Gallery hopping along Avenue Matignon

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

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

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

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

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction, 2018

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

chung sang hwa untitled 82-6-25 1982

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

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

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

Erwin Wurm, Tomorrow: Yes @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

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

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

Erwin Wurm, Shadow (Substitutes), 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Erwin Wurm, Mind Bubbles in Installation
Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

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

Erwin Wurm, Director's Rest, 2023

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

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.