Curated by Alfred Pacquement

Pulled toward electromagnets yet restrained by wires, the suspended metal cones and needles of Takis’s “Télésculptures” seem to quiver with absurd and frustrated desire.The Greek artist settled in France in 1954 and, with sculptures involving magnetism, light, and sound, became a leading figure in the kinetic art movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Now, twenty-two years after his last major retrospective, the Palais de Tokyo offers a welcome opportunity to reassess Takis’s work at a moment when contemporaries such as Lygia Clark and the German postwar group Zero are receiving high-profile surveys. With approximately sixty works dating from 1960 to the present, the galleries will surely hum with what William S. Burroughs described as Takis’s “cold blue mineral music of thinking metal.”

— Tyler Cann

Curated by Christian Briend

Born in Haiti but active in France for most of his career, Hervé Télémaque has for five decades made works that parse the pictorial vocabularies of consumer culture and that are inflected by transatlantic dialects of race and power. Stenciled letters and cartoonish figures may make a painting like My Darling Clementine, 1963, legibly Pop, but the artist’s ferocious dissections of forms and bodies, as well as his references to loaded stereotypes (a rubber mammy doll is installed next to this canvas), describe American consumerism in a language far more confrontational than that offered by most New York Pop of the early ’60s. The Pompidou’s exhibition will showcase this and more than seventy other works, including paintings, collages, drawings, assemblages, and sculptural objects by this bold and underappreciated artist. Travels to Le Musée Cantini de Marseilles, June 19–Sept. 20.

— Sarah K. Rich