Mara Hoberman

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  picks May 03, 2021

  Kenjiro Okazaki

  Kenjiro Okazaki is perhaps best known in the US for his 2007 collaboration with Trisha Brown, I love my robots, in which his custom-designed cyborgs performed Brown’s choreography. If the Japanese artist’s latest works, small abstract paintings from his series “ZeroThumbnails,” 2005–, seem a far cry from mechanized dancers, they still inhabit the nexus of technology and art. The sixteen paintings on view (all works 2020) are each based on at least one work from the art-historical cannon, their models ranging from Renaissance paintings to Greek sculptures and nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts.

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  print May 2021

  Jean Claracq

  Jean Claracq paints contemporary leisure scenes with the style, technique, and skill of a Renaissance master. His subjects are not religious or royal but do represent a kind of millennial nobility. The stylish young men who populate his oeuvre are Instagram influencers, whose posts the artist pilfers to create digital collages and, finally, meticulous oil-on-wood paintings. Claracq renders his subjects and their twenty-first-century accoutrements (smartphones, baseball caps, laptops, running shoes, sports cars) with great detail and without visible brushstrokes. In addition to referencing the

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  print April 2021

  Victor Brauner

  IN THE CATALOGUE for the Victor Brauner retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, director Fabrice Hergott describes an institutional mission “to draw the public’s attention to the existence of work by nearly forgotten great artists.” Brauner—whose first and last major retrospective was in 1972 at the Musée National d’Art Moderne—certainly fits this bill, having been all but written off as a minor Surrealist. As reintroduced by curator Sophie Krebs (with assistance from Jeanne Brun, Nadia Chalbi, and Camille

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  print April 2021

  Daniel Buren and Philippe Parreno

  In 1985 Pontus Hultén founded the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques (Institute for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts), an alternative art school in Paris modeled after the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. Daniel Buren was among IHEAP’s original faculty, and Philippe Parreno was one of his students. In the years since, Parreno has often cited Buren’s influence, and Buren included Parreno in an exhibition he curated in 2007. Their work has been shown together on several occasions, and as of 2016 they are both represented by Kamel Mennour. But the recent show at the gallery’s newest

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  picks March 24, 2021

  Pierre Seinturier

  Working with thinned oils, Pierre Seinturier paints moody scenes whose semitransparent muted greens, browns, and blues recall Charles Burchfield’s watercolors. But whereas Burchfield’s American landscapes are mostly devoid of people, Seinturier’s Americana-infused settings typically feature at least one figure who is simultaneously mundane and suspicious. Across the sixteen paintings on view (all 2021), this sense of ambiguity is enhanced by low light (Seinturier has a penchant for dawn, dusk, and shadows cast by tree canopies), voyeuristic perspectives, and zinger titles that yield more questions

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  print March 2021

  Oscar Murillo

  Since March 2020, amid worldwide Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders, Oscar Murillo has been working out of an improvised studio in his hometown of La Paila, Colombia. But if the pandemic abruptly disrupted the artist’s otherwise peripatetic practice, the paintings it inspired feel far from confined. Murillo’s latest works, part of an ongoing series titled “manifestation,” 2018–, flout lockdown doom and gloom with their energetic gestures, vibrant colors, and monumental scale. Exuding painterly confidence with the majesty of Joan Mitchell’s landscapes and the urgency of Jean Dubuffet’s scratch

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  picks February 06, 2021

  Laurent Le Deunff

  Under a slanted glass roof in the gallery's back room, Laurent Le Deunff has created an enchanting woodland scene with real dirt, leaves, moss, and birch and willow saplings for his exhibition “The Mystery of Sculpting Cats.” Punctuating this loamy terrain, seven animal heads (bear, owl, snail, dolphin, hippopotamus, beaver, and seahorse) on pedestals suggest something between totem poles, a pet cemetery, and kitschy garden décor. Le Deunff made these works using a nineteenth-century decorative technique known as rocaille, whereby concrete is carved to look like wood. For an artist who has worked

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  picks December 28, 2020

  Linus Bill + Adrien Horni

  “GIFs,” 2020, Linus Bill and Adrien Horni’s latest work, is both a product and critique of our collective digital dependence, a reliance that has taken on complex new forms under lockdown. Created on smartphones, the artists’ “moving paintings” flicker across LED displays whose proportions and verticality suggest supersized and ultraluminous touch screens.

  Reclaiming passive solitary screen time in the name of creative collaboration, Bill + Horni set a goal back in early 2020 to produce and share five GIFs daily. For months they traded files via WhatsApp, composing colorful collages of [could

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  print December 2020

  Elsa Guillaume

  As its taxonomic title indicated, Elsa Guillaume’s recent show “Tritonades & coelacanthe” (Tritons & Coelacanth) was teeming with prehistoric-looking newts and fish. The artist’s interest in these species lies in their relationship to the evolutionary aquatic-to-terrestrial migration made by vertebrates millions of years ago. The coelacanth (once thought to have gone extinct before being rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century) is a transitional organism that links lobe-finned fish to tetrapods. Tritons, commonly known as newts, migrate from water to land over the course of their lifetimes.

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  print October/November 2020

  Niele Toroni

  STILL A CARRIER OF THE PAINTING VIRUS. These words, handwritten by Niele Toroni and posted near the gallery’s reception desk, greeted visitors to the artist’s recent exhibition “Un tout de différences” (A Set of Differences). The show featured the same monochrome imprints the artist has been making for more than fifty years, and the works were all titled, as usual, with blunt descriptiveness (e.g., Empreintes de pinceau N°50 à intervalles réguliers de 30 cm [Brush Impressions No. 50 at Regular Intervals of 30 cm]). Yet the familiar marks looked quite different post-Covid-19. Developed by Toroni

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  picks September 21, 2020

  Piero Gilardi

  Piero Gilardi is best known for the polyurethane “Nature Carpets” he has made since the mid-1960s. Depicting realistic landscapes such as seashores, agricultural fields, and woodlands, these rugs vary widely in size, format, and orientation. Of the fifteen such works on view here, two five-foot squares—Temporale e pesche cadute (Thunderstorm and Fallen Peaches) and Greto di torrente (Riverbed) (both 1967), a peach-littered lawn and a stony creek, respectively—are displayed on the floor. The remainder, which includes five smaller tondos produced while the artist was in coronavirus confinement in

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  print September 2020

  Jean-Charles de Quillacq

  Having opened just days after Paris ended its strict two-month coronavirus lockdown, Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s exhibition “Autofonction” (Auto-function) inevitably adopted a pandemic-related subtext. A last-minute addition to the show, Momie (Mummy), 2020—a braided loaf of bread, baked by the artist and posed on the gallery floor—was a direct response to the global health crisis, nodding to the uptick in home baking during confinement. It was a reminder of socially distant behavior, which is one way to describe the artist’s studio practice. For de Quillacq, artmaking is an erotic experience