Each Person Is A Portal: Read Our Interview of Seffa Klein on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Galerie Poggi in Paris →

 
 

The human race has been gazing at the stars with a sense of wonderment since time immemorial. These cogitations have inspired the creation of everything from religious mythologies to monumental earthworks to marine navigation, space navigation and innumerable inventions in between. It is a universal human experience where most of us encounter our first existential ponderings and Seffa Klein is no exception. What is exceptional about her experience is that she comes from a family of artists whose careers have been dedicated to exploring universal truths in the realms of art, science, and spirituality, which has afforded her the unique opportunity to engage with these profound questions further in the light of day rather than extinguishing them. While most of us are told to invest our time and energy in more realistic endeavors, the Klein family is deeply rooted in the belief that this is as real as it gets. Gallerist Jérôme Poggi recognized this unique quality of the Klein family as one of artists who foster each other’s practices rather than competing with one another, which inspired him to curate a solo exhibition of Seffa Klein’s works alongside selected works from Yves Klein, Rotraut, Marie Raymond, and Günther Uecker, who are respectively her grandparents, great-grandparent, and great-uncle. See the exhibition before it closes tomorrow, July 13. Read more.

TRUFFLE by Parker Woods and Erin Green Book Launch @ Sheriff Gallery

TRUFFLE is an ode to detail; with the combining forces of Parker Woods’ intimate style of photography that takes a fresh approach to abstraction by placing it within the context of humanity, as well as Erin Greens’ honest and raw makeup artistry, depicting more than just makeup—but the person behind it. The book proposes a perspective one could only define as close, in all ways. Work that prides itself on defying the very word “pristine.” TRUFFLE’s black and white imagery along with their mix of up-close shots displaying both identifiable human features drawn in makeup amongst abstracted textured imagery creates a unique voice that speaks to you like a whisper directly into your ear. Portraying not only up close intimacy, but an undeniable vulnerability that compels you to look, even if it feels invading, the art book stands out by its artistic approach that can only be described as honest. 

With graphic design by Patrick Slack and Austin Redman, the final object is a 208-page, landscape-oriented book with slipcase and a 40.64cm x 50.8cm double-sided poster. Edition of 200.

You can preorder TRUFFLE now on their website

 
 

Prototypes' AW24 Lookbook Is Bringing It Back to Grassroots

 
 

photography by Raphael Bliss
styling by Betsy Johnson
hair by Charlie Le Mindu
makeup by Stephanie Kunz
casting by Conan Laurendot

The commercial use of sports uniforms as merchandise is perpetually being updated from one season to the next, which is why they lend themselves perfectly to a brand like Prototypes that is guided by the principles of upcycling and repurposing. Their newest collection goes beyond the age-old practice within the industry of cultural appropriation to the point of a complete aesthetic cannibalism, and instead serves as an homage to the communal role that local football clubs play within the social fabric of British culture. In this collection we see the groundskeeper, the kitman, the coach, and the youth — they are archetypes within the community that define each passing generation. Each club bears the DNA of its locality, passing down its individualized values of teamwork, physical fitness, stewardship within the field, and honor. For Prototypes Series 06, which was shot at a local club in England with collaborative partner Betsy Johnson, these values are encapsulated in a collection that breathes new sartorial life into that which might otherwise be discarded as old merch. As working class Brits currently bear witness to the gentrification of their most beloved sport, Prototypes is bringing it back to grassroots by sponsoring kits for the club’s new women’s team. 

 
 
 
 
 

14 Artists Question the Possibility of Human Benevolence & Ecology in Ce que nous donne la terre @ Afikaris in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Much like nature itself, Ce que nous donne la terre (What the earth Gives Us) is an exhibition comprised of many disparate parts: resin, beads, and acrylic are to the show what beetles, silt, and chlorophyll are to our natural world. Also like the natural world, Ce que nous donne la terre is undeniably united. With fourteen different works on view, each artist challenges what it is to be a human who is both part of that precious, quivering equilibrium of the Earth and a disruptor of it.

While the human is centered throughout the show, we are always in our most early context—nature. In doing so, the relationship between us and world is reimagined countless times, a testament to its eternal loamy dynamism. In Beya Gille Gacha’s haunting Lady Mirror, a blue Mother Nature bathes in black water and algae. She is tranquil, but perhaps not kind—humid anger billows from her like steam from a bath. Though she is a humanoid figure, her lapis lazuli-colored skin is jarring and unnatural against the dirty porcelain.

A blue-bodied figure also appears in Omar Mahfoudi’s Hidden behind the sun. Shielding his visage from the violent, lone smear of sunlight, Mahfoudi’s blue man is blurry with cool, wet anguish beneath the red-yellow light. 

The people of L’Eden are—perhaps—more at peace with their world. Blending into the foliage entirely, their jewelry, clothing, and hair are the only denotation of where the leaves end and their bodies begin. Maybe they have returned to the earliest beginning among the lush, green leaves. But there is also a more sinister possibility: are the figures making a return to their roots, or are they trapped behind the rapidly encroaching leaves? Will the foliage continue to grow and twist across the canvas until it blots them out entirely? 

This tenuous relationship winds itself through each work in Ce que nous donne la terre, on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery. What is our place in a world where we are both the product and demise of natural creation?   


Ce que nous dans la terre is on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery 7 Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth.

Takashi Murakami's "Understanding the New Cognitive Domain" @ Gagosian

Understanding the New Cognitive Domain, an exhibition of work by Takashi Murakami focused on his monumental paintings, is on dislpay at the gallery in Le Bourget. The exhibition features five such works plus others in smaller formats and several sculptures. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in France.

The exhibition marks the debut of a monumental new 5-by-23-meter painting by Murakami based on the iwai-maku, or stage curtain, that he produced for the Kabuki-za theater in Ginza, Tokyo, in celebration of Japanese Kabuki actor and producer Ichikawa Ebizō XI’s assumption of the name Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen. (Kabuki stage names, which specify an actor’s style and lineage, are passed down through generations; the Ichikawa family has a roughly 350-year history.) The November 2022 unveiling of Murakami’s design, which was commissioned by film director Takashi Miike, coincided with the first performance of Ichikawa Shinnosuke VIII in the November Kichirei Kaomise Grand Kabuki Theater program.

Also on view is another extended-format painting, Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue (2010), which Murakami produced in response to eccentric Japanese artist Soga Shōhaku’s Dragon and Clouds (1763). Shōhaku’s work is a multi-panel Unryūzu (cloud-and-dragon) painting in which the titular creature appears as a Buddhist symbol of optimism and good fortune. Murakami’s painting, like Shōhaku’s, uses a restricted palette and is spread over several conjoined sections. Graphic swirls allude to Shōhaku’s expressive use of ink and suggest the dragon’s flight, combining with its flared nostrils and serpentine whiskers to evoke turbulent motion. Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue also resonates with contemporary Japanese visual culture, particularly the video game Blue Dragon, while its vast scale revives the visceral and psychological impact of Shōhaku’s masterpiece.

Also on view are several “lucky cat” paintings that reference the artist’s recent NFT projects, and other works featuring Murakami’s iconic smiling flower motif—including a two-meter rainbow neon sign—in which the artist again employs a retro-digital variant on his influential Superflat aesthetic. His ever-proliferating cartoonlike blossoms function as immediately recognizable and infinitely flexible icons that may be at once ornamental and symbolic, directing the viewer toward intertwined themes of identity, representation, and technology.

Understanding the New Cognitive Domain is on view through December 22 @ Gagosian Le Bourget 26 avenue de l’Europe. Every Saturday during the exhibition, Gagosian shuttle buses will run gratis between Le Bourget Gare RER (exit 1: Place des Déportés) and Gagosian Le Bourget every twenty minutes from 2 to 6pm. No reservation required. 

Will Cotton's "Trigger" @ Galerie Templon in Paris

 
 

Twenty years after his very first exhibition in Paris, New York painter Will Cotton, known for his depictions of sweets and cakes, is back on the walls of Galerie Templon with a subtle and quirky exhibition: Trigger.

In this new show, Will Cotton continues to reflect on pop culture and American myths. His 2020 series The Taming of the Cowboy, about the hyper-sexualisation of childhood and gender representations, featured ultra-masculine cowboys battling with pink unicorns. Will Cotton now introduces the cowgirl, an archetypal feminist figure, as voluptuous as she is provocative. With humour, she takes the opposite direction to the artist's usual female characters, pushing the gender boundaries further and blurring the relationship between the sexes as well as LGBT struggles and the notion of queerness.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a notion that has become a political concept in the US: the trigger. It refers to the safe spaces created by the liberal left on American campuses in recent years. Trigger warnings are intended to prevent situations that could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. However, in an America torn apart by the controversial issue of carrying weapons, the artist wonders if it is possible to dissociate it from the trigger of the firearms defended tooth and nail by the conservative right.

Will Cotton thus invents a world that mirrors our schizophrenic societies. His grandiose landscapes, with their cascading sweets and candy floss, are home to ambiguous scenes, playful but potentially disturbing or even explosive. A commentary on the opulence of an idealized America, Cotton's art is also a means of questioning the power of painting itself. The fluidity between great painting, timeless myths, advertising imagery and pop icons acts as a metaphor for the contradictions of our time.

Trigger is on view through July 22 @ Galerie Templon 30 Rue Beaubourg Paris.

Izumi Kato's Homunculus Monsters Interrogate the Nature of Our Mortality @ Perrotin Paris

For any connoisseur of Japanese art, the ambiguous phenomena that have characterized Izumi Kato's work for more than two decades may seem familiar. Yet there is never any complete correspondence, only omnipresent echoes, the distinctive signs of a highly singular artistic universe.

Since the 2000s, Kato’s "untitled" sculptures, paintings, and drawings have featured hybrid figures (their limbs and breath producing vegetal or human shoots), budding flowers (often lotuses, the Buddhist flower par excellence, a symbol of purifying transformation plunging its roots into the mud), and other beings (human heads or homunculi hanging from bodies like clusters of ganglia). In the latter case, the multiplication is truly “monstrous;” the lotuses don’t proliferate. But they spring from an exhalation that evokes another type of Japanese art, the He-Gassen emaki (literally "fart scroll"), some of which show yokai fighting in a mad battle of winds (like the "Shinnô scroll" in the Hyôgo History Museum). The strange small creatures that spring up like ganglia from the larger figures also recall battles against monstrous animals, like the heroic struggle against the giant tarantula Tsuchi-gumo, at the end of which thousands of human skulls emerge from the spider’s severed neck. The play of mirrors between Kato's work and Japanese art creates limitless perspectives.

The distinctive appearance of his faces, with their enlarged eyes, often without pupils, the whole shaped by nose and mouth, the impression of being covered with ritual makeup, all this has numerous echoes in the fantastical prints produced in the 19th century, during the latter part of the Edo period and the Meiji era of Imperial Japan (1868-1912). Kato's work must be considered in relation to Utagawa Kunyoshi’s prints (1797-1861), one of the masters of the genre. In the work of Kunyoshi, the yokai are startling hybrids with bulging eyes, large jaws, and strange faces that seem like theatrical masks.

Looking at the hand-and-footless limbs of Kato's “characters,” one is reminded of Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi’s playful prints of "demon-shaped plants" (1844-1847). Yet, what sets Izumi Kato's creatures apart from all this pleasant, swaggering bluster is their silence. His work is characterized by a seriousness absent from the other works.

The totemic immobility of Izumi Kato's painted and sculpted works is strikingly melancholic. These figures are endless questions, beyond any specific place or time, as Japanese as they are ours, wherever we are. They challenge our gaze, drawing us in, interrogating what makes us mortal.

Izumi Kato is on view through July 29 @ Perrotin 76 Rue de Turenne.

The Collection of the Fondation: A Vision for Painting @ Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris

“The Collection of the Fondation: A Vision for Painting” brings together 72 works by 23 artists representing different horizons across generations. The exhibition showcases how formal modes and expressions of painting have been renewed and reinvented since 1960 to today: figurative or abstract, manufactured or mechanic, inhabited or distant. These works are also displayed in dialogue with a series of sculptures and installations.

“The Collection of the Fondation: A Vision for Painting” is on view through August 26 at Fondation Louis Vuitton 8 avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Bois de Boulogne, Paris. photographs courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton

Henry Wessel: A Dark Thread @ Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris

For five decades, Henry Wessel documented intensifying elements of the uncanny present in scenes of everyday life. As an avid fan of film noir and detective fiction, Wessel arranged his images in sequences like storyboards for films so that viewers could try to make connections and imagine stories between pictures that may have been taken years apart. The prolific photographer worked primarily in black and white, developing his own prints with a characteristic soft silver tone. Henry Wessel created an interpretive, mysterious vision of the places he lived in and visited, with a “dark thread” connecting his photographs to one another.

Henry Wessel: A Dark Thread is on view through August 25 at Maison Européenne de la Photographie 5/7 Rue de Fourcy, Paris, France. photographs courtesy of Maison Européenne de la Photographie

Martine Franck @ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson In Paris

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first exhibition at 79 rue des Archives opens Martine Franck – A retrospective. A journey through the life of a free spirit (Belgian 1938-2012), from activist gatherings to meditative landscapes, political engagement to friendly portraits, this deeply human vision open to the history of art was associated with the Viva agency, which she helped create, then with the cooperative Magnum Photos.

A socially engaged photographer, Martine Franck became an activist for many of these causes she actively photographed, which required a great deal of courage and daring for the young woman who had been taught not to cross the boundaries. She famously laments:

“A photograph isn’t necessarily a lie”, she said. “But nor is it the truth. […] You have to be ready to welcome the unexpected” - Martine Franck

Read more at: https://bit.ly/1MI0Hbs

Martine Franck is on view through February 10, 2019 at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson 79 rue des Archives — 75003 Paris. photos courtesy of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson