Tag: paris

20
Nov

Urs Fischer. Leo

An artwork is not about the now.
—Urs Fischer

Gagosian is pleased to present Leo, an exhibition of new work by Urs Fischer.
Across his protean oeuvre, Fischer frequently evokes art historical genres and motifs with wry self-awareness and humor. In Fischer’s work, the processes of material creation and destruction are often explored through the use of impermanent materials, as in Bread House (2004–05), a life-size cabin constructed from loaves of sourdough bread. Embracing transformation and decay while resounding with poetic contradictions, Fischer’s art excavates the potential of its materials and media, producing joyful disorientation and sinister bewilderment.

Fischer’s candle sculptures exemplify the relationship between permanence and impermanence. He began to make them in the early 2000s with a series of crudely rendered female nudes, standing upright or lounging in groups. A series of realistic figurative candle portraits followed, including a full-size replica of Giambologna’s sixteenth-century sculpture The Rape of the Sabine Women, and Marsupiale (Fabrizio) (2017), which amalgamates a portrait of the Florentine antique dealer Fabrizio Moretti with an oversize bust of Saint Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners. In 2018, Fischer created a candle replica of the art patron and collector Dasha Zhukova, which burned for weeks in the shopfront gallery at Gagosian Davies Street in London.

Fischer’s newest candle portrait, Leo (George & Irmelin) (2019), depicts Leonardo DiCaprio with his parents, George DiCaprio and Irmelin Indenbirken. Cast entirely in wax, the family is posed in mid-action: George gestures while conversing with Leo, as Irmelin holds Leo in her loving embrace.

As with all of Fischer’s candle sculptures, Leo (George & Irmelin) will melt slowly over the course of the exhibition, its original composition transmuted into a form dictated by the wayward laws of physics. Captivating in their materiality and haunting in their implications, Fischer’s candles serve as both portraits of—and meditations on—the passing of time. Elaborating on traditions of memento mori, they remind viewers of the transience of life, beauty, and even art itself.

Leo is presented in the ground floor gallery of Gagosian Paris. On view upstairs in the Project Space is Smalls, an exhibition of new works by Spencer Sweeney.

Urs Fischer. Leo
October 14–December 20, 2019

Gagosian
4 rue de Ponthieu
75008 Paris

+33 1 75 00 05 92
paris@gagosian.com

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–7

Contact
collecting@gagosian.com
press@gagosian.com

Image: Urs Fischer Gentle Moon, 2019 Aluminum composite panel, aluminum honeycomb, two-component adhesive, primer, gesso, solvent-based screen printing ink 96 x 72 in 243.8 x 182.9 cm © Urs Fischer. Photo- Ulrich Ghezzi. Courtesy Gagosian
03
Lug

Sally Mann – A Thousand Crossings

For more than 40 years, Sally Mann (born 1951) has been taking hauntingly beautiful experimental photographs that explore the essential themes of existence: memory, desire, mortality, family, and nature’s overwhelming indifference towards mankind. What gives unity to this vast corpus of portraits, still lifes, landscapes and miscellaneous studies is that it is the product of one place, the southern United States.

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia. Many years ago she wrote about what it means to live in the South; drawing on a deep love for that area and a profound awareness of its complex historical heritage, she raised bold, thought-provoking questions—about history, identity, race and religion—that went beyond geographical and national boundaries.

This exhibition is the first major retrospective of the eminent artist’s work; it examines her relationship with her native region and how it has shaped her work. The retrospective is arranged in five parts and features many previously unknown or unpublished works. It is both an overview of four decades of the artist’s work and a thoughtful analysis of how the legacy of the South – at once, homeland and cemetery, refuge and battlefield – is reflected in her work as a powerful and disturbing force that continues to shape the identity and the reality of an entire country.

Curators: Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachussetts, in association with the Jeu de Paume.

The FOUNDATION NEUFLIZE OBC choses to bring its support to this exhibition.

Sally Mann
A Thousand Crossings
June 18–September 22, 2019

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
France

www.jeudepaume.org
lemagazine.jeudepaume.org

Images: Jessie #25 & Virginia #6 2004. Sally Mann, Gelatin silver print. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Promised Gift of Stephen G. Stein Employee Benefit Trust. © Sally Mann
17
Giu

DORA MAAR in Paris

The largest French retrospective ever devoted to Dora Maar (1907-1997) invites you to discover all the facets of her work, through more than five hundred works and documents. Initially a professional photographer and surrealist before becoming a painter, Dora Maar is an artist of undeniable renown. Far beyond the image, to which she is all too often limited, of her intimate relationship with Picasso, this exhibition retraces the life of an accomplished artist and a free and independent intellectual.

The exhibition is organized by the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, in coproduction with the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles) and in collaboration with the Tate Modern (London).

PRESENTATION BY THE CURATORS
“To Dora of the varied, always beautiful, faces”. Lise Deharme’s dedication to her friend Dora Maar in a copy of Cœur de Pic (1937) poetically sums up the various facets of her artistic career: between photographer and painter, between youthful Surrealist revolution and the existential introspection that marked her painting activity after World War II.

With the collaboration of the J. Paul Getty Museum and in partnership with the Tate Modern, the exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou aims to highlight, for the first time in a French museum, Dora Maar’s work as an artist, and not only as the muse and mistress of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. Although for many she remains the model of La femme qui pleure, Dora Maar has nevertheless recently enjoyed critical reception and recognition in studies dedicated to Surrealism and photography. Several exhibitions organized by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, “Explosante fixe” and, more recently, “La Subversion des images” and “Voici Paris”, accorded a special place to Dora Maar’s Surrealist work, with enigmatic photographs such as Portrait d’Ubu and Le Simulateur, a photomontage that joined the museum’s collections in 1973.
The donation of Simulateur was the beginning of the Centre Pompidou’s continued interest in Dora Maar’s photographic work. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by various acquisitions, culminating in 2011 with the arrival of ten prints from the Bouqueret collection. In 2004 the purchase of her studio collection, consisting of some one thousand eight hundred and ninety negatives and two hundred and eighty contact prints, made the collection preserved in the Musée National d’Art Moderne one of the largest public collections of Dora Maar’s work. The recent digitization of negatives has now rendered her work accessible to a large audience of researchers and amateurs. Dora Maar is the only artist with a large portfolio of photographs preserved in the collections – Brancusi, Brassaï, Éli Lotar, Man Ray – who has not yet been the subject of a major exhibition project. Thanks to original archives and close scientific collaboration between the curatorship teams at the Centre Pompidou and the Getty Museum, the Dora Maar retrospective traces the development of this independent artist through more than four hundred works and documents: from her first commissions for fashion and advertising as a studio photographer, to her political commitments as witnessed by her street photographs, including her Surrealist activity and her meeting with Picasso. Lastly, the exhibition shines a special spotlight on her work as a painter, an activity to which she devoted herself for nearly forty years. Like her fellow female photographers, Laure Albin Guillot, Rogi André, Nora Dumas and Germaine Krull, who were active like her between the wars, Dora Maar belongs to the generation of women who liberated themselves professionally and socially through their work as photographers, a profession that was undergoing complete renewal with the development of the illustrated press and advertising. After studying graphic art in the Comité des Dames of the Union des Arts Décoratifs, Dora Maar trained in photography in the late 1920s. Like her mentor, Emmanuel Sougez, she preferred to work in a studio and collaborated with Pierre Kéfer, a set designer for films, from 1931 to 1935. “Kéfer-Dora Maar” became the name and the official credit for the studio, figuring in prints and publications at the time, even when Dora Maar or Pierre Kéfer worked alone on projects. Kéfer’s social flair enabled them to specialise in portraits, fashion and advertising illustrations for the cosmetics sector. This exhibition accords a central position to Dora Maar, a professional photographer endowed with an inventiveness that combined great technical mastery with a dreamlike universe that was much praised by her contemporaries.Continue Reading..