Bridget Riley, Point de départ @ Musée d'Orsay

Bridget Riley, Cataract 2, 1967

This small exhibition, tucked away in an upstairs gallery at Musée d'Orsay, is a gem. I have to be honest and admit that I have never seen a solo exhibition of Bridget Riley's painting and art work, and likewise am no expert on Op Art. The good news is that my lack of knowledge meant that the exhibition was eye-opening, in more ways than one.

Bridget Riley, Straight Curve, 1963

Riley has often discussed the influence of Seurat's pointillism on her work, particularly, his ability to capture light and shadow through line, his balayé technique and the optical effects of both for the viewer. Seurat was a painter who was interested in how the viewer sees, how to create a harmonious frame through laws of colour and contrast and the ability of colour to irradiate such that the eye perceives light and shadow. The current Riley exhibition expertly demonstrates how she extrapolates his intention, does away with the representational, and elevates painting to an experience of vision through looking at abstract works. Placing some of the Musée d'Orsay's Seurat paintings, sketches, and drawings next to Riley's sketches and fully-rendered paintings was thus not only illuminating, but fully convinced of Seurat as inspiration for the British artist.

Bridget Riley, Untitled, 1979

Standing before these paintings, we quickly recognize that they anticipate us as viewers, playing with our eyes as they move. It's difficult to focus on a single spot because there are no details, just shapes that appear and disappear as we move our eyes around and over the picture plane. Riley's meticulously conceived and executed lines and shapes dance and vibrate, dancing before our eyes. Over time, it's not that something becomes revealed, but that we can no longer look, and must turn away as the painting gives us a headache. At least, this was my experience. The most sophisticated of the works on display do not even need us to move our eyes, but rather, we hold our eyes still when standing in front of a work such as Cataract 2 and the lines and curves vibrate like waves on the ocean, of their own accord. 

Installation View

As is often the case with single artist exhibitions, Bridget Riley, Point de départ offers insight into the complexity and meticulousness, the conceptual sophistication of the artist's work. But it also helped me to see Seurat's paintings from a new perspective. When looking at a painting such as Seurat's Bathers at Asnières, 1884, our attention is fully focussed on the curvature of the backs of the boys on the grass, remembering Seurat's use of white and colour and scrambled brushstrokes to create hazy limits between figure and environment. Next to Riley, Seurat's curves become fascinating, rippling from canvas to canvas, from thenineteenth century painting to the twentieth century abstraction. And when juxtaposed with the Riley paintings influenced by Seurat's The Circus, the harmony and gaity created through opposite colours becomes writ large across Seurat's painting. 

Bridget Riley, Blue Landscape, 1959

As might be expected with a Bridget Riley show, this exhibition is a treat for the eyes. Light and shadow, curves and movement create paintings that dance for us, perform for our eyes, giving us cause to remember the deceptions of vision, the fact that nothing sits still in this world. We are reminded that our eyes operate in a particular way, our retina creating the changing colours and movements, shadows where there is only colour. And maybe in the end, we will ask ourselves if we are seeing things, if things are really as they appear. All this in paintings that are intellectual, revealing, and as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. 

Tyler Mitchell @ Musée Européen de la Photographie

Tyler Mitchell, Ancestors, 2021

I was excited to see Tyler Mitchell's exhibition at the Musée Européen de la Photographie. Mitchell is a young photographer who has enjoyed a meteoric rise to renown, thanks in large part by a photograph of Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue. The work on exhibition in Paris ranges from film, through portrait photographs and landscapes, to what I will call, memory works in which he places old family photographs on mirrors. These photographs are  particularly sophisticated in their creation of reflective visions that simultaneously look back to Mitchell's own history and draw the present viewer into this history. 

Tyler Mitchell, Riverside Scene, 2021

There is a lot of staging in Mitchell's photographs: it is possible to see that he has spent a long time putting together the mise-en-scène of the image, creating carefully crafted photographs made to look realist. In particular, the portrait paintings with their curtains and backgrounds, poses and performances display the process. The people's poses are often playful and relaxed, with no sense of threat or indication of oppression or a violent history. Of course, this is the point; the figures have taken back the centre of the frame, the look at the viewer, and the narrative told by an image. They are now the protagonists of their own story where once African Americans were excluded from history. The landscape photographs are also powerful because of their appropriation of the pastoral landscape format, inserting African Americans into a space that is not, as Manet reminded us over a century ago, divorced from history as painters such as Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin would have us believe.

Tyler Mitchell, Wish This Were Real, 
Installation

Some of the most powerful photographs were those in which he uses mirrors. A man swimming in a local waterhole reflects a staged portrait of two men that hangs on an opposite wall, one sitting, the other seemingly smoothing down the backgroumnd. Next to the reflected portrait, what looks like a waterlogged object in a small black and white photograph reminds the viewer that these same waters were used for disposing of bodies and erasing traces of violence against the likes of the men in the larger photograph. The man's liberty to swim has been hard won over the course of history. In another photograph, two women, perhaps mother and daughter fix their hair in a mirror, a mantlepiece filled with old photographs of ancestors sits in the foreground. The photograph suggests that the stories of generations are woven into the daily rituals and routines in the present. Metaphorically, the photograph also reminds us that the people remembered on the mantelpiece are always in the foreground of daily life. 

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled. Blue Laundry Line, 2019

Ultimately, while I enjoyed seeing this young photographer searching for ways to represent his people with dignity, joy, and grace, the narrative was a familiar one, putting African Americans into the position so long assumed by white people. Taylor's intention is noble, but the message is not new. With his exploration of different genres, styles, and photographic techniques, the exhibition shows that Mitchell is still searching for his own visual language. The ancestor photographs were lovely, the landscapes interesting with their layers of art history, and the portrait-style works were colourful and bright. So, in short, Mitchell has a promising future, and it will be interesting to see where his aesthetic settles. 

Images copyright the artist and Gagosian

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need @ Galerie Continua

Berlinda de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Berlinde de Bruyckere's exhibition at Galerie Continua in the Marais is an absolute must see, standing out from plethora of great exhibitions in Paris this Autumn. The work arouses a complexity of emotional and visceral responses with its raw, confrontational sensuality. Wax sculptures of legs below the knee, discoloured skin, aging toenails, cloaked in animal hide, covered in tufts of hair, placed under a bell jar, standing on an old table. A piece such as City of Refuge I (2023), like much of her work, is repulsive and fascinating, clearly fabricated, yet hauntingly real, too close for comfort, yet intimately familiar, sequestered inside a bell jar. The fleshy, disintegrating limbs, body flanks, and sculptures of branches that could also be legs, are sinewy and seductive, pulling us both closer in and forcing us, unwillingly, to step back.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, City of Refuge I (2023)

Need, the title of the exhibition itself is provocative, suggesting desire, compulsion, the craving for physical intimacy, and the repugnance of the body in all its nakedness. And yet, the sculptures are also like bodies, discovered after a long time, rotting, in the cellar after being dismembered by a serial killer. In this sense they cry danger and a ghostly presence of an unknown, but intriguing past, haunted by death. The need of an internal, living disequilibrium together with that of a death awaiting explanation, are pressed together under the bell jars. Their apparently aging plinths and tables making the forms everyday, familiar. In spite of their rich sensuousness, their provocation of much more than sight, they maintain a mystery and something never able to be explained.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Many of the limbs, slices of flesh, or whatever they are, are bound in string, like meat, ready to be sold, eaten, put in the oven. In this, they remind of Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, 1655. But because they are also always on a little plinth, not hanging from meat hooks, the objects function differently. That said, while not on exhibition at Galerie Continua, de Bruyckere has made works that are hung from hooks, as if in an abattoir. But the sculptural objects on display at Galerie Continua, looking like slices of flesh, draped in an exotic fabric, again, make them something to revere, giving them a strange and rare beauty. 

Placing the "specimens" of an unknown origin under glass domes of course complicates their significance. This familiar way to display precious and delicate objects signals that they need to be protected, kept. The bell jar which traditionally maintained a controlled environment, also says that the exotic is something worth looking after. Simultaneously, on display, they draw our eye to their importance as something to be looked at, specimens under glass to be ogled. Today, the glass dome also works very well to create a shine on its surface, making the object underneath appealing, valuable, to be looked at, as if to arouse our need to consume.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Also on exhibition in Need are a number of pieces hung on the wall, looking like wood, merged with flesh, as if the two had grown together. The objects are always in heavy old wooden frames, often with a mirrored backing, or pieces of paper stuck to the back. They reminded me of fragments found in a forest, still alive, or dead and being preserved using flesh for unknown reasons. Other pieces were titled, Plunder, Madonna, and Archangel — suggesting religious connotations, such as sacrifice and worship. 

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Torn cloth in heavy frames likewise reminds of liturgical cloaks, resonating with the drapery around pieces of flesh. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, de Bruyckere installed an exhibition in the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, bringing presence to the pastness and fragility of those involved in the Christian narrative. The fragility and tenderness, vulnerability and suffering of fallen trees, translated into wax by de Bruyckere are nevertheless not referring to institutional doctrine, but rather, the sculptures put human emotion and need at the centre of a religious experience. Even though the religious references are more subtle in the exhibition at Galerie Continua, the power of the emotions elicited by de Bruyckere's sculptures is similarly overwhelming. 

Minimalism @ Bourse de Commerce

Robert Ryman, Untitled, 2010-2011

The Pinault collection's current exhibition, in spite of its title, is not so much an exhibition of minimalist art as it is a display of works that embrace the themes and concerns of minimalist art from the 1970s onwards. Among a handful of what we know to be minimalist works are an array of art privileging light, surface, the monochromatic, balance, the grid and so on. Of the several of works made under the minimalist umbrella, a sculpture by Donald Judd, a lovely Brice Marden encaustic, Number (1972), and some Japanese Mono-ha pieces stood out.

Robert Ryman, District, 1985

For me, the highlight of the exhibition was seeing Pinault's collection of Robert Ryman's paintings, most of which I would consider to be his least minimalist works. The one piece which might be described as minimalist is the sculptural District (1985) from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. On walking into the Bourse, the first works, hung along the right wall, were Ryman's final Untitled (2010-2011) paintings. White vibrates over blue, red, yellow, green, orange and purple. White is never as pure as it makes out, white is never as pure as we think it is. For Ryman, white is tinged with blue, even when only whisps of blue can be seen on the canvas as the first of his Series paintings from 2004 also on display in the first room. For Ryman, blue is the DNA of white. The frame and the edges are as important as the center of the painting, so in the Untitled (2010-2011) works, it doesn't surprise to see white falling out of the square, the frame a misshapen orange and green and blue. Coloured ground and a trapezoid shape of white, edges of white on coloured backgrounds remind of and may be influenced by Rothko, the space of the picture in a single colour influenced by Malevich. Thus, this late series might be seen as an ode to the history of twentieth century abstraction, from black square to colour field.

Agnes Martin, Blue-Gray Composition, 1962

A small painting by Agnes Martin, Blue-Gray Composition, in the upstairs galleries was exquisite, like nothing I had ever seen Martin paint. In it, she considers horizontal lines, interacting with a vertical line down the middle, a window of white at the centre, as if it is an opening for light falling through space. I have always thought of Martin's pencil lines as far from minimalism because they are hand drawn, tending to slight falters as the hand moves down and across the canvas. Martin's works are about looking, how we engage with a painting, seeing it from afar, then moving forward to be met by a completely different painting. They are delicate and fragile, intimate like the line drawn in pencil, quite at odds with the industrial constructions of Donald Judd and painted geometrical shapes by Frank Stella's.

On Kawara, Today, Sept. 13, 2001.

 

 

The vitrines around the inner circumference are filled with a selection of On Kawara's Today series in which he paints a date in white on black background, accompanied by a box with a newspaper clipping from the given date. The works are mesmerizing because we read the newspaper clippings as showing what is important to that culture on that day. For example, on September 13, 2001, an article from The New York Times bemoans the chaos brought to the stock exchange thanks to the collapse of the Twin Towers. The accompanying image of burning twin towers is horrifying, making the responses of the stock exchange as reported in the NYT disturbing. The newspaper cuttings in boxes are also fascinating for their historical value. It seems so long ago that newspaper clippings would be archived in a box.

Meg Webster installation in the rotunda

The rotunda is occupied by installations of San Francisco artist Meg Webster. Sensuous sculptures made of natural fabrics, materials and foliage. The deliciously soft scent of honey emanating from a wax piece with traces running down an uneven surface, textured and tempting touch, was compelling. There was something perfect about the shapes made from salt, red ochre, and foliage, again engaging senses other than sight. Webster is interested in experimenting with how these landforms resonate with their materials, reminding us also that the structures of the natural world are also very much fabricated.

Susumu Koshimizu, From Sculpture to Surface—A Tetrahedron, 1972/2012

In the upstairs galleries, the works became more adventurous, departing from the minimalist aesthetic, often through introducing natural materials. Although it was interesting to see works by Hans Haacke, Dorothea Rockburne, and Jackie Winsor, these later examples of post-minimalist installation and sculpture didn't seem to belong as forcefully as others (such as those of Meg Webster). Ultimately, the exhibition offers a sweep through some key minimalist themes, at times, at the expense of coherence. That said, Pinault's collection is so impressive, and the fact that a single collector has work enough to fill four floors with minimalist-related art is mindboggling.

Abstract Erotic @ The Courtauld, London

Alice Adams, Big Aluminum 2, 1965

This small exhibition at The Courtauld was important on a number of levels. First, the fact that the 1960s work of three women artists, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams was exhibited together is always to be appreciated. Following on from that, each of the artists was engaged in practices that appropriated the materials of industrial modernity and pushed them beyond their limits to create sensuous discourses on the body. Moreover, their focus was on the body as  sensed, not touched, desired and desiring without oppression, and sexual without abuse. Put differently the work of Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams and Eva Hesse takes the intransigence of industrial materials and forms soft, provocative curves marked by rich texture and resonance. 

Installation of Louise Bourgeois sculptures

It was interesting to see the artists using latex and rubber as medium. The material with its elasticity, organic properties was a provocative alternative to the hard edged plastics, steel and other industrial materials that characterised the hard edged masculinity of minimalism in the 1960s. They were also using latex for making artistic sculptures, a material that was at the time, marketed for children's toys and other household goods. Thus, the use of latex enabled the artists to push the language of art in multiple directions.

Louise Bourgeois, Fillette (Sweeter Version), 1968

As mentioned, one of the most striking aspects of all their practices was the exploration of the body through new and then undiscovered approaches. Bourgeois playful forms that embrace many levels of ambiguity were especially provocative. Are pieces such as her well known Fillette male or female? Vulnerable or trapped? Protected or isolated? Bourgeois is mistress of blurring boundaries, including the distinction between the inside and outside of the body, well ahead of the times. In works such as Avenza, I was also reminded me of the Alien mothers eggs in the film series, eggs laid and hatched on her own without a male. In spite of the binding of male and female, there are moments in Bourgeois work where women have the ultimate power. Bourgeois's art is truly transgressive years before the fluidity of gender and sexuality became front and center of the public discourse. 

Louise Bourgeois, Avenza, 1968-69

Eva Hesse's sculptures are radical and transgressive in a different way. If Bourgeois shifts between opposites, Hesse takes us inside the body, to organs and the ooey gooey amorphous stuff that is not conventionally seen. 

Eva Hesse, Inside II, 1967

I was also touched by the intimacy to the works, whether created in fleshy fabrics or harsh modern fabrics such as steel fencing, chains, rope and chicken wire. The shapes and sculpted objects push these industrial materials beyond our understanding of how they were made to be used. Adams' Big Aluminium II made with chain-link fencing is a prime example. Like many of the forms on exhibition in Abstract Erotic, Hesse's creation of an organic form out of inorganic matter is a radical inversion and turning inside out on multiple levels. And yet, works in metals and other industrial fabrics also use the inherent qualities of the materials: malleable, ductile, tensile, tough, and elastic. It is simply that the shapes and objects are not those we associate with these materials. Perhaps it is the multiple levels of unconventionality in the works and the exhibition as a whole that are the most significant elements of this unique exhibition.

Rudolf Stingel, Vineyard Paintings @ Gagosian Grosvenor Hill

Rudolf Stingel's Vineyard Paintings in their inaugural exhibition in London are exquisite. In the spacious, light drenched space of Gagosian's Grosvenor Hill Gallery, the eleven sumptuous works of oil and enamel on canvas sing out loud. The identically-sized abstract works were apparently painted when Stingel was surrounded by the vineyards, trees, and all natural landscape at Martha's Vineyard (off the coast of the US state of Massachusetts). Despite their inspiration, these works are focussed on the interaction of paint and fabric creating spaces that are placeless. The paintings could just as easily be depictions of a view from an aeroplane window on a flight over European mountains in summer.

Rudolf Stingel, Vineyard Paintings
Installation View

The paintings are executed by spraying paint over fabric, gold over thick green enamel. Or is it the other way around? Is the green over gold? It's not possible to say, simply that the green is vibrant, sometimes electric, at others, wounded by brown. Every hue and tone of green is dancing around these canvases: lime green, evergreen, and of course, the green of grass, leaves, young sap on a tree. 

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Stingel's paintings is their transformation in the light. Depending on where we stand in relationship to them, how the sun is moving across the sky, and the angles from which its rays fall through windows, the colours are always on the move. Also thanks to the shimmer qualities of gold, individual paintings dance for our eyes. Like old masters paintings in Stingel's native Italy, the gold is resplendent, glistening and glowing in interaction with space in the changing light of day. Settling before a painting, we start to see the wind in the trees, the dense foliage, as if from a flight path above. At a distance, they become darker, more brooding, less resplendent, but are always changing. They also take on a different sense of balance and focus at a distance, ceasing to appear as all over abstractions. The green directs the eye, seeping through gold like water in crevices, or mountain tops peeking through golden clouds.

The gallery flyer talks about Stingel's exploration of the relationship between nature and abstract painting. Well yes, of course, like so many other abstract painters, Stingel has been influenced by the abstractions of nature. Nevertheless, there is also something domestic about these works. The fabric covering the canvases before they are sprayed might remind of crumpled bedsheets and things undone, relationships in a flurry, emotions removed from visibility, rustling beneath the surface. The works are textured, tempting to touch, as if they are a textile rather than the rich medium of gold paint and enamel. Alternatively, the works also remind of screens with their sensuous fabric ground, a swipe that looks to have been left by a brush, taking the viewer out of the dream world of sleep or nature in motion.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Nothing could have prepared us. Everything could have prepared us @ Centre Pompidou

Installation view on empty shelves of the public library

German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has been given carte blanche at the Pompidou Centre for a few months before the cultural mecca shuts down for five years of renovations. The simple activity of entering the Pompidou to visit this exhibition is a novel experience, even for those of us who are regulars. Visitors must cross the empty ground floor, walk up stairs, then take an escalator through a space not previously accessible to the public. On arrival at the second floor, having completed this unusual traversal of space, we enter the old public library. All other areas are boarded up. Even before I reached the entrance to Tillmans' exhibition, I was happy to be there. 

Installation view

I had taken my time to visit this exhibition because I am not a big Tillmans fan, but seeing so much of his work in one place — and in this space — was rewarding. Tillmans' photography is often not aesthetically pleasing, which is part of the point, and also, one of the reasons I am not always drawn in. That said, there are works that are highly aestheticized—particularly those in which he experiments with photographic materials and light. More often exhibited in France is Tillmans' vast collection of personal and public photographs resembling something like an amateur archive of images depicting his journey through a changing world. As a body of work, these photographs make visible every day life over the past fifty years. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Resolute Rave, 2020

I was surprised to see so many hip young people at the exhibition, because Tillmans' world is historical and presumably unknown to many of the visitors. Because Tillmans is my generation, his world is very familiar, and hence, I  enjoyed seeing the breadth of his vision across decades. Under glass over five tables, Tillmans has curated photographs, programs, flyers, books from the past five decades. I spent a lot of time in Berlin in the 1990s and 2000s, and the immediate post-wall Berlin of Tillmans' generation was the same one that I skulked around in those years. The ecstasy nightclub scene, grunge living, and the freedom of a world seemingly without limits, in a united, undeveloped Berlin. It is a city that we will never know again in our lifetimes. Perusing Tillmans' photographs of Berlin in those years, I looked with nostalgia, and grateful to have been a part of during an extraordinary period in history. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Renzo Piano, 2024

Tillmans was given carte blanche to do as he wished, and perhaps the most interesting thing about the exhibition is that his installations are always in dialogue with the space. Whether it is a mirrored tabletop at which we peer and see the exposed pipes and ducts of the Pompidou ceiling, empty shelves of the one time library—the shelves of the arts and humanities being emptied while the scientific ones are filled with space travel books to indicate the state of knowledge today—a photograph of Renzo Piano in front of the building he designed, or photographs of the space we are in, Tillmans constantly reflects on the radical architecture of the Pompidou building. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 234, 2024

Among Tillmans most stunning works are the Freischwimmer and Greifbar works - images that he makes using different light sources in the darkroom without a camera. Huge abstract works that look like ink dye playing on surfaces, and in some, creatures busily fanning across paper. The colours he finds through light play in the process of image production are sumptuous, always different. Similarly, the Silver works remind of carefully worked abstract paintings. Photographic paper is fed through used developer triggering chemical reactions. The resultant images are varied, appearing to be marked, blemished by the silver salts of the paper. Over time, we see that they are gorgeous, but enigmatic. And then, over time, their appearance as something that they are not, disappears.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Paper Drop (green), 2011

Lastly, a lot of fun was to be had by visitors who spent time lounging around, talking, searching at computer stations - just as they did in the old library. Nothing could have prepared us. Everything could have prepared us was an experience as much as it was a visit to an art exhibition.So yes, I had a fun time at the Tillmans' exhibition, and I would highly recommend it as a lovely goodbye to the Pompidou as it goes on its five year restoration journey. 

Corps et âmes @ Bourse de Commerce / Pinault Collection

Duane Hanson, House Painter, 1984-88

It was wonderful to be back at the Bourse de Commerce in the final days of their summer show, Body and Soul. The place was teeming with visitors, in fact, I have never seen it so full on a Friday afternoon. It seems that visitors to Paris have discovered this, one of Paris's newest cultural pearls. Because of the crowds, I skipped the rotunda sound installation in which visitors sat in silence watching bowls floating on water. Instead, I followed the fascinating exhibition of Ali Cherri's sculptures in the twenty-four vitrines around the perimeter. Cherri's provocative sculptures begun from recycled archaeological finds—broken limbs, scarred bodies, decapitated heads—made for unsettling viewing. In this installation, Cherri brings the past into the present and reminds his viewer of the imbrication of spoils of war, history, and culture. 

Ali Cherri, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), after Velázquez, 2022

Two films by African American artist Arthur Jafa were among the most powerful works in the exhibition. Downstairs Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) is a collage of clips showing the history of African American life in the twentieth century. Weaving together recognizeable figures in often quoted images such as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Barack Obama —all of whom claim a message of love, tolerance, inclusivity—and footage of anonymous men, women, children being beaten, dragged along the street, and terrorized by the police. Love may well be the message, but the language of death is the only vocabulary American society knows when speaking to African Americans. Kanye West's Ultralight Beam overlays the images, successfully moving the viewer from the emotive power of cultural icons through the horror of police brutality towards African Americans. More than one person (including me) left the screening room in tears.  

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, (2021)

Jafa's Aghdra (2021) in the ground floor galleries was more enigmatic, but still overwhelming in a different way. Slabs of what look like broken bitumen (digitally generated) roll around where we expect to see ocean waves under a rising sun, a setting moon in a clear sky. The black sludge or magma travel towards us, threatening to envelop us, and then they rise so high in the frame that they covers the sky. From where we sit, there is no escape once the horror of this stuff threatens to bury us. The message is clear: the sea is not the same phenomenon for everyone. We think of it as a place to go for a holiday and dream and fall in love. For African Americans, the sea is the reminder of transportation and colonialism, enslavement and entrapment to the designs of a perpetrator. 

Philip Guston, Lamp, 1974

Though it was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition, it was not clear to me how Philip Guston's Lamp, 1974 was related to the themes of body and soul, the exhibition title. While Guston's work from this period is known for its conversation on questions of racism, Lamp is more abstract, discoursing on looking and reflection in absent space. Painted in Guston's signature pinks with flecks of grey, it is a luscious painting in which brushstrokes enigmatically travel around the canvas, thus the room in which the lamp sits. Light spills out of the lamp, but there is nothing to illuminate. The lampshade with its caresses of white and grey, glimmers of peppermint green, verges into being an image on a wall. It is a painting about light in which nothing is illuminated, there is nothing to see in an empty room, thus turning the attention back on the viewer as the one who is looking and looked at. There is a curious red line drawn horizontally through the middle of the painting, like a cord. Is it a trail of blood? Or is it a definition of the wall behind the lamp. It's hard to say. 

Marlene Dumas, Horizon, 2007-2008

In the upstairs galleries, a richness of works is displayed, again with varying degrees of relevance to the title of the exhibition. Standing out for me were works by Marlene Dumas. In a more unusual work, Horizon, Dumas paints the flowers on her mother's grave and thinks of it as a portrait. As if drifting out towards the horizon at the back of the painting, the flowers are framed by the slight hint of a grave. Or perhaps they are in a vitrine, displayed for us to admire as we walk past? The work speaks to questions of death and eternity, suggesting the preservation of life in memory after death. The blue paint is complex and suggests the changing mood of the water into which her mother's memory floats. With Dumas, it's so often about death, looking, and our ultimate blindness.

Corps et âmes, Installation View
Foreground: Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana Noire, 1965

I think I am not a theme exhibition person. With my need for order and coherence, I am always looking for continuity in an exhibition, something much easier to find in an author-centered exhibition. Body and Soul had many breathtaking works—from Man Ray to Mira Schor—but as is often the case, it felt scattered. It's a little difficult to say what exactly the exhibition wanted to show about the body and soul—particularly, as you can see, some of the most impressive works were about the absence of the body. Maybe the problem was the title? If the exhibition had been called something like "Invisible Bodies," it would have made more sense.

Georg Baselitz: Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Georg Baselitz, Traumflug sex, 2025

I loved the paintings and was moved by this exhibition as what might be seen as a sort of treatise on aging, the deterioration of the body, and the associated challenges. Moreover, the interaction of Baselitz's paintings and Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space were enthralling. I visited the exhibition in the early evening when the shadows cast by the latticed roof of the former ironwork factory were long, and in the heat, they were strong. Falling over the enormous paintings, creating patterns as if further caging the figures in their bodies aleady trapped inside the paintings' frames, and again on the walls, the shadows became integral to the works. The vision was quite spectacular. This was further underlined by the fact that the galleries were all but empty of visitors, so I had the pleasure of being with the paintings alone.

Georg Baselitz, Idigene kunst von damals, 2025

It was only after a little research that I understood the curious exhibition title, translated from the German as, A Leg By Manet from Paris. Apparently, Manet had difficulty painting legs, though I can be forgiven for not knowing this because in the nineteenth century, legs were not exactly on display. Manet's women typically appear in long dresses and men in loose fitting pants. So the connection to Manet is not so obvious, and certainly not visible in the paintings. The title is more about Baselitz than Manet, a reference to his own difficulties with mobility. The title also speaks to Baselitz's career long fascination with feet and hands - usually misshapen in his paintings and oversized in his sculptures. It seems ironic that an artist who has constantly pulled our attention to the feet and hands of his figures should find difficulty walking in later life.

Georg Baselitz, Warum nicht zwei, 2025

Georg Baselitz, Waren die Indigenen wirklich diejenigen, 2025

Where many artists accommodate the limitations of an aging body by painting smaller, Baselitz has gone bigger and included the traces of his negotiation of bigger canvases in the paintings themselves. Legs and mobility (or lack of it) are a major theme in these works that include the tracks left by his wheelchair as he skirts around in the painting process. There are also footprints, drips, smudges and other traces of movement as graffiti over the huge canvases. Accompanying the traces of process, misshapen, withering bodies are tenderly painted with Baselitz's familiar sensuous treatment of paint. The colour is usually fleshy, the body in the signature Baselitz upside down pose. And even though there are usually two bodies in the painting—his own and that of his wife—they rarely touch or interact. This sense of isolation is again familiar from decades of Baselitz's painting, but it feels central to the experience of aging as it is shown here.

Georg Baselitz, Verscheiden von den anderen, 2024

Over the years, I have read many critiques of Baselitz's work on the basis of his apparent misogyny. While he may well denigrate women, there is nothing in these paintings to support this. His aesthetic is one that reflects the human inevitability; we see the body falling, sleeping, in pain. Trapped by the frame, trapped within the body, the self is fragile in a whole new way now that Baseltiz is concerned with age. These are not visions of a self in which the ego is so fragile that it cannot reveal the vulnerability of being human. To my eyes, these paintings have little to do with gender or sexuality. If anything, the fragility of the aging male artist is humble and vulnerable. Self-obsessed maybe, but cruel to women? I don't see that in these paintings.

Georg Baselitz: Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris
Installation View, Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Another critique often leveled at Baselitz's work is that the upside down figures are a gimmick that he has exploited for commercial and art world attention. It is true that he paints them over and over again, but here, the motif is not without motivation. The upside down body and supine bodies speak to its destabilization and incapacitation with age. Where bifurcation was once of Germany, in this exhibition, the doubled Baselitz paintings represent himself and his wife. In one painting, the two figures look as though they could be lying in their coffins - the body not simply withered, but dead. Together. Again, they might be bifurcated, but the meaning of the twin figures has shifted and is not without deeper relevance.

Robert Irwin @ White Cube, Paris

Installation View, White Cube, Paris

My first encounter with the light sculptures of American artist Robert Irwin in the early 1990s was a revelation. I remember walking into a Soho gallery and being mesmerized by the interaction of fluorescent light and scrims for the first time, recognizing the concerns of painting extended beyond the four sides of a framed canvas. The predominantly white light, at times broken by red tape, at others by metal obstructions, changing intensity and hue depending on where I stood in the gallery, the angle through which I was placed in relation to the scrims. The work resonated so strongly with Mondrian, with hazy photographs, and the blur of Monet's vision. I immediately saw Irwin's installations as modernist painting in light. 

Robert Irwin, Legacy #3, 2012

Together with artists such as James Turrell and Dan Flavin, Irwin not only invented a new kind of experiential light art, but they expanded our conceptions of light, colour, and their interactions with space of a gallery. By extension, these works brought new dimension to our understanding of our perception as viewers. No longer was light used to illuminate a thing in the world or an object on a canvas, but for these artists, light was the thing itself. Light took on a material, became the subject of the art work. Light didn't simply stand in for someone as it did for Caravaggio in The Calling of Saint Matthew—light became the medium and meaning of the work.

Robert Irwin, Basie's Basement, 2015

Irwin does something a little different from Turrell and Flavin because his primary motivation is not to create spaces through light, although that eventuates. His concern is more about how light is used and manipulated to shift the ways that we see.  In this exhibition at White Cube, Paris, some of Irwin's last  works, fluorescent light sculptures are vertically attached to walls, some turned on, others masked with vertical strips of tape, interrupting, but also creating colour fields in which diverse colours come into dynamic rhythms of communication, shifting as we move around the space. Natural light floods through the gallery windows on the first floor of a Parisian building, prompting us to reflect on its interaction with the artificial, the illusions created through looking. And as we move around, we realize that there is an absence of a fixed single place from which to stand to observe the truth of what we see when colours mutate. The interactions of light, both clashing and in concert, dance and vibrate as vigorously as the world around us. 

Robert Irwin, #6 x 8", 2015

The gallery flyer tells of a connection between Irwin's work and abstract expressionism because Irwin began as an abstract expressionist. Of course, we immediately see the push to create colour as subject, but for me, the strongest connection to painting is to the pop art of someone such as Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein painted brushstrokes that reduced the use of paint to the process and subject of the work. The brushstroke is not in the service of depicting something else, it's the thing, the work of art itself. We could say that Irwin is doing the same with light. Light no longer creates meaning of something, it is the meaning of the artwork for Irwin. While Lichtenstein pokes fun at the supposed authenticity of the abstract expressionist aesthetic, Irwin pushes art outside of the abstract expressionist frame altogether.  He moves away from a focus on an expression from the unconscious to a reflection on the viewer's physical experience of seeing in space. For this innovative use of fluorescent light, Irwin was a unique artist who has left his mark.