Today at the age of 76, Etienne-Martin occupies a place of his own in sculpture. He has created not only an autonomous world, but a diverse one. If one didn’t know that the author of this work has held a professorship at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, one might classify his work as art brut. That Harald Szeemann should have chosen such an artist to occupy the space here makes good sense. Szeemann, who last year presented a beautiful group of works by Mario Merz in the same space, plays the ruggedly primitivist forms of Etienne-Martin against the austere spatial geometry of the vast chapel.

Pierre is a photographer. Gilles is a painter. Ever since their meeting in 1977, when they decided to work collaboratively, they have been using both disciplines to create images in which their two universes mingle lovingly. To the desperate and provocative punk images that were dominant at the time, Pierre et Gilles opposed tender and saccharin representations, largely influenced by Indian and Egyptian cinema, popular imagery, and fairy tales. They proposed a kind of gaiety and sweet abandon in a world preoccupied with crises and enclosed in skepticism.

In 1981, they completed the “Paradises”