Jean-Pierre Criqui

• 

  previews May 2009

  Katharina Fritsch

  IMAGINE SOL LEWITT OR DONALD JUDD in love with old fairy tales, haunted not only by the formal archetypes of geometry but also by the iconography of piety, commerce, and everyday life in their most generic aspects. The resulting combination might have resembled the work of Katharina Fritsch (born in 1956 in Essen, Germany).

  IMAGINE SOL LEWITT OR DONALD JUDD in love with old fairy tales, haunted not only by the formal archetypes of geometry but also by the iconography of piety, commerce, and everyday life in their most generic aspects. The resulting combination—as improbable, or as beautiful, as the encounter, so dear to Lautréamont, of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table—might have resembled the work of Katharina Fritsch (born in 1956 in Essen, Germany). Driven by a search for maximum visual impact, and fabricated with an obsessive perfectionism, her various productions—small

• 

  previews May 2008

  Saâdane Afif

  Faithful to the idea of the “cover version,” the artist will revisit and rework more than ten of his previous productions in the show.

  The works of French-born, Berlin- and Paris-based Saâdane Afif frequently include an audio or musical dimension. His best-known work, Power Chords, 2005, is based on a principle similar to synesthesia: The sound sculpture consists of a computer-programmed chorus of electric guitars, each playing a series of chords derived from the chromatic sequence of one of André Cadere's barres de bois rond. Melding the figures of viewer and listener in an ambiguous way, Afif always makes reference to some absent origin and thereby induces the sort of nostalgia—light and

• 

  previews January 2008

  Claude Closky

  For this show, Claude Closky will translate some fifty of his works from 1989 to 2007—drawings, collages, video, Web projects, artist's books, and other texts—into a purely sonic mode. Visitors will don headphones and stroll through otherwise empty galleries, listening to the results.

  “I like the kind of artifice that gives no authority to form,” quipped French artist Claude Closky, whose multimedia output includes a book of the first thousand numbers in alphabetical order and a series of giant street posters announcing that it isn't 3 PM. A Bartleby in reverse, Closky is a hyperactive artist who find new reasons to produce work in the realm of the arbitrary. For this show, he will translate some fifty of his works from 1989 to 2007—drawings, collages, video, Web projects, artist's books, and other texts—into a purely sonic mode. Visitors will don headphones

• 

  previews January 2007

  Richard Estes

  It used to seem obvious that the Photorealist work of Richard Estes (born 1932) was in tune with the major artistic currents of the 1960s: primarily Pop, but also Minimalism, which it is difficult not to think of when looking at a painting such as Telephone Booths, 1968. But our sense of Estes’s affinity with these movements was doubtless mistaken and he now appears, instead, as an antimodern painter, fairly unconcerned with the art of the past century.

  It used to seem obvious that the Photorealist work of Richard Estes (born 1932) was in tune with the major artistic currents of the 1960s: primarily Pop, but also Minimalism, which it is difficult not to think of when looking at a painting such as Telephone Booths, 1968. But our sense of Estes’s affinity with these movements was doubtless mistaken and he now appears, instead, as an antimodern painter, fairly unconcerned with the art of the past century. Bringing together some fifty paintings from 1967 to the present, this retrospective should

• previews September 2005

  “Ecstasy: In and About Altered Sttes”

  In the ’80s, XTC (the English pop band whose name phonetically transcribes the word that serves as the theme for this exhibition) wrote a song titled “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul.” The great voyage beyond oneself seems to be the order of the day, at least if one is to judge by the number of recent exhibitions devoted either to soul-searching’s historical and vernacular side (psychedelia) or to its multiple avatars in contemporary art. Among the latter, this show promises a particularly original, and very multimedia, journey. The list of thirty artists is radically

• 

  print January 2005

  psychedelic posters

  WE ARE IN A LUXURIOUS VILLA somewhere in the Los Angeles hills, the home of Terry Valentine, a rock-music producer of a certain age now involved in a panoply of dubious schemes. Our man stands facing a bathroom mirror, inspecting his teeth. His young mistress, lying in the tub, points at a framed poster for a Santana concert at the Fillmore West that hangs on the wall and, after waxing lyrical over its colors, says, “It must have been a time, huh? A golden moment.” Valentine responds, “Have you ever dreamed about a place you never really recalled being to before? A place that maybe only exists

• 

  previews January 2005

  “Inflamed with Art: Dubuffet and Art Brut”

  Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), who amused himself at times by reading the comedies of Terence in the original Latin, nevertheless asserted that he preferred the inventions of art brut to the “parrot-like processes” of “cultural art”—a torturous but fruitful aporia that occupied him for much of his life. The largest show of art brut to date, this exhibition allows comparisons between 117 of Dubuffet’s own artistic productions and those of some fifty brut artists, from the Swiss Aloïse to Henry Darger by way of other less

• 

  print November 2003

  Bernard Frize

  What is the greatest number of color fields that can be arranged so that each maintains a border with all others? Bernard Frize’s Heawood, 1999, a pair of painted sculptures in the permanent collection of the MAMVP, and Heawood, 2003, the thirteen digital prints that introduce this show of the artist’s mostly recent paintings, address this thorny question. The works’ namesake, British mathematician Percy John Heawood, labored over this and related problems (which originated in cartography) in the years surrounding the turn of the last century; at one point, exploring three-dimensional forms, he

• 

  print Summer 2003

  LOCUS FOCUS: “HYPERREALISMS”

  TO BE A STUDENT OF ART HISTORY IN PARIS DURING THE EARLY ’80S WAS not especially exhilarating, but for me Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s courses at Nanterre University and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, like Hubert Damisch’s seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, were exceptions. I remember his classes, devoted to the beginnings of abstract art and to Romanticism, in which knowledge was mobilized not to anesthetize the subject but, on the contrary, to reconstruct in lively fashion the artistic stakes for Mondrian, Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, Novalis, and Nerval. In

• 

  previews May 2003

  Hyperréalismes—USA 1965–1975

  Just after Pop art created a taste for iconography drawn from the banal precincts of everyday life, and some time before photography began to rival the great apparatus of painting, there was hyperrealism.

  Just after Pop art created a taste for iconography drawn from the banal precincts of everyday life, and some time before photography began to rival the great apparatus of painting, there was hyperrealism. This exhibition revisits the American phase of the phenomenon in detail. As imagined by the highly imaginative art historian Jean Claude Lebensztejn, accompanied by Patrick Javault of the MAMC in Strasbourg, “Hyperréalismes” presents roughly seventy works by more than a dozen artists, from Richard Artschwager to Ben Schonzeit. The landmark catalogue includes texts by the curators and art

• 

  print April 2002

  Carla Accardi

  Italian writer and poet Italo Calvino was preparing the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University when he died suddenly in 1985. Published later as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the series begins by exploring the theme of lightness. Identifying the source of his literary vocation as the urgent desire to escape the paralyzing effects of heaviness, Calvino declared, “Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” If Calvino's enterprise was a “subtraction of weight,” the project of his compatriot and contemporary Carla Accardi has run

• previews September 2001

  CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother

  The twofold destiny of the spectator: A viewing subject, this modern figure who was constituted parallel to the autonomous work of art, is also always the object of the other’s gaze. This is the theme explored by Thomas Y. Levin through an itinerary whose theoretical and chronological point of departure is Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a panoptical prison project. Examining the consequences of this model of total control for visual culture, Levin has gathered around fifty names, among them artists, photographers, architects, and filmmakers. “CTRL [SPACE]”: an exhibition that should see you.