Looking for a cultural break? From the Marais to Romainville through Bastille and Belleville, we’ll be your guide for this month’s selection of art exhibits!
Lolita Bassomb, Anita-Carlota Bassomb, Noura Djuric, Juliette Malveau, and Astrid Bourquin – Le pouvoir de l’invisible
January 4th-14th
“Some journeys leave a lasting impression. Countries, faces, landscapes whose colors pervade and bewitch. […] Through our heritage, the power of the invisible appears like a mirror that lets us glimpse the missing parts of our beings. In this search for origins and through the work of memory, each of us carries within us the legacies of our own lineage, perceiving travel experiences according to our own subjectivity. […] This invitation to travel brings together audio-visual poems by Lolita Bassomb, photographs by Anita-Carlota Bassomb, paintings by Noura Djuric, photographs by Juliette Malveau, and installations by Astrid Bourquin.”
Thursday to Sunday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission
Galerie des Ateliers d’Artistes de Belleville
1 rue Francis Picabia, 75020 Paris
ateliers-artistes-belleville.fr
E. Boissier & Lutes – Au 389
Until January 19th
“Lutes and E. Boissier are two Parisian painters who share a common vision of figurative painting: to represent our times. In the midst of the din and dense, suffocating urbanism that characterizes Paris, their paintings seek to recapture moments of tranquility. Freezing an instant of life, letting your gaze linger on people, objects and lights, taking the time to appreciate, contemplate and preserve a memory of the moment. The exhibition will run for two months, and will evolve throughout to present new paintings at Galerie 389 La Boutique.”
Tuesday to Saturday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission
Galerie 389 La Boutique
389 rue des Pyrénées, 75020 Paris
instagram.com/389laboutique
Lolita Bourdet & Alexandra Serrano – Grandeur Nature
January 5th-27th
“Artists Alexandra Serrano and Lolita Bourdet from the collective Les Cousines are pleased to exhibit their project Grandeur Nature, winner of the ‘Partage ton Grand Paris’ call for projects. During the summer of 2023, the two artists surveyed the cities of Bobigny and Bondy to draw up a sensitive cartography of a territory in motion, multiplying viewpoints and showing different forms of cohabitation between nature and city. This project is based on the combination of two creation and printing devices: the Caravana Obscura, which enables the capture of full-scale landscapes, and the Anthotypie, a plant-based photographic printing technique used to produce an inventory of spontaneous urban flora.”
Wednesday to Saturday: 10am-12pm & 2pm-6pm – Free admission
Galerie Ephémère
1 rue Kléber, 93100 Montreuil
instagram.com/hellolescousines
Alioune Diagne – Seede
From January 6th to February 24th
“For Seede, which means “the witness” in Wolof, Diagne spent several weeks visiting the Senegal coastline. His canvases echo the stories of local fishermen who, equipped only with a pirogue and a net to do their work, are seeing growing foreign industrialisation of the fishing business. As Alioune Diagne explains: “To survive, some of them have had to abandon their traditional skills and resort to the illegal practice of people smuggling.” The deep blue colour and handful of fishing nets covering the walls and floor of the Paris space give the exhibition an immersive not to say dramatic feel. “These are subjects I want to talk about,” says the artist.“Emigration is still a painful reality today. Up till now, people only envisaged living a successful life in Europe or the USA. I want to show the younger generations that it’s possible to have a future in Africa.” Since 2011, Alioune Diagne’s work has featured in a variety of solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Africa and Asia. In April 2024, the artist will have the honour of representing his country on the Senegalese Pavilion at the 60th Art Biennale International Art Exhibition in Venice.”
Tuesday to Saturday: 10am-7pm – Free admission
Templon Paris – Beaubourg
30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
www.templon.com
Véronique Dorey – Inventarium
Until January 20th
“Véronique Dorey was born in 1963, and lives and works in Paris. A cartoonist, she published her first stories in the late 1980s in the magazine Métal Hurlant, before embarking on a career as a colorist for comics. She notably worked on the trilogy Le roi des mouches by the Mezzo / Pirus duo, while filling her drawing boxes with some amazing graphic nuggets. […] To coincide with the launch of her monograph Inventarium, published by Cernunnos, the Arts Factory gallery presents a retrospective of Véronique Dorey’s work. Richly illustrated, this book looks back over an artistic career spanning three decades, with a preface by Benjamin Lacombe and a long interview with author Véronique Ovaldé. Spread over the gallery’s four levels, the exhibition features a range of works produced between 1995 and 2023, bringing together for the first time the universe of her early paintings inspired by the 1950s and some dazzling graphite drawings, including Adoscopie, a striking series of portraits that had never been exhibited before.”
Monday to Saturday: 10am-7:30pm – Free admission
Galerie Arts Factory
27 rue de Charonne, 75011 Paris
www.artsfactory.net
Yoshimi Futamura & Pierre-Elie de Pibrac – Rebirth
Until January 13th
“To mark the opening of its new venue at 6 rue Chapon, Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard is delighted to present Rebirth, a dialogue between works by French photographer Pierre-Elie de Pibrac, produced during an eight-month trip to Japan (2019-2020), and ceramics by Japanese artist Yoshimi Futamura, born in Nagoya in 1959. Taking the name of a series by Yoshimi Futamura, inspired by the spirit of resilience born of the trauma of Fukushima, the exhibition offers a meditation on the sense of impermanence that permeates Japanese culture and, more universally, all human existence. This notion of the precariousness of existence, consubstantial with its beauty, is also the common thread running through Pierre-Elie de Pibrac’s Japanese body of work, which blends color portraits from the Hakanai Sonzai series with black-and-white prints from the Mono no Aware corpus, recalling the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e, the subtle art of ink and woodcuts.”
Tuesday to Saturday: 11am-7pm – Free admission
Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard
6 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris
annelaurebuffard.com
Ndayé Kouagou – A Change of Perspective
Until February 18th
“The Frac Île-de-France presents Ndayé Kouagou’s first solo exhibition in France in such a venue. His different practices revolve around language, without establishing any hierarchy between them. From the tangible form of a painting to videos evoking the world of influencers, to the intimate and ephemeral nature of performances and workshops, his work gives equal consideration to transmission via objects, performances, and educational formats. Engaging with the other is central to his need to create. A self-taught artist, his work is driven by a desire for dialogue and openness, a yearning to allow others to dream for themselves.”
Wednesday to Sunday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission
Frac Île-de-France – Le Plateau
22 rue des Alouettes, 75019 Paris
www.fraciledefrance.com
Alice Lasnier / With Fanny Caron, Julien Espiaut, and François Hebert – Les fleurs de l’âge
January 13th-31st
“The photo exhibition Les fleurs de l’âge highlights the simplicity of a grandmother’s daily life, as seen through the lens of her granddaughter. A tribute to the relationship between generations, it captures and sublimates the old-fashioned simplicities that seem so ordinary to us. On the day of her grandmother’s 90th birthday, her granddaughter Alice sees the melancholy in her eyes. Deep down, she’d like to join her husband, who died two years prior. From breakfast to dinner, in the village hall, to long moments contemplating the birds and talking about the weather, this photographic series was produced over the course of a single day, on the last day of summer, to keep a trace of her grandmother and show her the beauty of the daily life of which she had grown bored.”
Tuesday to Sunday: 11am-7pm – Free admission
Péniche-librairie L’eau et les rêves
9 quai de l’Oise, 75019 Paris
www.penichelibrairie.com
Yukiko Noritake – La Villa
Until January 16th
“La Villa is a lavish series of 30 elegantly styled gouaches. The viewer plunges into a softly chic universe, where every guest and every space is carefully depicted. The meticulousness of the details is reflected in the lace of a dress, a trompe l’oeil wall, the transparency of a crystal, the sensuality of a fruit bowl… You can almost hear the hubbub of the evening, so vibrant is life in Yukiko’s vast painting, where the guests, gathered under a masterly, finely decorated cupola, seem ready to step out of the frame… The food is succulent, the decor sumptuous, the festivities absolutely epicurean. With Yukiko, everyday life is imbued with exquisite refinement, and she cultivates a certain art de vivre where beauty is everywhere, as a remedy for gloom and melancholy.”
Monday to Saturday: 11am-7pm – Free admission
Slow Galerie
5 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris
www.slowgalerie.com
Françoise Pétrovitch – In my Hands
From January 13th to March 9th
“I observe young people in museums, or in the street, both in France and abroad. These images are snapshots of today’s world. These teenagers rarely look at each other, nor do they exchange a great deal verbally, yet they come together, almost blending into one another. Their identities merge in intense friendships, where each is the reflection of the other. The backgrounds are painted in broad strokes, they contain no details, they are pure color, as with Ingres, who I often think of. I really admire the modernity of his female figures, the care and precision given to the details of the clothing, the folds and pleats, the embroidery and even the corseting of 19th century women, I have to admit. I tried to depict the graphic lines that criss-cross the bodies of these teenagers. I tried different ways of framing the figures and various points of view, from both above and below. The colors are drawn from the palette I’m currently using: acidic green, mauve, orange and charcoal blue.” — Françoise Pétrovitch
Tuesday to Saturday: 11am-7pm – Free admission
Semiose
44 rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris
semiose.com
Bruno Serralongue / With Mégane Brauer, Burn-Août, François Curlet, and Suzanne Husky – Le Présent
From January 14th to March 3rd
“The present isn’t necessarily the present of the news cycle. The present is described in the exhibition as the current zeitgeist in France, characterised by the Earth Uprisings movement as a driving force for radical change. It is the need for civil disobedience against a state deemed too slow, or even inactive, in facing environmental challenges. Works by Mégane Brauer, Suzanne Husky and François Curlet also raise questions about peripheral territories and populations — where overconsumption meets the supernumeraries. In its own way, this exhibition is about survival.” — Bruno Serralongue
Tuesday to Saturday: 10am-6pm – Free admission
Air de Paris
43 rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville
www.airdeparis.com
Stella Sujin – Femmes lisant la nuit parmi les fleurs du jardin
From January 13th to February 24th
Korean artist Stella Sujin, a nominee for the 2023 Drawing Now Prize, has produced a series of watercolors exploring the themes of the invisible and the bizarre, inspired by witches, hybrid creatures and medieval woodcuts. […] In medieval Spain, the brotherhood of the blind was made up of visually impaired peddlers who chanted fantastical and often lewd poems at the top of their lungs. Sujin pays homage to these messengers of the invisible – the figures whose oral tradition gives us a glimpse of what is hidden, kept out of sight – with a free interpretation of two texts used as references for the entire exhibition: La Danse aux Aveugles by Pierre Michault, a collection of medieval poems with a phantasmagorical feel, and strongly colored medieval woodcuts, including those featured in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The result is a picaresque house of mirrors steeped in the Middle Ages and its troubadours, jesters and acrobats. Sujin seeks to recount the invisible by making it visible, showing what the blind see. She paints a collection of improbable portraits and weird and wonderful scenes. Animals sing and play the violin, witches contort themselves, fish with the heads of bishops pose in a contemporary Garden of Earthly Delights, as fascinating as it is repellent, and certainly intriguing. What are the secrets and unmentionable rites concealed by this supernatural theatre?”
Tuesday to Saturday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission
Backslash Gallery
29 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris
www.backslashgallery.com
Call of the Wild
January 6th-13th
“Sabine Bayasli’s idea for this exhibition was inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s pioneering 19th-century tale of Walden or Life in the Woods, in which the author lives for two years, cut off from the world, in a cabin on the edge of a forest pond. The point here is to rediscover authenticity, to clear a wild state, an original sap. [… ] The group exhibition Call of the Wild brings together artists Sacha Cambier de Montravel, Magali Cazo, Jérôme Combe, Sylvain Dubrunfaut, Bruno Gadenne, Nathan Ghali, Beya Gille Gacha, Kubra Khademi, Magdalena Lamri, Thomas Lesigne, Hélène Marcoz, Emmanuel Morales, Karolina Orzelek, Simon Pasieka, Nazanin Pouyandeh, Abel Pradalié, Hervé Priou, Pascale Rémita, Pauline Riveaux, Andreas Senoner, Gregory Thielker, Marko Velk, Samuel Yal, Fabien Yvon, Otvard Zeerazerr, and Xarli Zurell.”
Tuesday to Saturday: 12pm-7pm – Free admission
Galerie Sabine Bayasli
99 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris
galeriesabinebayasli.com
Le citron est la fleur la plus sincère
January 6th-13th
“An icon of art in the making and a sanctuary of the unexplored, the lemon, a simple fruit, reveals itself in an enigmatic light. Both fruit and sun, this gold that grows on trees becomes a guest of honor for the duration of an exhibition. A key figure in the world of artists, the lemon is on everyone’s lips. Seen through studio visits, encounters and travels, its tree, zest, pulp and seeds are laid bare in a multitude of forms: from design to performance, painting, installation, photography and poetry. […] The gallery Les filles du calvaire has invited curator Yvannoé Kruger to take over the space, confirming its commitment to broadening its programming through invitations and “cartes blanches”. The exhibition brings together artists Abdelhak Benallou, Anna Farouche, Apollinaria Broche, Baptiste et Jaïna, Bianca Argimón, Bruno Verjus, Çağla Ulusoy, Charles Hascoët, Claudio Coltorti, Itamar Gov, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Lei Saito, Léo Fourdrinier, Mateo Revillo, Maya Inès Touam, Nicolas Momein, Nika Kutateladze, Raphaël-Bachir Osman, Taisiia Cherkasova, and Ugo Schilde.”
Tuesday to Saturday: 11h-18h30 – Free admission
Galerie Les filles du calvaire
21 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris
www.fillesducalvaire.com
Corps à corps – Histoire(s) de la photographie
Until March 25th
“Bringing together more than 500 photographs and documents by some 120 historical and contemporary photographers, Corps à corps (Body to body) offers a unique insight into photographic representations of the human race in the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition goes beyond the traditional categories of study such as “portrait”, “self-portrait”, “nudes” and so-called “humanist” photography. It reveals the particularities and “photographic” ways of seeing, showing the connections between artists. It brings to light common obsessions in ways of addressing the subject and stylistic approaches. The images on display also question the photographer’s responsibility: how does photography contribute to the birth of identities and their visibility? How does it recount individualities, the relationship with the Other?”
Every day except Tuesdays: 11am-9pm (until 11pm on Thursdays) – €17/€14/€0
Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris
www.centrepompidou.fr
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Illustration (cropped):
Exhibition view – A Change of Perspective at Le Plateau – Frac Île-de-France
© Ndayé Kouagou
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