Looking for a cultural break? From the Marais to Romainville through République and Belleville, we’ll be your guide for this month’s selection of art exhibits!

 

 

– Version française –

 

 

Frédéric Coché, Natasja van Kampen, and Ludovic Nino – Motifs

Until July 28th

Featured alongside the “human adventures” of illustrator and comic book author Frédéric Coché, the works of Dutch artist Natasja van Kampen impress by the strength of their message. Empty hotel lobbies, soulless conference rooms, large interiors with inexplicable carpets: by representing the places where political and economic decision-makers traditionally meet, she rightly denounces “the vulgarity of power and business”, and their disconnection from the reality shared by the majority of the population. For this group exhibition, Motifs, La Ferronnerie gallery also presents a selection of artworks by Ludovic Nino, whose inks depict “abandoned spaces that once had a function, remnants of a past waiting for a new beginning”.

Tuesday to Friday: 2pm-7pm – Saturday: 1pm-7pm – Free admission

Galerie La Ferronnerie
40 rue de la Folie-Méricourt, 75011 Paris
www.galerielaferronnerie.fr

 

 

Camille Léage – Bus 60

Until September 19th

“In 2010, Camille Léage started documenting the streets of the neighborhoods of northeastern Paris. During her wanderings in the 18th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements, she defined a protocol to observe her city differently. For ten years, she brought back scenes that testify to the human and architectural diversity of this territory and gives us another image of Paris, far from the clichés of the City of Light, or of the so-called “quartiers sensibles”. Throughout this research, Camille Léage reflects on how to better inhabit the city. She raises questions about diversity between communities, the way public space is shared, and the usefulness of “useless” actions. Her pictures are accompanied by a series of illustrated postcards, along with an essay by Taous Dahmani (historian of photography), and interviews with Solo (co-founder of the rap collective Assassin), as well as Pascale Lapalud and Chris Blache (creators of the platform Genre et Ville).”

Outdoors – Free admission

Walls of the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin
Rue des Pyrénées & Rue de Ménilmontant, 75020 Paris
mairie20.paris.fr

 

 

Ray K. Metzker – Sculpteur de lumière

Until July 23rd

“For its third solo exhibition of Ray K. Metzker’s work, Les Douches la Galerie has assembled a new selection of photographs representative of his strength of experimentation and his mastery of the medium. From his graduation work in 1957-58 from the Institute of Design in Chicago to the City Whispers series in the early 1980s, the exhibition follows the figure of the ordinary man through his various major series.”

Wednesday to Saturday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission

Les Douches La Galerie
5 rue Legouvé, 75010 Paris
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com

 

 

Ana Miranda – Photographies

Until July 13th

Floral orchestrations, still lifes, dark undergrowth: in her compositions of elegant contrasts, photographer Ana Miranda finds her inspiration in the great pictorial movements of Romanticism, Baroque, and the Flemish School. “The idea was to recover the principles of each: composition, color, tint, playing with lights, shadows, textures, in order to approach them through photography. Not wanting to create any kind of pastiche, contemporary details and anachronistic items have slipped into the image in order to inscribe the work in our time”, explains the artist, whose works depict a dialogue between “the shimmer of colors” and the deepest darkness. Alternating small and medium formats, Ana Miranda’s series can be seen until July 13th on the walls of the brasserie Les Buttes-Chaumont, a charming local address whose terrace extends below the square Bolivar.

Monday to Friday: 8am-12am – Saturday & Sunday: 11am-12am – Free admission

Brasserie Les Buttes-Chaumont
38 avenue Simon Bolivar, 75019 Paris
Instagram

 

 

Beya Rebaï – Les Beaux Jours

Until August 27th

“Beya Rebaï discovered pastel in 2018, and it was love at first sight with this soft, velvety medium offering infinite color possibilities. Since then, her dry and oil pastels have become her signature. She explores, experiments, draws constantly, with great freedom, quickly, creating compositions sober and full of life at the same time. With a special appetite for the representation of landscapes, often with unreal colors, distant from reality. Beya passionately loves nature, the vital explosion of spring, flowers, countryside landscapes. No need to go to the end of the world to taste the sensuality of nature awakening: this is what the artist tells us in Les Beaux Jours, where each drawing evokes a sweet and nostalgic memory, with the promise that everything will start again next year.”

Monday to Saturday: 11am-7pm – Free admission

Slow Galerie
5 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris
www.slowgalerie.com

 

 

Toshio Saeki – Fièvres nocturnes

Until August 27th

“Born in Miyazaki Prefecture in southeastern Japan, Toshio Saeki was four years old when his family moved to Osaka. He learned to draw at an early age, and after finishing high school, began working in advertising. In 1969, he moved to Tokyo and developed his own universe by publishing Saeki Toshio Gashuu the following year, his first work, which in his own words evokes “a nightmarish fresco inspired by traditional Japanese imagery”. In 1971, he began a regular collaboration with the erotic magazine SM Selecto. Very popular in Japan in the 1970s, Toshio Saeki had many exhibitions in his country and abroad. The French public discovered him with Japon Intime, published in 1990 by Albin Michel. He interrupted his various collaborations with the press at the end of the 1980s, living a form of semi-retirement in the mountains of Chiba Prefecture, outside Tokyo [until his passing in 2019].”

Monday to Saturday: 12:30pm-7:30pm – Free admission

Galerie Arts Factory
27 rue de Charonne, 75011 Paris
www.artsfactory.net

 

 

Claire Seppecher – Photographies

Until July 31st

Perched at the top of Parc de Belleville, the gallery Les Temps Donnés presents a selection of artworks by photographer Claire Seppecher until the end of the month. Accustomed to strolling along the streets of Belleville and Ménilmontant, the Parisian artist knows this local address well, and some of her series were already featured there. Favoring square formats, her portraits alternate between the use of colors and black and white.

Wednesday to Sunday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission

Galerie Les Temps Donnés
16 rue des Envierges, 75020 Paris
www.lestempsdonnes.com

 

 

Floryan Varennes – Hypersensibilité

Until July 16th

“Referring to senses or emotions, hypersensitivity refers to extreme states of the body – whether positive or negative – an intensity found in the works of Floryan Varennes, made of contrasts between materials, shapes, and concepts. For the artist who chose to name his first solo exhibition at Maëlle Galerie Hypersensitivity, this state is above all an opening towards others, allowed by an exacerbated receptivity, used for compassion and mutual aid. This is how the Matriarch welcomes us in the exhibition, a futuristic entity suspended in space, whose threatening air is matched only by its tutelary role: an assembly of PVC and medical instruments, it also evokes the shapes of a riveted medieval armor. A goddess of care, the Matriarch is both curative and protective: she watches over us.” — Kevin Bideaux

Tuesday to Saturday: 10am-6pm – Free admission

Maëlle Galerie
29 rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville
www.maellegalerie.com

 

 

Allemagne / Années 1920 / Nouvelle Objectivité / August Sander

Until September 5th

“The Centre Pompidou’s multidisciplinary exhibition, “the first comprehensive look at this artistic movement in France”, examines the art and culture of Germany in the 1920s, in a parallel with the work of photographer August Sander. After the end of the First World War, an era of contrasts began in Germany, then disillusioned yet rich in creativity. On the one hand, the nascent democratic aspirations of the Weimar Republic, the dazzling rise of technology, a form of individual liberation, favoring the expression of a hitherto repressed marginality. On the other hand, the end of the illusions and utopias brought down in the hell of the trenches, the unbridled violence of industrial development, and the rise of totalitarianism. […] — Our article (French)

Every day (except Tuesdays): 11am-8pm (until 11pm on Thursdays) – €14/€11/€0

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris
www.centrepompidou.fr

 

 

Gaudí

Until July 17th

The Musée d’Orsay invites us into Gaudí’s studio for the most important French exhibition of this scale dedicated to the Barcelona genius in nearly fifty years. We rediscover the artist’s precocious and multifaceted talent, from the inventiveness of his student sketches to his most famous architectural achievements. In association with the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), the institution on the banks of the Seine is also presenting woodwork, doors, windows, and other interior furnishings designed by the Catalan, demonstrating that his sense of innovative aesthetics did not prevent a great attachment to craft techniques. “Gaudí’s work was built on paradox: light and shadow, refinement and austerity, pride and humility”, the curators of the exhibition indeed point out.

Tuesday to Sunday: 9:30am-6pm (until 9:45pm on Thursdays) – €16/€13/€12/€0

Musée d’Orsay
1, rue de la Légion d’Honneur 75007 Paris
www.musee-orsay.fr

 

 

Cabu – Dessins de la rafle du Vel d’Hiv

Until November 7th

“In the spring of 1967, the magazine Le Nouveau Candide published the first pages of La Grande rafle du Vel d’Hiv 16 juillet 1942 by Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard. To illustrate this five-part series, the editorial staff called on a young 29-year-old cartoonist, Jean Cabut, known as Cabu. Through documents and testimonies, Lévy and Tillard’s book retraces the course of the round-up and lockdown of more than 8,000 of the 13,000 victims of the arrests in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Pointing out the role of the French police and the Vichy government in the deportation of Jews by the Nazis, the book provoked a shock in the public opinion. It was also a shock for Cabu, who discovered this tragedy, forgotten too quickly, and put the best of his talent to translate the scenes described into drawings. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, Véronique Cabut, his wife, and the Shoah Memorial, offer to rediscover these drawings, never exhibited since their publication. This exhibition is also a tribute to a brilliant and popular cartoonist who was one of the twelve victims of the January 7th, 2015 jihadist attack against the staff of Charlie Hebdo.”

Sunday to Friday: 10am-6:30pm (until 10pm on Thursdays) – Free admission

Mémorial de la Shoah
17 rue Geoffroy L’Asnier, 75004 Paris
www.memorialdelashoah.org

 

 

In the banlieues: Oakland/Saint-Denis

Until August 28th

“Whatever you call them – suburbs, peripheries, urban fringes… – this exhibition highlights the symbolic reversal from the center to the periphery. Artistic movements, social struggles, urban innovations: the suburbs of Oakland, California, and Saint-Denis are proving their influence in inventing solutions to the challenges of poverty and the accelerated urban development that metropolises are facing. Combining urban, artistic, and social approaches, In the Banlieues retraces the key moments in the history of the two cities and reveals, through concrete experiences and illustrated stories, their contributions to current urban planning practices. Agitators of ideas, creators of connections, spokespersons for those who are rarely heard, revelators of spaces and models of cooperation, the actors of these territories use their sensitivity to build on a human scale.”

Tuesday to Sunday: 11am-7pm – Free admission

Pavillon de l’Arsenal
21 boulevard Morland, 75004 Paris
www.pavillon-arsenal.com

 

 

Pionnières – Artists in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties

Until July 10th

“Having long been marginalised and discriminated against, both in terms of their training and their access to galleries, collectors and museums, women artists in the first half of the 20th century nevertheless played an essential role in the development of the major artistic movements of our times, even if this was not acknowledged during their lifetime. It is only recently that their role in the avant-gardes has been explored; indeed, it stands to reason that once these women’s role is properly recognised, these movements will be transformed. This exhibition invites us to reinstate them in this changing history of art, from Fauvism to abstraction via Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, but also in the worlds of architecture, dance, design, literature and fashion, as well as scientific discovery. Their visual and conceptual explorations attest to their audacity and courage in the face of established conventions that confined women within certain professions and stereotypes. They express, in many different ways, a desire to redefine the role of women in the modern world.”

Every day: 10:30am-7pm (until 10pm on Mondays) – €14,50/€10,50/€0

Musée du Luxembourg
19 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris
museeduluxembourg.fr

 

 

Sors de ta Réserve #1

Until October 1st

“After the transfer of the 2,078 works in the Frac Île-de-France collection, Les Réserves reopen to the public with the hanging of works chosen online. This first selection of artworks by the public, including recent pieces as well as older, even historical ones, perfectly represents the diversity of mediums found in the Frac’s collection. It also reflects the diversity of today’s artistic creation. 33 works, made by 33 artists, were chosen by the public for this inaugural experiment of Sors de ta Réserve.”

Wednesday to Saturday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission

Les Réserves – Frac Île-de-France
43 rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville
www.fraciledefrance.com

 

 

Urbanité verte

Until July 23rd

“Orchestrated by curator Julie Sicault Maillé, the collective exhibition Urbanité verte brings together artistic projects and civic initiatives around the issues of nature in the city. The market gardening past of Montreuil becomes an inspiration, with the future of our cities to be dreamt and built. The exhibition proposes a sensitive and reflexive immersion, from a fictional city without nature, to a city that living beings, plants, animals, and humans, inhabit together and get to reinvent. From a picnic in an urban park to growing vegetable crops, or to the sheep that graze in the city, the artists invite us, through their paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, and drawings, to listen to Marcel Proust: ‘The only, the true, the only journey is to change the way we look at things’.”

Wednesday to Friday: 2pm-6pm (until 9pm on Thursdays) – Saturday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission

Centre Tignous d’art contemporain
116 rue de Paris, 93100 Montreuil
centretignousdartcontemporain.fr

 

 

 

Illustration (cropped):
Exhibition view – ‘Urbanité verte‘ at Centre Tignous d’art contemporain
© Atelier Find Art – Centre Tignous d’art contemporain