print May 1987

Richard Baquié

With this one-person show in the Galeries Contemporaines at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Richard Baquié, a 35-year-old artist from Marseilles who was practically unknown only three years ago, received a first consecration of what promises to be a very brilliant career. Before this official acknowledgment, Baquié had had only a few exhibitions in France. These sufficed, however, to attract attention to this newcomer—so much so that he was among those invited to participate in three important group shows that were organized in 1986 to introduce contemporary French art abroad (one in Germany and

print April 1987

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto seems to have conceived his two simultaneously presented shows in France as complementary. At Marseilles the Italian artist chose to organize the exhibition around a group of recent paintings and sculptures that had been shown last year in Turin, along with a selection of his earlier works. Installed in the most spacious of the new halls at the Musée Cantini, the recent works, which according to Pistoletto come from an “art of desolation,” clearly aim to go beyond the classical opposition of painting and sculpture through the occupation of space by color. The sculptures

print March 1987

Lothar Baumgarten

Through toponymy, geography is often cloaked in the mantle of history. In cities this is often apparent in the names given to streets, avenues, and public squares commemorating places and personages already charged by a history of their own. In big cities with subway systems, the map of the subway constitutes not only a spatial guide but a veritable encyclopedia of the past—or at least that version of the past endorsed by official history. In his first show in Paris, at ARC (Animation, Recherche, Confrontation—the contemporary section of the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), Lothar

Daniel Soutif