Leonora Carrington @ Musée de Luxembourg

Leonora Carrington, Feeding the Table, 1959

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

Leonora Carrington, Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, 1975

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

Leonora Carrington, Artes 110, 1944

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

Leonora Carrington, The Lovers, 1987

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

Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of Ste Antoine, 1945

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

Leonora Carrington, Mars Red Predella, 1947

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

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

Brion Gysin, Dreammachine, 1979

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

Brion Gysin, Magic Mushrooms, 1961

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

Brion Gysin, Naked Lunch, 1959

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

Brion Gysin, Le dernier Musée, 1973

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

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

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

Normes Corps @ Palais de Tokyo

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

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

Benoît Pieron, Vernis à Ombre, 2026
Installation View

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

Pauline Curnier Jardin, La Colonne della Colombo, 2023

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

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Qu'un sang Impure, 2019

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

Cathy de Monchaux, Maud's Pink, 1999

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