Asger Jorn

Fundació Antoni Tàpies
Aragó 255
February 12–April 21, 2002

Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain
1, Place Hans Jean Arp
October 19, 2001–January 13, 2002

Most people equate the Situationist International with Guy Debord, but there was another protagonist in this radical anti-art movement, Danish painter Asger Jorn. In the first French survey of the artist’s work, curators Paul Hervé Parsy and Laurent Gervereau present Jorn not only as the catalyst of the COBRA collective (1948–51), but also as an intellectual force for the nascent Situationists. With some 100 works, the show features paintings, sculptures, drawings, etchings, collages, photographs, and books. And while the ghost of Debord is no doubt still excoriating “sub-Leninist impostors,” Jorn’s oeuvre poses an interesting question: Why did Debord et al. lack all perspective on art?

— Caroline Schneider

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Fundació Antoni Tàpies
Aragó 255
November 22, 2001–January 27, 2002

Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
May 29–August 11, 2002

Centre National de la Photographie
Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild 11 rue Berryer
February 20–May 13, 2002

Hans-Peter Feldmann’s artistic bio commences with his decision to abandon painting in 1968; photographs, he stated, were “entirely sufficient” to convey the idea of his art. Out of a conceptual preoccupation with reproducible images came a trove of mass-media artifacts, amateur photos, and the artist’s own shots, all of which he categorizes and processes in booklets, posters, journals, and photographic series. This survey is intended as an overview of the transition from Feldmann’s approach in the ’70s—he is frequently touted as a forerunner of appropriation art—to the “social and political reality of the nineties.”

— Astrid Wege