Marlene Dumas, Liasons @ Porte des Lions au Louvre

Marlene Dumas, Liaisons, 
Installation, Louvre

On the wall at the entrance to the Porte des Lions on the west side of the Louvre, Marlene Dumas's nine mask-like faces bid goodbye to those exiting the Italian and Spanish painting halls. Each face is different, wears a different expression, is painted in a different colour, and has a varied resemblance to a mask. The faces are too distant for the visitor to engage with them as they can only be seen from the stairs leading up to Spanish painting, or from below. Thus, while  their appearance as one exits the Porte des Lions is bold and arresting, it is difficult to focus on any one out of the nine.

Marlene Dumas, Alpha's Light, 2025

Each face or mask fills its frame, as if replicating a cropped photograph, and typical of Dumas's faces, all identity is removed. The faces have no gender, sex, colour or identity. Rather, they are yellow and blue and green and orange, black and brown. Some are obviously masks, such as that on the right in the middle, or the blue one above it which looks like a horror movie mask, without a living being behind it. Others such as the blue on the top left is visibly traumatized with its distorted mouth and eyes rolling upwards. One way to approach them is to see each expressing an emotion: the pale blue in agony, yellow on bottom left could be a lightness, the black is alarmed, the orange on the right, suspicious and so on. 

Marlene Dumas, Red Rust, 2025

Liasons is also a comment on the history of the Louvre and, the inevitable traumatization that comes with colonization of cultures and identities. It is no secret that the Louvre is a magnificent collection filled with pilfered and misappropriated works. As the final stop on a tour through the history of Western European art, as its title suggests, Liasons comments on the connections, the coming together of styles and mutual influence over centuries. It sits in a gallery named Galerie des Cinq Continents, it creates a dialogue between five continents, specifically, creating connections between works from Africa, Asia, The Americas, Europe and Oceania. And given Dumas's not always joyful masks, all of the suggested emotions are on display from around the world.

Marlene Dumas, Bronze Moss, 2025

The faces can also be ominous and unsettling - they are not all celebration. Similarly, the mask-like appearance is unsettling: we are immediately prompted to ask what is lurking underneath the surface, like all of the hidden stories and meanings of art in the Louvre. Dumas says in interview that there is also a relationship to the sculptures in the Louvre's collection - and mentions Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Such sculptures are emotions in motion, whereas Dumas's paintings are very much emotions frozen behind masks. We are left to wonder what caused the emotions of faces with little agency on a wall at the exit.

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.