. Pleasure gardens, or espaces de folie, resembling both the Greek Nymphaeum and the 19th century diorama. They are not only about the past, but they engage with something on the edge of the present; and they are simultaneously forward thinking. Their likeness to dioramas means that they also invite movement. Certainly, people kept moving around the works, not just in close, but in the case of the Duomo, a space into which we are invited to enter, we go in, move from wall to wall, falling into the world that might be an underground or underwater excavation, or equally belong to another planet. The movement in and around the works is part of them, and their invitation inside ushers us into another world.

Lastly, it must not be overlooked that Jospin's exhibition is next door to Claire Tabouret's designs, sketches, and plans for the new windows in Notre Dame Cathedral. Though the two exhibitions may seem to have little in common, the fact that both are creating mythical, mysterious, otherworldly spaces that draw attention to centuries of devotion, makes them comfortable neighbours in this latest installment at the Grand Palais. 

The House on Utopia Parkway, Joseph Cornell's Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson

View of exhibition from opposite side of rue de Castiglione

Gagosian has outdone itself, yet again, with an exquisite exhibition in its rue de Castiglione window. Filmmaker Wes Anderson has recreated Joseph Cornell's studio in which he lived and worked until his death in 1972. The studio was in the basement of his mother's house in Queens where he lived. Cornell was known in his neighborhood as the solitary figure walking the streets of Queens and sifting through odds and ends in flea markets and antique shops. He was obsessive, and meticulous, a man who created beautiful worlds that meant everything to him. He may have been a recluse and somewhat of an oddball, but as a collector, an archivist of memories and emotions, and creator of curious worlds inside boxes, his work also enjoyed an enormous influence on mid-century American art. 

Installation View Gagosian Gallery, rue de Castiglione

Anderson's installation—done together with some of his longtime collaborators—is not the studio itself, rebuilt and transposed to Paris, but a recreation. Some of Cornell's possessions are too fragile to move, and others not available, so Anderson remade these objects as close to the original as possible. That said, a number of Cornell's most well known boxes, themselves now archival objects, are in the display. I must say, knowing the sheer amount of junk that Cornell kept in the basement, I was expecting his studio to be messier, more like Francis Bacon's than Cezanne's orderly arrangement of objects. But, of course, Cornell's studio as represented in this exhibition, was scrupulous, with every object in a box, labelled, ordered, neatly stored and within easy access. In addition, Cornell's tools and materials—glues, brushes, pliers, and metal wash basins—looked as though they were waiting to be used. 

Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, 1936

For me and my students, Cornell is known for his found footage film, Rose Hobart (1936) one of the earliest examples of surrealist collage on film. Cornell took images of the actor Rose Hobart from a B-movie adventure, and re-edited them into a hommage to the actor, replaced the soundtrack with Brazilian samba, slowed it down, and projected his 19 minute film through a blue filter. The film says everything about the eccentric Cornell who was fascinated from a distance with the exoticism of film, the eroticism of the star, and his drive to creatively reconceive the world as the rest of us saw it.

Installation view with reflection of Gucci sign

The most glorious thing about this exhibition was how the installation became a repetition of Cornell's boxes. Viewers peered in through the gallery windows at all the objects, drawings, and everything in its place in the same way that we would before his boxes. Along with some of Cornell's most well-known boxes—Lauren Bacall and the medicine cabinet—there were film cans, photographs, drawings, boxes waiting to be filled, pictures from books, books with the pictures town out, pieces of wood, iron, biscuit tins, scrap books, little bottles, jars, baskets—all the bits and pieces that would eventually make their way into Cornell's boxes. As I peered through the windows of the gallery on a bitterly cold January 2, hoards of tourists walked past, their legs and feet reflected in the window together with the exquisite tiles of the arcade. Further complicating the view into Cornell's studio is the reflection of the Gucci hoarding on the building construction on the opposite side of the street. This Gucci kind of consumerism would be the antithesis of everything Cornell valued: his love of things thrown away, deemed to be of no value to anyone else, but of great value to him. The forgotten, that which has been left behind by capitalism and the drive to entertain - like the genre actor Rose Hobart—was his treasure trove. 

Installation view @ Gagosian Gallery

Cornell never left America, in fact, he rarely ventured far from New York. But, he was the sort of person who had a voracious appetite for the world, for things, for adventure. National Geographic magazines, Baedekers, well-read and loved books, films watched, these were the source of Cornell's fascination for the world. He knew Paris from the movies, fellow artists, and from encyclopaedias, books, and magazines that he found in junk sales, so I am sure, he would have been tickled to see his work on display through a prominent city window. That said, I can't imagine that he would have felt comfortable on rue de Castiglione, just up from the Place Vendôme with Napoleon looking down on him. What Cornell would have thought aside, well done Wes Anderson and Gagosian, for inviting us to peek into the past, so lovingly recreated, as Cornell did his boxes, amid the freneticism of contemporary Paris. 

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need @ Galerie Continua

Berlinda de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Berlinde de Bruyckere's exhibition at Galerie Continua in the Marais is an absolute must see, standing out from plethora of great exhibitions in Paris this Autumn. The work arouses a complexity of emotional and visceral responses with its raw, confrontational sensuality. Wax sculptures of legs below the knee, discoloured skin, aging toenails, cloaked in animal hide, covered in tufts of hair, placed under a bell jar, standing on an old table. A piece such as City of Refuge I (2023), like much of her work, is repulsive and fascinating, clearly fabricated, yet hauntingly real, too close for comfort, yet intimately familiar, sequestered inside a bell jar. The fleshy, disintegrating limbs, body flanks, and sculptures of branches that could also be legs, are sinewy and seductive, pulling us both closer in and forcing us, unwillingly, to step back.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, City of Refuge I (2023)

Need, the title of the exhibition itself is provocative, suggesting desire, compulsion, the craving for physical intimacy, and the repugnance of the body in all its nakedness. And yet, the sculptures are also like bodies, discovered after a long time, rotting, in the cellar after being dismembered by a serial killer. In this sense they cry danger and a ghostly presence of an unknown, but intriguing past, haunted by death. The need of an internal, living disequilibrium together with that of a death awaiting explanation, are pressed together under the bell jars. Their apparently aging plinths and tables making the forms everyday, familiar. In spite of their rich sensuousness, their provocation of much more than sight, they maintain a mystery and something never able to be explained.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Many of the limbs, slices of flesh, or whatever they are, are bound in string, like meat, ready to be sold, eaten, put in the oven. In this, they remind of Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, 1655. But because they are also always on a little plinth, not hanging from meat hooks, the objects function differently. That said, while not on exhibition at Galerie Continua, de Bruyckere has made works that are hung from hooks, as if in an abattoir. But the sculptural objects on display at Galerie Continua, looking like slices of flesh, draped in an exotic fabric, again, make them something to revere, giving them a strange and rare beauty. 

Placing the "specimens" of an unknown origin under glass domes of course complicates their significance. This familiar way to display precious and delicate objects signals that they need to be protected, kept. The bell jar which traditionally maintained a controlled environment, also says that the exotic is something worth looking after. Simultaneously, on display, they draw our eye to their importance as something to be looked at, specimens under glass to be ogled. Today, the glass dome also works very well to create a shine on its surface, making the object underneath appealing, valuable, to be looked at, as if to arouse our need to consume.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Also on exhibition in Need are a number of pieces hung on the wall, looking like wood, merged with flesh, as if the two had grown together. The objects are always in heavy old wooden frames, often with a mirrored backing, or pieces of paper stuck to the back. They reminded me of fragments found in a forest, still alive, or dead and being preserved using flesh for unknown reasons. Other pieces were titled, Plunder, Madonna, and Archangel — suggesting religious connotations, such as sacrifice and worship. 

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Torn cloth in heavy frames likewise reminds of liturgical cloaks, resonating with the drapery around pieces of flesh. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, de Bruyckere installed an exhibition in the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, bringing presence to the pastness and fragility of those involved in the Christian narrative. The fragility and tenderness, vulnerability and suffering of fallen trees, translated into wax by de Bruyckere are nevertheless not referring to institutional doctrine, but rather, the sculptures put human emotion and need at the centre of a religious experience. Even though the religious references are more subtle in the exhibition at Galerie Continua, the power of the emotions elicited by de Bruyckere's sculptures is similarly overwhelming. 

Minimalism @ Bourse de Commerce

Robert Ryman, Untitled, 2010-2011

The Pinault collection's current exhibition, in spite of its title, is not so much an exhibition of minimalist art as it is a display of works that embrace the themes and concerns of minimalist art from the 1970s onwards. Among a handful of what we know to be minimalist works are an array of art privileging light, surface, the monochromatic, balance, the grid and so on. Of the several of works made under the minimalist umbrella, a sculpture by Donald Judd, a lovely Brice Marden encaustic, Number (1972), and some Japanese Mono-ha pieces stood out.

Robert Ryman, District, 1985

For me, the highlight of the exhibition was seeing Pinault's collection of Robert Ryman's paintings, most of which I would consider to be his least minimalist works. The one piece which might be described as minimalist is the sculptural District (1985) from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. On walking into the Bourse, the first works, hung along the right wall, were Ryman's final Untitled (2010-2011) paintings. White vibrates over blue, red, yellow, green, orange and purple. White is never as pure as it makes out, white is never as pure as we think it is. For Ryman, white is tinged with blue, even when only whisps of blue can be seen on the canvas as the first of his Series paintings from 2004 also on display in the first room. For Ryman, blue is the DNA of white. The frame and the edges are as important as the center of the painting, so in the Untitled (2010-2011) works, it doesn't surprise to see white falling out of the square, the frame a misshapen orange and green and blue. Coloured ground and a trapezoid shape of white, edges of white on coloured backgrounds remind of and may be influenced by Rothko, the space of the picture in a single colour influenced by Malevich. Thus, this late series might be seen as an ode to the history of twentieth century abstraction, from black square to colour field.

Agnes Martin, Blue-Gray Composition, 1962

A small painting by Agnes Martin, Blue-Gray Composition, in the upstairs galleries was exquisite, like nothing I had ever seen Martin paint. In it, she considers horizontal lines, interacting with a vertical line down the middle, a window of white at the centre, as if it is an opening for light falling through space. I have always thought of Martin's pencil lines as far from minimalism because they are hand drawn, tending to slight falters as the hand moves down and across the canvas. Martin's works are about looking, how we engage with a painting, seeing it from afar, then moving forward to be met by a completely different painting. They are delicate and fragile, intimate like the line drawn in pencil, quite at odds with the industrial constructions of Donald Judd and painted geometrical shapes by Frank Stella's.

On Kawara, Today, Sept. 13, 2001.

 

 

The vitrines around the inner circumference are filled with a selection of On Kawara's Today series in which he paints a date in white on black background, accompanied by a box with a newspaper clipping from the given date. The works are mesmerizing because we read the newspaper clippings as showing what is important to that culture on that day. For example, on September 13, 2001, an article from The New York Times bemoans the chaos brought to the stock exchange thanks to the collapse of the Twin Towers. The accompanying image of burning twin towers is horrifying, making the responses of the stock exchange as reported in the NYT disturbing. The newspaper cuttings in boxes are also fascinating for their historical value. It seems so long ago that newspaper clippings would be archived in a box.

Meg Webster installation in the rotunda

The rotunda is occupied by installations of San Francisco artist Meg Webster. Sensuous sculptures made of natural fabrics, materials and foliage. The deliciously soft scent of honey emanating from a wax piece with traces running down an uneven surface, textured and tempting touch, was compelling. There was something perfect about the shapes made from salt, red ochre, and foliage, again engaging senses other than sight. Webster is interested in experimenting with how these landforms resonate with their materials, reminding us also that the structures of the natural world are also very much fabricated.

Susumu Koshimizu, From Sculpture to Surface—A Tetrahedron, 1972/2012

In the upstairs galleries, the works became more adventurous, departing from the minimalist aesthetic, often through introducing natural materials. Although it was interesting to see works by Hans Haacke, Dorothea Rockburne, and Jackie Winsor, these later examples of post-minimalist installation and sculpture didn't seem to belong as forcefully as others (such as those of Meg Webster). Ultimately, the exhibition offers a sweep through some key minimalist themes, at times, at the expense of coherence. That said, Pinault's collection is so impressive, and the fact that a single collector has work enough to fill four floors with minimalist-related art is mindboggling.

Corps et âmes @ Bourse de Commerce / Pinault Collection

Duane Hanson, House Painter, 1984-88

It was wonderful to be back at the Bourse de Commerce in the final days of their summer show, Body and Soul. The place was teeming with visitors, in fact, I have never seen it so full on a Friday afternoon. It seems that visitors to Paris have discovered this, one of Paris's newest cultural pearls. Because of the crowds, I skipped the rotunda sound installation in which visitors sat in silence watching bowls floating on water. Instead, I followed the fascinating exhibition of Ali Cherri's sculptures in the twenty-four vitrines around the perimeter. Cherri's provocative sculptures begun from recycled archaeological finds—broken limbs, scarred bodies, decapitated heads—made for unsettling viewing. In this installation, Cherri brings the past into the present and reminds his viewer of the imbrication of spoils of war, history, and culture. 

Ali Cherri, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), after Velázquez, 2022

Two films by African American artist Arthur Jafa were among the most powerful works in the exhibition. Downstairs Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) is a collage of clips showing the history of African American life in the twentieth century. Weaving together recognizeable figures in often quoted images such as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Barack Obama —all of whom claim a message of love, tolerance, inclusivity—and footage of anonymous men, women, children being beaten, dragged along the street, and terrorized by the police. Love may well be the message, but the language of death is the only vocabulary American society knows when speaking to African Americans. Kanye West's Ultralight Beam overlays the images, successfully moving the viewer from the emotive power of cultural icons through the horror of police brutality towards African Americans. More than one person (including me) left the screening room in tears.  

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, (2021)

Jafa's Aghdra (2021) in the ground floor galleries was more enigmatic, but still overwhelming in a different way. Slabs of what look like broken bitumen (digitally generated) roll around where we expect to see ocean waves under a rising sun, a setting moon in a clear sky. The black sludge or magma travel towards us, threatening to envelop us, and then they rise so high in the frame that they covers the sky. From where we sit, there is no escape once the horror of this stuff threatens to bury us. The message is clear: the sea is not the same phenomenon for everyone. We think of it as a place to go for a holiday and dream and fall in love. For African Americans, the sea is the reminder of transportation and colonialism, enslavement and entrapment to the designs of a perpetrator. 

Philip Guston, Lamp, 1974

Though it was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition, it was not clear to me how Philip Guston's Lamp, 1974 was related to the themes of body and soul, the exhibition title. While Guston's work from this period is known for its conversation on questions of racism, Lamp is more abstract, discoursing on looking and reflection in absent space. Painted in Guston's signature pinks with flecks of grey, it is a luscious painting in which brushstrokes enigmatically travel around the canvas, thus the room in which the lamp sits. Light spills out of the lamp, but there is nothing to illuminate. The lampshade with its caresses of white and grey, glimmers of peppermint green, verges into being an image on a wall. It is a painting about light in which nothing is illuminated, there is nothing to see in an empty room, thus turning the attention back on the viewer as the one who is looking and looked at. There is a curious red line drawn horizontally through the middle of the painting, like a cord. Is it a trail of blood? Or is it a definition of the wall behind the lamp. It's hard to say. 

Marlene Dumas, Horizon, 2007-2008

In the upstairs galleries, a richness of works is displayed, again with varying degrees of relevance to the title of the exhibition. Standing out for me were works by Marlene Dumas. In a more unusual work, Horizon, Dumas paints the flowers on her mother's grave and thinks of it as a portrait. As if drifting out towards the horizon at the back of the painting, the flowers are framed by the slight hint of a grave. Or perhaps they are in a vitrine, displayed for us to admire as we walk past? The work speaks to questions of death and eternity, suggesting the preservation of life in memory after death. The blue paint is complex and suggests the changing mood of the water into which her mother's memory floats. With Dumas, it's so often about death, looking, and our ultimate blindness.

Corps et âmes, Installation View
Foreground: Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana Noire, 1965

I think I am not a theme exhibition person. With my need for order and coherence, I am always looking for continuity in an exhibition, something much easier to find in an author-centered exhibition. Body and Soul had many breathtaking works—from Man Ray to Mira Schor—but as is often the case, it felt scattered. It's a little difficult to say what exactly the exhibition wanted to show about the body and soul—particularly, as you can see, some of the most impressive works were about the absence of the body. Maybe the problem was the title? If the exhibition had been called something like "Invisible Bodies," it would have made more sense.

Boros Collection Bunker Berlin

Bunker on Reinhardtstrasse

Despite several attempts to visit this space in the past couple of years, last week was my first time inside the Bunker Berlin. Housed in a former Nazi bomb shelter, subsequently converted into a prisoner of war camp by the Soviets and then a techno warehouse night club in the 1990s, the bunker is somehow illustrative of the ever-evolving transformation of Berlin. And no less telling of Berlin as the self-made city of the 2000s, the building was purchased by an advertising executive in 2003 and fashioned into one of the coolest art spaces in town. When Hitler had the bunker built, there wasn't time or money to dig underground, and so the building went upwards. Thick, heavy walls, no windows, one entrance, but the "bunker" would withstand a bomb. In keeping with the aspirations of all Nazi buildings, envisioned for the roof was a statue of the triumphant German soldier. Today, the owner of the building has his penthouse perched atop the bunker; it is somehow in keeping with our times that the capitalist marks his status as the hero of contemporary Germany by placing his abode atop the bunker. Those who have seen Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022) will be familiar with the interior of the penthouse, itself mimicking the aesthetic of the one time air raid shelter. 

Bunker before renovations

A visit to the Boros collection—the advertising executive's private art collection—is an event, a production showcasing contemporary art. We buy a ticket for the privilege to become acquainted with a wealthy person's private collection, not a public musuem. A guided tour is the only way to visit the collection. Somehow, I had the feeling that if visitors were allowed to visit the Boros collection on an individual basis and the building was not so shrouded in history, the art would not be such a big drawcard for the average tourist. But for a look inside the building, visitors are happy to pay the relatively high entrance fee. It is also worth mentioning that the guide who led my tour was very knowledgeable and made the often highly conceptual art accessible to all. The bunker itself has been sanitized in the renovations, retaining the surface of the old walls, but none of the grime and grease of its former uses. The comparison would be the Pinault Collection in the restored Bourse de Commerce in Paris. But whereas Pinault brings works from outside into the exhibitions and installations, he lends work, and has a living breathing collection, Boros is amassing a private collection sealed within the bunker.

Adrian Morris, Filtration Plant, 1974

The art ranges in quality. I will say that much of it seems to have been bought with the space in mind as most of the work is sympathetic to the walls. Though Boros has collected work by a number of well known artists, his acquisition policy is one of buying works in the year that they are made. This results in a lot of contemporary art by artists who are emerging or in the early stages of their careers. That in itself is an admirable policy, but it does mean that the work can be uneven. While some of the work is radical and boundary breaking, other pieces had little resonance.

Anna Uddenberg, Rona's Revenge, 2020

Among the best of the often highly conceptual works on display were Anna Uddenberg's sculptures of women who contort their bodies to get the perfect selfie of their perfect butts. Decked out in BDSM gear, the figures are both fabulous and frightening in their simultaneous subsumption and critique of female identity, usually sexually defined. I was also impressed by Berenice Olmedo's display of mechatronic orthoses (acquired from her onetime work place) on strings, like puppets, dancing, until they fail and fall to the ground. When the orthoses falls, we immediately reflect with empathy on the absent wearer's attempts to walk. While other of Olmedo's work might challenge ableist notions of performance, her works on display in Bunker Berlin are about the resilience and resolve of those who once wore the orthoses.

Berenice Olmedo, Julieta, 2021

Also in the collection were a handful of paintings by a little known British artist, Adrian Morris. Morris's paintings were intriguing on a number of levels, navigating questions of space and looking at space from different angles. Spaces and landscape are seen through windows that appear to be in motion the longer we look at the works. The views from planes and trains or through unidentifiable windows at ambiguous spaces spoke of the shifting meanings of space and our continual reorientation dependent on the time and lens for looking. Morris's work represents the exception to Boros's commitment to buying in the year of execution, and is a welcome addition to the walls of the Berlin Bunker with its current identity as home to a private art colleciton. 

Chiharu Shiota, The Soul Trembles @ Grand Palais

Chiharu Shiota, Uncertain Journey, 2016/2024

Chiharu Shiota's exhibition at the Grand Palais is magesterial. Visitors enter into a haunted space filled with frames of steel boats, and Shiota's signature red yarn creating complex webs of bleeding life in Uncertain Journey (2016/2024). On many levels the weave of red yarn is mesmerizing: most immediately, visitors will be amazed at the amount of work in the sculptures - clearly, the installation is time and energy consuming to put together with threads woven, tied, knotted, strung and entwined to fill the entire room. The threads create a dense, cloud of red, woven together, clinging to walls, sprouting up and around the space. It is as if the web is still in process, still growing, the traces of a creature who continues to work, invisible. For Shiota, the threads are evidence of her existence, her weaving of ideas, of relationships, of memories of the spaces she has traversed. Thus, for Shiota, that creature fabricating this web is us humans, and the work represents the "uncertain journey" of life as we sail around the spaces of our existence. The skeletal boat hulls, as if burnt remnants of some kind of apocalypse, appear to sprout the red woven yarn, like clouds of vapour filling the ten foot high space. At the same time, it is as if they threads are being guided by the boat hulls, pulled on their way to another land.

Chiharu Shiota, Inside-Outside, 2008-2024

The marriage of opposites—objects and installations that can be seen as depictions of creativity and destruction, life and death, possibility and entrapment—is the signature concern of Shiota's work. In Inside-Outside, for example, window frames collected from construction sites for the  rebuilding of former East Berlin in the early 2000s, climb skyward, one on top of the other, sometimes doubled by more windows, into a wall that separates inside from outside. It's impossible to know if one is on the inside or the outside of this wall of windows, what is excluded, what is contained, where one is standing. And even though we are walled in by windows, we know there is an other side. We cannot always see through the windows, or if we do, the image on the other side is blurred, or fragmented so that looking at the window becomes more satisfying than what is on the other side. Such was life in the former East Berlin. Some of the windows are broken, some frames have no windows at all, others are boarded up, the function of what we know as a window has become a thing of the past. None of the windows are open, all are old, deteriorated, more objects to look at than gateways to another world. And so, Shiota transforms the meaning of what we know a window to be.

Chiharu Shiota, In Silence, 2004

Thanks to Shiota's residence in Germany, it's difficult not to think of the Holocaust when wandering through the exhibition. Particularly because she uses the objects that are often found in Holocaust art representations. Old shoes and clothes are scattered throughout the exhibition spaces. And inside (or outside) the windows of Inside—Outside we are reminded of all those windows that don't open. The windows of Auschwitz block 8 that were permanently shuttered in order that the occupants would not see the killings taking place on the other side. Or those windows with their recognizeable frames on the barracks at Auschwitz, rendering life opaque and inevitable for their occupants.

Chiharu Shiota, Accumulation - Searching for the Destination, 2014/2024

In perhaps the most imposing, yet precarious of the eight installations that comprise The Soul Trembles Accumulation - Searching for the Destination sees Shiota put another symbol of the Holocaust to unique use. Old suitcases are suspended form red cords, cluttered together, slowly rising to the heavens. The stairway to heaven is said to be holding memories, experiences, but given their prominence in Holocaust art, we look at Shiota's suitcases and see the dispossessed. The suitcase is not only for those who move around by choice, but those whose lives have been confiscated, their destiny in a suitcase removed forever. I think of how much is held within the suitcase. When we travel, we are separated from our suitcases, they contain everything we need for the time that we are away from home, and yet, we willingly let go of them as we step on a plane. The suitcase, like old shoes, clothes, a burnt out piano, chairs without seats is, all at once, about motion and possiblity of what lies ahead, about new horizons. And in its association with the Holocaust, it is also about death, stagnation, stasis. 

Chiharu Shiota, Accumulation - Searching for the Destination, 2014/2024

Depending on which end we begin our exploration of Accumulation, the suitcases might also be a stairway from heaven to ground, gravity pulling us to a firm place, our own place on earth, thus, fixity. The suitcase comes with us from one world to the next, it is a vessel for all that we want to do in the future, and simultaneously, a memory of the past. For Shiota, the past and future are connected, unsurprisingly, with red thread, the blood running through one generation to the next. 

The Delight of Contemporary Art @ Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce

Maurizio Cattelan, Others, 2011

I took my friend Harriet to see the new exhibitions at the Bourse de Commerce last night. As we walked along the outside of Tadao Ando's concrete cylinder, laughing at some of Bertrand Lavier's objects in the display cases that have been there since the building's days as the Bourse, marvelled at the fresco depicting trade in the colonies, and the magnificent reflections of the early evening sun shining through the latticed roof of the dome, I thought that this magnificent building should be the mandatory first stop on every tourist visit of Paris. Visiting the Pinault collection is pure pleasure. It is, perhaps, the most comfortable and welcoming modern art museum in a major city. It's difficult to describe how delightful it is to wander the exhibitions and the building itself.

Charles Ray, Boy With Frog, 2009

We stopped in front of a Lavier piece of two crystal vases accompanied by the text "only one of these vases is real" to have a long discussion with two other visitors about which they thought was real. Being the know all, I was convinced as soon as I saw the display that the two vases were identical, and Lavier had simply included the text to keep us guessing. As Harriet pointed out, if only one was real, what kind of real would that be? In fact, whether or not the vases were real or fake was not the attraction of the display, but rather, the point of the piece was its play with our heads and temptation into animated conversation with strangers. This level of visitor engagement is maintained throughout the exhibitions on the first and second floors. 

Ryan Gander, With /.../.../..., 2019

I remember a friend bemoaning that she didn't really understand the Urs Fischer statue in the collection's opening exhibition. However, I am pretty sure that a lot of the art on display at the Pinault is not that difficult to "get".  Ryan Gander's stuttering Animatronic Mouse who has gnawed its way through the gift shop wall, or Marizio Cattelan's pigeons looking down from the third floor railing are exactly what they appear to be. The mouse and the pigeons are intruders into the precious world of art, making fun of its seriousness, showing us all that laughter and wonder are valid responses to art. 

Roni Horn, Dead Owl, 1997

The two temporary exhibitions also encouraged a frolick with art, eliciting physical and emotional responses. Roni Horn and Felix Gonzalez-Torres' exhibition on the ground floor created a lovely dialogue between the two artists. My absolute favorite piece was Horn's Dead Owl, 1997. The two fluffy white owls are both adorable and creepy. Their soft silken feathers make them like dolls sitting on their perches. But the title reminds us, they are dead, stuffed animals. The owl was photographed in Iceland, a country for which Horn has an ongoing fascination. But as an American, I am sure, Horn is aware of their symbolism within Native American culture as harbingers of death. Making the owls even more cuddly and curious, but simultaneously, unnerving is the fact that when standing in front of them, our eyes never rest. We constantly flit between one photograph and the other, comparing them, looking for differences, as if expecting them to reveal the answer to a puzzle. Of course, walking from side to side, the eyes of both owls never leave us, following our every move. Being watched by art works is always the most unsettling experience in a museum.

Charles Ray, Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley, 1992

There is a large Charles Ray exhibition in the level two galleries, complementing the Centre Pompidou's spring exhibition. Ray also has three pieces under the dome in the main circular gallery: a child, himself and an old, reconstructed truck. Ray's works are also unnerving, but unlike my experience of the Pompidou exhibition, my resounding response to the pieces on display at the Pinault was his obsession with naked male bodies, especially his own and those of young boys. It's true that a lot of his works re-conceive religious and classical sculpture, they also play with the traditional display of sculpture. In addition, Ray manipulates spaces and size and makes our movement through the gallery visible through the changing size of the sculpted figures when seen from different perspectives. But these works are not only working on an intellectual level. Ray has an obsession with pubescent male bodies and sexual fantasies, and you don't need an art history degree to get that!