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. 

Clair-Obscur @ Bourse de Commerce

 

Peter Huyghe, Camata, 2024

Pierre Huyghe's video installation, Camata, 2024 fills the gallery beneath the Bourse cupola for the latest exhibition. Set in the Chilean Atacama desert, the film watches as three solar-powered mechanical arms move around a skeleton from the early twentieth century left lying on the desert floor. Cameras are placed on each arm, one moving on a semi-circular track around the skeleton, one outside the track simply observing, and one inside, probing, peering, and engaging with the skeleton and various glass balls, amulets, and a mirror. Of particular fascination is the film's editing which is done in real time by an AI algorithm. When Camata was shown in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the algorithm was determined by human movement within the exhibition space, but it was unclear if this was also the case in Paris. In addition to being mesmerizing to watch as mechanical arms move around, in and out of close up, themselves fascinated by the skeleton, Camata creates sophisticated dialogues between technology and human, life and death, processes of surveillance and objectification. Similarly, given the age of the skeleton and its enigmatic story, human time is thrust into tension with technological time in the film. A discourse on celestial time also emerges as we watch day turn into night through changing light in the sky, the appearance of stars, and the waxing and waning of sun and moon. Added to these already complex times is the seeming unpredictability of the editing created by algorithms. In keeping with Huyghe's concern for the inexplicable, for the blurring of boundaries between machine and human, Camata sits somewhere between science fiction and a scary reality in which machines very quickly take on human qualities. 

Sigmar Polke, Axial Age, 2005-2007

Also challenging boundaries between human and celestial, as well as having interesting things to say about time, is Sigmar Polke's cycle Axial Age. The installation consists of nine panels made with varying techniques and media from Antiquity through contemporary, including acrylics and toxic, artificial pigments. The result are a series of transparent panels resembling discoloured stain glass windows, "graffitied" by time. The panels bring to mind sacred images, speaking to an era that has been desecrated, and simultaneously, rescued from the dustbins of history.

Philippe Parreno, La Quinta del Sordo, 2021

Philippe Parreno recreates Goya's black paintings in, La Quinta del Sordo, 2021, a film that underlines the darkness of Goya's paintings. As the camera moves into tight closeup, the viewer feels intimately connected to the melancholy faces and the frescoed works. Sound is key to Parreno's re-presentation, as the environment of the recreated space dominates the soundtrack. We hear mechanical sounds, crying, light gurgling water, moaning. Once again, the past (images) and the present (sounds) come together on these sensuous walls, seen lovingly through Pareno's camera. As the film progresses, the light changes, becomes progressively brighter until the camera and light together remove the images and reduce the paintings to surfaces. Then we see shadows of leaves from a tree outside a window falling on an abstract painting. Parreno's film was actually one of the only ones in the exhibition which is directly and obviously about light and darkness, as it quite literally brings the ghosts of the past out of the shadows, into the light of the present. 

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1990 

I was also thrilled to see a few pieces by Robert Gober in the first floor galleries as he is not an artist that we often see in Europe. Gober's unique installations of amputated limbs, in the case of those on display here, trapped in a suitcase, descending in a glass case are always emotionally moving, and simultaneously, somewhat scarey. A work in beeswax and human hair shows a pillow merged with a torso, one side a man, the other a woman. The disfiguratioin of both bodies and objects, the loss of boundaries between the two, making the piece surreal, and provocative. Gober's surreal objects show the sad, desperate deformation of humanity. 

Alina Szapocznikow, Fiancé folle blanche, 1971

There were lots of other works in the exhibition, many of which I could and would love to write about here if space permitted. But I will just mention the few pieces by Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish sculpture whose work was new to me. Szapocznikow made incredibly powerful depictions of women's entrapment and enchainment to male sexuality. A work such as Fiancé folle blanche, is reminiscent of a small statuette that could be placed on a wedding cake. For all its critique of heterosexual relations, the woman is as happy in her naked pose with a penis as her support, as the penis is happy with her embrace. There is no sense in which the woman is a victim to the male organ. But still, we can't help wondering if she had any choice.

Clair-Obscur is another sprawling exhibition loosely cohered around a theme that itself moves from clarity to obscurity across three floors and a range of media at the Bourse de Commerce. And like previous of the Pinault collection's themed exhibitions, Clair-Obscur contains some exceptionally strong works and others that pale, mainly due to their uncertain relevance to the exhibition. Similarly, because a number of the films are long, and reveal themselves over time, it is an exhibition that is difficult to appreciate in one visit. That said, the richness of some of the works make for a rewarding few hours.