Focus on Sanity with Zofia Pałucha @ Galerie Pact

Zofia Pałucha works mainly with ”found footage” and creates sketches for the paintings
on a smartphone, using apps to transform selected photos. Like Free Jazz, the stream-of-consciousness-based work in contemporary figurative painting allows the artist to surrender to the painterly gesture and action of individual images. She combines the final artworks with evocative titles derived from philosophical essays, art history or quotes from movies and audiobooks.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the ever-changing landscape of contemporary crises has meant that podcasts about the most important political, social, and cultural events in the world always accompany Zofia Pałucha as she works and are an integral part of her creative process. One can trace the roots of the artist’s paintings to the early political works of Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, or Luc Tuymans. Pałucha’s paintings, though deeply involved in politics and morality, are full of elusive meanings. They attempt to reflect the condition of modern man, emphasizing the fragility of the individual not only in the real world but in the virtual space too. Through the prism of sensuality and sexuality, filtered through personal experiences, the artist’s works delve into the problems in the modern world without providing a clear answer. Like the reality around us, her painting is multi-layered and subject to change. Her work is a manifesto, an expressive artistic statement about the here and now and perhaps ahead.
Focus on Sanity is on view through January 27, 2024, @ Galerie Pact, 70 rue des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris

Helene Delprat's Monster Soup with Hand-fulls of Figurative Extravagance @ Hauser & Wirth Paris

Over the past four decades, Delprat’s multifaceted practice has engaged the human condition as its focus, exploring life and death in an oeuvre that spans various mediums. After finding success for her distinctively primitive style of figurative painting, following her residency at the prestigious Villa Medici in Rome between 1985 and 1995, Delprat turned her focus to video, theater, interviews, installations and projects for radio, all whilst continuing to paint. Since the late aughts, the artist’s painting practice has been shaped by an encyclopedic research process compiling a remarkable archive of sources. Delprat’s works, together, comprise a sprawling constellation of references to literature, film, radio, philosophy, internet databases, recorded histories and art history. The title of this exhibition, ‘MONSTER SOUP,’ reflects this multidimensional approach by referencing a variety of sources from popular culture. The poster for the exhibition, created by Delprat, reflects this syncretism: the image, taken from a British 1820s etching depicting a woman in horror at the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water, is interspersed with Delprat’s painted characters. Likened to an iconologist, she distills eclectic sources of inspiration into an expansive inventory—a world both fortuitous and deliberate, beautiful and grotesque, where themes of memory, identity, recording and legacy coalesce to remind us that the past is a construction and the present is fleeting. ‘Intellectually, I start from everything I see’ she says, ‘...there is no real prep work, except all this reading, all these curiosities, the newspapers I flick through, the programmes I listen to and all the photos that I take or cut out. The preparation is simply what I am living.’

Monster Soup is on view through Saturday 9 March at Hauser & Wirth 26 bis rue François 1er, Paris 75008

"More Than A Muse" Group Show Featuring Larry Clark, Sandy Kim, Ryan Mcginley, and Dash Snow @ 65 Ludlow in New York

“More Than A Muse” aims to explore those relationships between artist and subject that exceed creative companionship and are based on inextricable, emotional ties. These relationships are those of parents, lovers, siblings and friends- those who have a visceral and often complex connection to the artist. The photographs then are more than standard depictions of beauty or intrigue but unfiltered glimpses into the intimate lives of two beings through the eyes of someone emotionally invested. The subjects are shown in their rawest form as they are photographed intuitively by the artist. This show is unique in that both photographer and muse will be recognized as artists. This is to further show the muse as more than simply the vision. They are the vehicles by which it comes to life. The symbiotic relationship is the basis of the work; it would not exist without the other. More Than A Muse will be on view until September 18 at 65 Ludlow in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer