When you think of Paris in the 1920s, you might think of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday salons. Where Picasso and Matisse met Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Sitwell to philosophize about the world and the world. In the last 100 years, Paris has become a kind of symbol – for the creative energy of the early 20th century, indeed for modernity in general. The image of Parisian bohème is of course also subject to clichés and romanticized to the limits of taste. But the creative light of the city never went out completely. These days, Paris is also becoming more relevant to the contemporary art scene. This is supported by the takeover of the traditional art fair FIAC by the almost unrivaled fair titan Art Basel.
The latest Basel creation is called Paris+. The fact that it took place in Paris this year was read by those in the know as a signal to the market to pay more attention to the French capital from now on. As far as contemporary is concerned, Paris was long considered too self-referential and laid back, and in the eyes of some simply too traditional.
In addition to the Paris+ exhibition stands in the Grand Palais, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, sculptures and installations in the Tuileries Gardens at the Louvre or in the Musée Delacroix could also be seen at the fair this year – including works by Robert Montgomery, Ugo Schiavi and Niki de Saint-Phalle. The timing was deliberate: after all, a number of top-class exhibitions and gallery spaces opened in France this year.
Esther Schipper opens a new branch in Paris
This includes the newly opened branch of one of Berlin’s most important galleries, Esther Schipper. For the eponymous gallery owner, who herself grew up between Taipei and Paris and has French citizenship, the Parisian location at Place Vendôme, in the heart of the city, also represents a kind of homecoming. At the moment you can see works by the conceptual artist Ceal Floyer, which also represent an examination of the new space. Here the artist divides its architectural elements into their individual parts, makes otherwise invisible settings visible, confronts us with our perception of walls, floors and windows – with their functional logic, their limits and their (brittle) stability.
In the middle of the picture: The work “Saw” by the artist Ceal Floyer in the newly opened Paris branch of the Berlin gallery Esther SchipperAndrew Rossetti
In the main room of the gallery, for example, a jagged metal saw blade protrudes from the floor, like a saw milling an almost complete circle in the polished parquet floor. A hole in space seems to appear at the circle marking. The work “Saw” (2015) thus not only undermines the viewer’s confidence in the stability of the soil, but also conjures up the abysses of the imagination. The whole thing looks a bit like a scene from a Looney Tunes cartoon, a bizarre image of physical (apparent) reality.
Not far from there hangs a more recent work, “Jigsaw”. It consists of twelve graphite drawings, each showing a piece of the puzzle. So isolated, the individual parts will probably never complete the whole. Floyer’s works are an expression of her ironic conceptualism. Her art examines interfaces between the artificial and the natural, substance and appearance. And creates, as in “Jigsaw”, a feeling of incompleteness that encourages the works to be thought through to the end in one’s head.
Update to a white art canon: Chabalala Self
A little under two hours by train from Paris, at the Mustard location in Dijon, you can see works by US artist Tschabalala Self. The title of her exhibition is “Make Room”. That sounds like a proverbial request to the art world to make room: for something new. Because even if numerous female artists, especially younger ones, today dream of breaking through old dichotomies – between subject and object, aesthetic appearance and lived reality – the art world still often finds it difficult to get behind the traditional structures of the market and the large art institutions to let yourself
Works by US artist Tschabalala Self at Le Consortium in Dijon, FranceRebecca Fanuele/Consortium-Museum
Self, who has already exhibited at the Schur-Narula Gallery in Berlin, actually has something new to offer. The individual flashes up again and again in her art, especially the black woman: as a fantasy, metaphor and mirror of social expectations between hyper-sexualization, racist clichés and personal vulnerability. The artist, born in 1990, creates a broad spectrum of black physicality. Some of these bodies seem reduced to corpulent outlines and vulgar curves, to buttocks, breasts, vulvae. Then again they are staged in streetwear, elegant dresses and with dancing grace. Much of Self’s work consists of fabrics that she sews directly onto the canvas.
The large-scale paintings that can be seen here in the Consortium seem like attempts to add something third to the medium of fabric through the flat-contrasting pastel colors and the sometimes grotesquely staged physicality: like light that is shot through a prism and breaks down into its spectral components unraveled, Self’s works—certainly not entirely independent of who is looking at them—appear at one moment like fetishized clichés, at the other like powerful updates to a white and Eurocentric art canon.
For example, Self’s paintings, collages and installations repeatedly bring to mind Paul Klee’s mythically charged drawings or watercolors. Or the expressive two-dimensionality of Joan Miró’s paintings. Sometimes they also seem like a contemporary response to reductive depictions of blackness in works such as Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Sleeping Milli”. Her works invert the objectifying, white view of black bodies – through a genuinely new, unapologetically black perspective.
Scene from Ugo Rondinone’s art film “Burn to Shine”, currently showing at the Petit Palais in ParisStefan Altenburger/Small Palace
Dance and escapism at the Petit Palais
Another highlight currently on view in Paris is the work of Swiss installation artist Ugo Rondinone in the Beaux-Arts architecture of the Petit Palais. At the heart of the exhibition is Rondinone’s latest film, Burn to Shine, shown here amidst a monumental, circular yakisugi structure made of charred wood, surrounded by paintings by the symbolist Eugène Carrière.
Inside the dark room, an incantation that has become a film can be seen on six large screens: We see a group of people dancing and drumming in the middle of the Mahgreb desert, who come together for a several-minute dance sequence around a campfire. They are trance-like movements, guided by Fouad Boussouf’s specially arranged choreography. Anyone who stands in the midst of this artistic tightrope walk between escapism, ancestor worship and world renewal will find it difficult not to be carried away by it, at least for a moment.
The theme of dance is also reflected in Rondinone’s line of trapeze dancing wax figures, which he has cleverly arranged amidst the Petit Palais’ marble-white sculpture collection. And also in the blue and white cast bodies, on which sky and cloud formations seem to be depicted. The latter arch gracefully dancing over the entrance rotunda of the Petit Palais, in front of mosaics and stained glass. You literally get lost looking into the air. No question: Paris has something contemporary to offer these days. Perhaps a good moment to reconsider outdated images of this city.
Cancel Floyer. Esther Schipper (Paris), to February 4; Tschabalala Self: Make Room. Le Consortium Dijon, bus 22. January 2023; Hugh Rondinone. Small palace, until January 8th.