Andreas Gursky, Paris, Montparnasse II, 2025 @ Gagosian

Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse II, 2025

From every angle, Andreas Gursky's new work, Montparnasse II,  is stunning. The large photograph is now on exhibition at Gagosians small gallery space in rue Castiglione, first seen on approach through the large street window. Walking through the arcade, passers by are able to peer through the window and, from a distance, see through to the windows in Montparnasse II. Inside the gallery, it is difficult not to be pulled into the orbit of the world inside the building, even though we cannot see inside. We remain at a distance from the apartments through the windows, no matter how close to the photograph we step. This is the first arresting realization about Montparnasse II: we are looking at a mise-en-abime of windows. Windows within a window of the photograph, itself able to be seen through the window of the gallery. 

Installation View @ 9 rue de Catiglione

Immediately, I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, as we, the viewer take the place of Jeffries with his telescope, straining to peer inside the windows on the other side of the street. In Gursky's windows we see a man sitting at a desk, his hand on chin, a woman sitting at her table. I am mesmerized by books on the sill, arrangements of flowers, a doll's house and stuffed toys, photographs, CDs, a lamp, a radio able to be seen in different windows. Each window tells of the individuality of a person, no matter the conformity of the modernist building they inhabit. Some of the most beautiful spaces—or windows—are covered with a curtain, blue, green, purple, pink, cotton, velvet, and plain white blinds. Other windows are like abstract paintings as reflections are caught on the window creating a soft pattern of moving shapes. Still others are blackened out completely, as though we are in the movie theatre waiting for the film to begin.

Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse II, 2025

When I wasn't imagining that I was looking through Jeffries' telescope, I could have been looking at a film strip, or a photograph contact sheet of thumbnails, some frames similar to others, but every one different. Again, I was reminded that even if everyone has the same-sized window, even if they live in the uniform Immeuble d'habitation Maine-Montparnasse in the rue Commandant-Mouchotte, there is nothing instrumentalized about everyday life. The functional building designed by Jean Dubuisson is a characteristic French postwar mass housing solution, built from 1959 to 1964 at a time when housing was in high demand. To me, the photograph shows that the human will always be in tension with the systematic organization of the built environment.

Gursky in the making of Montparnasse II

Like many of Gursky's photographs, Montparnasse II raises questions about the reality of the image. We believe what we see to exist, even though we know it can't be real. Here the original building has lost its drabness and uniformity, clouds removed, the length impossible for a camera lens to capture. Like, and very different from the first iteration of Montparnasse (1993), Montparnasse II  is a composite manipulated photograph, made from approximately one thousand photographs, taken from eight different positions along a terrace on opposite buildings. Curtains have been coloured, windows retouched, the sky brushed out. Thus, over time, recognizing that I am looking at an aestheticized image, I started to wonder. Behind all the excitement of seeing Gursky's brilliant work in which he pushes photography technology to its limits, there are a number of darker questions lurking inside these windows.

Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse, 1993

Whose apartment am I looking inside? Did Gursky obtain permission or is he, and am I, a voyeur? Turning peoples' lives into objects? I start to wonder who lives in the building? How many of the occupants have changed since the 1993 photograph? How much is the rent? Is it subsidized? And as is my number one question when it comes to all Paris buildings: are the walls thick or thin? How noisy is it on the inside? What is the reality of life inside this building that I am looking at? These details of daily life are hidden from the viewer of the large glossy print because the building is veiled in the beauty of Gursky's photographic genius. 

There is also the question of time passing: technology is now more sophisticated than it was in 1993. The image is more precise, the developing techniques more sophisticated. Gursky emphasizes thie element of the work, it is a temporal project, functioning in history, and yet, we see it only as a spatial depiction. The most interesting time passing comes as I strain to see inside the windows, voyeuristically, even though I am frustrated, and there is little to see. This is the time across which the narrative of Gursky's photograph is written—my inability to look into the depth of other people's lives from behind windows inside windows, framed by a photograph.

Imi Knoebel, etcetera @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Imi Knoebel, 

The website blurb for Imi Knoebel's etcetera at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery doesn't offer many ways into the exhibition. It says that his "abstract art investigates the fundamentals of painting and sculpture through an exploration of form, colour and material. [Knoebel's] aim is to uncover the basic material elements of art, which he locates in the simple interactions between humans and the essential conditions of our world." Isn't this what every abstract painter does? And couldn't we say this about any number of abstract works? It seems such a generic and ungenerous way to describe Knoebel's abstraction. Because, in these paintings, he is doing something quite unique. 

Imi Knoebel, CIII (2024)

Knoebel paints on metal most of the time, creating a surface that is fast, transparent and, in many cases, luminous. The literature references Malevich, but the artist whose work most resonated in my mind as I wandered the three floors of this exhibition was Ellsworth Kelly. Knoebel may have little interest in Kelly's work, but these energetic works are, at times, exploring some of the same parameters of painting. Knoebel's paintings challenge perception and our trust in what we see, in how we see and, much of the time, this is achieved through colour. At a distance from works in the main gallery, they shift in size and shape depending on where we stand. The edges of the metal support appears to weft and warp, squares becoming trapezoids, quadrilaterals with non-parallel sides. Up close, I tried to decipher the exact shape of the support, often in vain. That said, there are works for which the aluminium has obvious non-parallel sides, even if, from some angles, they appear as square.

Imi Knoebel, LXIV (2023)

The markings are also unique in that they are somewhere between expressionist swipes and graffiti markings. There are a lot of lines and strokes, swiping of different colours together as the brush is swept down or across the support. The transparency of paint comes from these very quick strokes, sometimes making shapes, at others, remaining lines. Unlike a lot of abstract painting, it is almost impossible to see something familiar in the surface markings of Knoebel's. Rather, in a more modernist tradition - perhaps more reminiscent of Philip Guston than Malevich - we see the shapes moving, vibrating, shifting to demarcate foreground and background, left and right of the picture plane. We also see negotiations between figure and ground, as if in a search for balance on the canvas. Strokes become explorations of space as it is drawn thanks to the restlessness of our vision. 

Imi Knoebel, XXXV (2023)

In the absoluteness of their abstraction, we see Knoebel's pictures engaged in questions of structure, how and where to place the line within the four (uneven) sides of a support. Similarly, in the sliding of paint up and down, around, creating shapes, there is an interrogation of what is a brushstroke. At least, he asks, what is its purpose? Where does it begin and end? Is it used to define or to shade? Sometimes the line looks like it might be hieroglyphic, a secret language telling stories for the initiated only. At other times, there is something resembling art brut about the lines, childlike scribbles on paper. And in still other paintings, the graffiti-like language screams a confused expressionism. 

Imi Knoebel, XXXVI (2023)

Not only is Knoebel doing something unique in his paintings, but the works are also diverse. Some are pretty, others harsh, others exploratory. Each has a different tone, depending on the colour and shape, direction, purpose of the line. In the upstairs gallery, smaller works on paper started to resemble indeterminate spaces, rooms, with objects—furniture for example—inside. All of which is to say, I was pleasantly surprised at the freshness of these paintings, to see them embracing so many different languages of abstraction, speaking to different moments in the history of painted abstraction. They are doing a lot more than is claimed in the publicity, making a rewarding visit.

Dans le Flou. une autre vision de l’art de 1945 à nos jours @ Orangerie

This exhibition includes many great individual works, but as an exhibition, it goes in many different directions. It also tends to stay on the surface of the many different, and otherwise rich debates around the blur and indistinct. Inspired by, or more accurately, set in motion by Monet's Water Lillies — because it's the Orangerie, the connection must be made — the exhibition sections move from Monet's blindness, through postwar disillusionment with the precision of modernity, the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, the deception of media and technology, and the uncertainty of abstract expressionism, to the "mistakes" of amateur photography, the blur/screen/hazy/disintegrating image can be connected to a whole lot of motivations in the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Gerhard Richter, Blumen, 1994, CR 815-3

To be sure, as I say, there are some magnificent works in the exhibition. As a Richter fan, I was happy to see a range of his paintings as they are surely central to any exhibition considering blurring and indistinction. Richter's Flowers prompted thought of another theme that could have been added, that of death. Spirits, ghosts, the other worldly and their depiction thanks to photography are a noticeable absence here. The representation of the unseen in the 20th century was inspired by the invention of photography, and it could have been placed as a fulcrum or springboard to cohere the exhibition. As it was, there was a distinct lack of context and comprised a lot of images that shared this element of haziness.

Vincent Dulom, Hommage à Monet, 2024

Some of the individual rooms worked very well. A room called "At the Frontier of the Visible" with works by Vincent Dulom, (Hommage à Monet, 2024), Ugo Rondinone (No. 42 Vierzehnterjanuarneunzehnhundertdreiundneunzig, 1996), Wojciech Fangor (N 17, 1963) was particularly compelling. In this room, the spectator is confronted with the deceptions of the eye. We think of our eyes as seeing things as they are, reality as it is, and yet, as we look at these paintings, they move, shift, vibrate, disappear. In front of these works, we are reminded that vision is as unstable as the world we are looking at. At the same time, each of these works makes a claim for the idea of paint as itself an apparition, something that floats on the surface of a canvas before disappearing. 

Philippe Cognée, Métamorphose I, 2011

If visitors are able to enjoy the exhibition for individual works, Philippe Cognée's Métamorphose I, 2011, is an absorbing and complex work. A large encaustic painting of high rise buildings that Cognée proceeds to go over with a hot iron. The wax melts and with it, the buildings collapse. In a section together with Richter's September 2005, and Thomas Ruff's jpeg ny01.2004, both of which represent smoke pouring out of the World Trade Centre towers, Cognée's painting takes on sinister meaning. Not only does he represent the cities metamorphosing and growing, but the melted wax shows the building and rebuilding of the urbanscape is a destructive measure. 

Gus van Sant, Elephant, 2003

The exhibition closes with a display of fragments from famous films that include some version of the blurry, out of focus, or indistinct. Again, there is no context for the very different examples shown, from Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003) to Hong Sang-Soo's In Water, 2023. Given the centrality of technological images to the notion of the blur, it would have been nice to see more integrity given to these few films by, for example, drawing attention to or at the very least, describing, the very different uses of the blur for these films. All in all, the exhibition is slim on intellectual substance and rich on images, making it disappointing in some ways and a treat in others.