Art Paris is back from the 7th to the 10th of April with a strong selection of 130 modern and contemporary galleries from some twenty different countries. Both regional and cosmopolitan, this 24th edition is characterised by its commitment in favour of the environment with two themes – “Natural Histories” and “Art & Environment”- combined with an innovative and sustainable approach to organising an art fair.
Galerie Ariane C-Y
Réparation is part of a series of sculptures that won Cultural Institute Bernard Magrez Prize for Sculpture, Bodeaux, France, in October 2017. Samuel Yal breaks the sculpture of his own face and repairs it with gold. Like in the Kintsugi technique in Japan, the place where the sculpture has been broken is revealed and pointed out. Samuel Yal stresses the beauty of scars as deep as they can be. Yal often uses ceramic to point out the fragility of being into the world. The artist works on the body and how one inhabits it and interacts with space around.
Galerie Olivier Waltman | Waltman Ortega Fine Art
Rune Guneriussen’s conceptual work, somewhere between installation and photography, features site-specific installations throughout his native Norway. Using an artistic process that concerns the object, locale, and time of installation, Guneriussen takes photographs using a large-format view camera that documents the existence of the installation itself. Mixing rural landscapes with everyday objects such as desk lamps or books, Guneriussen’s analogous application of material and space correlates to humans’ connection to the planet.
Galerie Claire Gastaud
German artist Erik Schmidt creates works that engage with symbolic processes within various social subsystems. Immersing himself in foreign contexts plays a significant role in his paintings, videos, photographs, and drawings. Throughout his work, Schmidt continues to consciously adopt the figure of the outsider, whether in the crowded urban landscape of Tokyo, the camps of the American Occupy movement, among wine and olive producers in the West Bank or the aristocratic hunting circles of his native North Rhine-Westphalia. This removed stance offers him a distinct insight into group dynamics and the various clichés, stereotypes, codes, rituals, norms, patterns and conventions they all hold.
Rodolphe Janssen
Jake Clark is a ceramic artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He studied Horticulture at the Holmesglen Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He is a self-taught artist and ceramicist inspired by his grandparent’s collection of pots and sculptures.
Galerie Lelong & Co.
Etel Adnan creates her intimate, small-scale compositions with a palette knife instead of a paint brush, which results in rich, geometric fields of colour that evoke sunsets, valleys and mountains. Mount Tamalpais, a peak in Marin County, California, has been a frequent subject. Adnan studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and established herself as a poet, academic, and essayist before she began to make art.
Galleria Continua
Les Marocains is broad-ranging project inspired by Robert Frank’s Americans, it led Alaoui to travel the length and breadth of Morocco with a portable photographic studio. In the course of her encounters, she built up a protean portrait of the country through its inhabitants: Arabs and Berbers, women and men, adults and children. Together they form a mosaic of different traditions, cultures and aesthetics, revealing many customs that are gradually disappearing as a result of rampant globalisation. In producing this set of portraits, the artist laid the foundations for a full- blown visual archive. More than just a documentary work, Les Marocains was also a way, for the young photographer, to begin to discover her own inheritance, offsetting the distance inherent to the camera with a form of intimacy, thanks both to her Moroccan roots and the ties she forged with people during her travels. It was a way, in short, to affirm an independent aesthetic, free from any Westernising folklore, and to highlight the dignity of individuals and of an entire country.
Galerie Ernst Hilger
Gudmundur Gudmundsson, aka Erró, produces scathing, humourous visual indictments of war, autocracy, mass consumerism, and economic and cultural hegemony, and pays twisted homage to canonical artists throughout history in his colourful, cacophonous paintings, silkscreens, and collages.
Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
Working collaboratively since 1996, Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera create dreamlike photographs designed to trigger subjective associations correlating to the cultural background and past experiences of the viewer. Through their photographs, they strive to visually represent complex subjects—such as time and space—that written language frequently complicates and obscures. The pair see their photographs not just as images, but as objects. Each Albarrán Cabrera print is handcrafted using a diverse range of traditional and experimental printing techniques, including platinotype, cyanotype, and gelatin silver print processes as well as pigment printing on metallic gold leaf and smooth, satin-like Japanese gampi paper. They achieve their rich chromatic effects by toning their prints with selenium, sepia and tea. This array of materials and methods widens the parameters of image-making and takes advantage of the expressive possibilities of photography.
Helene Bailly Gallery
Buste de femme nue is a delightful example of Kees Van Dongen’s seductive and painterly nudes. The unusual cropped composition and lack of pictural space creates an intimate proximity with the model. The facial features show a slight influence of cubism, drawn from Van Dongen’s close friendship with Picasso. In this canvas the glamorous female archetype of Van Dongen is at its peak. Her red lips and almond eyes rimmed with kohl are clearly inspired by Picasso’s muse – Fernande Olivier.
193 Gallery
Photographer Alia Ali depicts her subjects in vividly patterned traditional ikat textiles to reveal layered global histories of colonialism, migration, imperialism, and war. Her striking studio portraits conceal the identities of subjects entirely covered by these fabrics. The artist’s peripatetic life, which has brought her to more than 67 countries, informs her interest in excavating and tracing the complex provenance of global textile techniques like indigo- and wax-resistant dyeing.
Galerie Tanit
Info is extracted from the galleries’ press releases.