Galleries in Paris

Jean-Luc and Takako Richard are pleased to present Joseph Nechvatal’s new exhibition Turning the Viral Tempest in their Paris gallery from September 3 to October 22, 2022. The artist links the human body to the cosmos, allowing for both figurative and abstract readings.

In the first space of the exhibition, four paintings of Orlando Manifesting 2022 are hung, one on each wall. This presentation suggests a rotating circular dynamic in the room parallel to the physical rotation of Joseph Nechvatal’s The Viral Tempest record as it is played (published by Pentiments). Nechvatal also links this circular dynamic to his memory of Quad, a 1981 television play by Samuel Beckett, in which four asexual, gowned fi-gures turn around and revolve around a stage with defined patterns.

The second room of Turning the Viral Tempest features diptychs and triptychs presented in a line previously shown in 2020. Taken as a whole, Turning the Viral Tempest indirectly addresses issues of gender plasticity in our tumultuous viral and socio-political times by imagining non-existent mythical scenes from Virginia Woolf’s 1928 casual novel Orlando (the story of a young aristocratic poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives for 300 years).