Matisse, 1941-1954 Grand Palais

Henri Matisse, Spray of Leaves, 1953

I imagine that most people will be familiar with the odd Matisse painting, even if they didn't know it before going to the exhibition. It's difficult to visit an exhibition of Matisse's late work without seeing the infinitely reproduced popular art that it has become. That said, there were many surprises, including that the most reproduced were those made in his final years, works that are as interesting or radical as some of the earlier abstract painting. In addition, as a big fan of his studio paintings, as well as his use of colour to explore space and perspective, there are many reasons to brave the crowds at the Grand Palais for this exhibition.

Henri Matisse, Le lanceur de couteaux, 1943/44

Towards the beginning of the period on display at the Grand Palais' exhibition, Matisse was exploring movement, shape, music, and reaching for a  pure visual form. The colours in these paintings and throughout were gorgeous. The purples and pinks, female figures, leaves and other natural growth floating through water were also sumptuous for their expression of movement and dance. Matisse discovered these forms quite early in his career, but it took time to develop them into abstract expressions.

Henri Matisse, Interior in Yellow, 1946

As I say, it was a treat to see the interior rooms in blue, yellow, and red together in one space. The studio interiors are among the most avant-garde of Matisse's work. In them, we see black lines, and the four sides of the frame used to flatten space as well as the canvas. Ultimately, in these works, space is unsettled, difficult to perceive, making it a challenge to comprehend the spatial logic. It's interesting to think of these works in relationship to Picasso's work of the same period in which he is uses painting to tell a narrative. In a similar, but very different foreshortening and stacking of space, Matisse simply plays with perception. In many of the interior studio paintings, there is a window, open or closed, that nevertheless does not extend the space beyond the room. Windows work to put any realist space on the same plane as the represented interior. Alternatively, the windows might be paintings, and in the famous Red Studio we know this to be the case. In many of the interior spaces, there is also often a woman sitting, but she is also marginalized, even to the point where her face is behind a plant. Thus, it is not the human in the image who is important, but how bodies are organized within space.

Henri Matisse, Nus bleus, 1952

Though the colourful cut outs by nature are most familiar from reproductions, it was fascinating to be with them thanks to their sheer size and grandeur. Even a work such as The Snail and The Sheaf (1953) which is on permanent display at Tate Modern was impressive when together with other works of its size, including the stained glass windows. The final room of the exhibition gathered together silhouette cutouts in blue, including the four Blue nudes. It was a breathtaking close the exhibition. Thanks to these exquisite images, the finsal two rooms were intimate and expressed the artist's innovation. Seeing Matisse return to his lifelong interest in movement, form, and the role of the female figure in the search for purity of expression was fascinating.

Henri Matisse, Grand Visage, 1952

Lastly, also impressive was Matisse's lifelong obsession to find this pure, unencumbered form of visual expression. His journey through paint, paper cut outs, charcoals, illustrated albums, stained glass windows, in search of some kind of transcendence was fascinating. The search extended to his interest in music, the connections between jazz and painting, of course, the freedom of jazz. He is quoted as stating that he was looking for  this liberation in the lines and shapes and the expression of movement in the large works. However, it's not always easy to see the search in what can appear to be more decorative (hence their reproduction. In dots and stripes, grids and patterns, all disturbing space in the modernist paintings, the search is clearly identifiable.

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 Frize 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 Frize, Les 26 @ Perrotin, Avenue Matignon
Installation View

My final stop for the day was a glorious Bernard Frize exhibition at Perrotin on Avenue Matignon. Four floors of Frize'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. Frize 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, Frize 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.