The particularity of the landscape paintings shown here is that they were executed on coloured synthetic fur and were referred to by the artist in her Los Angeles studio as “fluffy landscape paintings.” Paintings reified as comfort blankets, transitional objects? Their imposing size suggests something more like a thwarted approach to painting, between sensua- lity and the roughness of the material. Tabouret likes to test her technique, her fluency against new constraints. For this exhibition, we might speak of a dialectic of contrary gestures: confronted with these vast landscapes painted over time, with returns and an emphasis on these obdurate sup- ports, she deploys a series of monotypes of flowers that are fluid and refined.
The exhibition’s title derives from a well-known English language idiom: “one man's trash is another man's treasure.” With this conceit at its heart, Belanger injects a cunning irony into her pop infused sculptures. The artist brings together amalgams of common objects, rendered with exaggerated forms, into a quiet dialogue with each other that speak volumes about our current cultural state.
Belanger takes the sidewalk rug (drained of color) and lays out symbolist sculptures for any treasure seeker to find: a wrench with a tooth in its clasp, a hair curler passing through a donut, and a shirt with a sandwich in its front pocket. Once precious objects, they appear to have been left behind by their former owners. Sprawled out past lives are now awaiting the opportunity to be reborn into new narratives or discarded forever. Belanger urges us to explore this decisive moment, of trash or treasure, and consequently the perception between the experiences that make us richer versus the experiences that diminish us.
Representing the mental space, to the artist, a room both shelters and confines. The exhibition features two seemingly divergent pictorial series: Bauhaus Gal (figurative portraits on canvas) and Room (abstract shaped aluminum plate), created by the artist simultaneously between 2020 and 2021.
BanBan’s large scale paintings are immediately recognizable. Their broad range of fleshy hues and voluptuous brushstrokes depict scenes of contemporary life and snapshots of intimacy. Her female subjects tend toward the Rubenesque, with features enlarged and elongated that spill towards the edge of frame. These consciously exaggerated figures contain an illustrative clarity of form, occasionally tempered by gestural and abstract intrusions. This combination of precision and obstruction serves to define an emotional response that feels both realistic and swirled through that of memory and feeling.
Jean-Michel Othoniel took over the museum of the Petit Palais and its garden. This was the artist’s biggest solo show in Paris since his retrospective My Way at the Centre Pompidou in 2011.
With more than 70 new artworks, Othoniel has invented “The Narcissus Theorem,” about a man-flower who, in reflecting himself, reflects the world around him. Othoniel weaves a web of unreality, enchantment, illusion and liberation of the imagination. Rivers of blue bricks, Lotus, Necklaces, Crown of the Night, Wild Knots, and Precious Stonewall are hidden in the architecture, placed on the water mirrors of the pools, hanging from trees; new works dialogue with the architecture of the Petit Palais and the golds go its garden. This exhibition is a message of opening, freely given to the public.
For his first solo exhibition in Japan, Julio Le Parc unfurls his oeuvre across Le Forum and beyond, occupying the entirety of the Maison Hermès in Ginza both inside and out: a large-scale work fills the glass façade of the Renzo Piano building.
'Les Couleurs en Jeu' offers a rich immersion in his decade-spanning œuvre by bringing together early paintings with emblematic series such as 'La Longue Marche' and the 'Lames réfléchissantes,' as well as with suspended mobiles, another significant aspect of the work of this major figure of contemporary art.
JOSH SPERLING
Like a catalog raisonné, this book dedicated to Josh Sperling gathers most of his work, from 2013 to 2020.
A text written by Kyle Chayka opens the book. Throughout the pages, his minimalist works are presented and categorized by the geometric and colorful forms that make up his style.
At the end of the book, exceptional views of his exhibitions across venues such as the Perrotin galleries in Paris, Seoul, New York and Tokyo, the At Bill Brady gallery in Miami and the Sorry we're closed gallery in Brussels are shown, to highlight his international presence.
An index of his body of work from 2013 to 2020 closes the book.
GEORGES MATHIEU
Copublished by Perrotin and Nahmad, 2021
A major figure of mid-20th-century abstraction, considered by Clement Greenberg to be the most influential European painter of his time, Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) had never before been the subject of such a large-scale monograph. With essays by Germano Celant and Nancy Spector, as well as a chronology by Daniel Abadie, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the artist's work, presenting a wide selection of paintings and works on paper spanning four decades of production by an artist who traversed the 20th century and the art world in both Europe and the United States.
