Galleries in Paris » DVIR

DOR GUEZ – DVIR

Galleries — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:01:24 +0000

In “Paper Veil”, Dor Guez brings together recent works alongside earlier pivotal pieces spanning two decades of his practice. This exhibition unfolds as a reflection on fragility, memory, and the complex ways identity is archived—whether through photography, scanography, or the fragile surface of paper.

This exhibition continues Dor Guez’s exploration of displacement and how personal histories are entangled with broader political narratives. Here, the artist sharpens his focus on two recurring motifs: the veil and paper. The veil—whether as fabric, metaphor, or photographic rupture— emerges as a central gesture of concealment: to protect, to mourn, or to resist. Paper, equally fragile and charged, becomes both a material and a metaphor for how identity is held, obscured, and remembered.

The exhibition opens with Samira, a seminal work that marks a key point in Guez’s practice: a torn photograph of his grandparents from the al-Munayer family, taken at their wedding in 1949—the first Palestinian wedding in Lydda after the 1948 war. Guez first exhibited this image twenty years ago, initiating a lifelong project dedicated to his family’s archive and the broader histories of his community. The tear runs directly through the bride’s veil, exposing the inner layers of the photographic paper itself. Here, photography is not merely a tool for documentation but a material embodiment of rupture, survival, and the precarious ways memory is held.

Paper, for Guez, has never been neutral. It holds, it breaks, it carries, it fails. This logic continues in a sculptural photograph suspended from the ceiling: a printed image of a lace curtain once handmade by his grandmother. This curtain, one of the few objects salvaged from the family’s home before their displacement, becomes a poignant trace of what endures. Suspended in space, it becomes a membrane— between interior and exterior, memory and forgetting, visibility and obscurity.

Another new work in the exhibition is based on a portrait of a Palestinian woman, a friend of the artist, photographed twenty years ago in Jerusalem. Her figure oscillates between common imagery of mourning and the iconic depiction of the Virgin Mary as a grieving mother. The photograph is printed as is, as a negative, on a transparent surface, allowing light to pass through and cast a shadow onto a smooth archival paper beneath. Her silhouette undergoes a doubling, shifting from a negative image to a shadow—existing on the boundary between presence and trace, visible and invisible.

In a new series, Guez returns to a tradition practiced in his father’s family, some of whom migrated to France from Tunisia after it was occupied by the Nazis. Photographs depict mirrors draped in white cloth—a gesture shared across cultures as a sign of mourning, sanctity, or transition. In Judaism, as in other traditions, covering can signify grief but also reverence. The veiled mirrors suggest an image that is simultaneously hidden and heightened; absence becomes a presence of its own.

The exhibition also includes Khobiza, a series Guez has been working on for the past two years that documents the wild mallow plant (known as Hubeza in Arabic), which grows abundantly across the Levant

and holds deep cultural significance. Historically used as a bread substitute during times of famine—its name derived from the Arabic word for bread, hubez—Hubeza is both personal and political for Guez, whose family in Gaza relied on the plant for sustenance amid the ongoing war. Echoing the scientific language of herbariums, Guez collects, presses, and dries leaves, stems, and roots, arranging them between sheets before photographing them from above.

Between the late 19th and early 20th century, albums of pressed flowers were popular souvenirs for tourists and pilgrims visiting the Holy Land from Europe and North America. Typically composed of dried petals arranged in floral shapes, these albums recorded collection sites such as “Jerusalem,” “Jericho,” or “Tiberias”—places aligned with a romantic, often religious Western perception of the region. Drawing on extended research into such albums in the American Colony archive in Jerusalem, Guez’s series Lillies of the Field examines the relationship between nature and culture, copy and origin.

The project explores how the local environment has been framed by Orientalist assumptions and adapted to Western aesthetic expectations. Many of the flowers in the albums do not match the locations cited and often include cultivated, non-native species. Botanical names are frequently replaced by literary or biblical references—such as identifying the anemone as the “Lily of the field.” An analysis of color in the flower arrangements reveals how pigments age differently. Guez photographed both the front of each flower arrangement and the reverse side of its wax overlay, which had absorbed the yellow pigment over a century. Aligning the two images, he reimagines the flower image through the lens of time.

The process yielded two photographic series, both in negative. The first simulates photograms of the flowers at a 1:1 scale; the second, by inverting the faded yellow to its complementary hue, resembles large-scale cyanotypes. In these, blank areas mark the original anthocyanin-colored flowers, now faded beneath the yellow residue. By focusing on what remains of the pigment rather than the flowers themselves, Guez challenges hierarchies of authenticity and fabrication.

Throughout Paper Veil, Guez invites us to consider how objects, images, and even plants become vessels for memory, survival, and identity. But more urgently, the exhibition asks: What does it mean to preserve? What is carried forward, and what is left behind? The veil—whether as cloth, paper, or shadow—becomes not only a symbol of mourning but also of care, of resistance, and of the enduring struggle to hold space for narratives that have long been marginalized or erased.

PUMHOS – DVIR

Galleries — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 13:58:58 +0000

Florian Pumhösl’s latest body of works consists of marks, straight or curved lines and dots of varying sizes, on smooth panels of cast plaster. The marks are of reddish ocher, and on closer inspection, one
can see that they are hand-engraved on the plaster. The carving of these lines is fragile, their compositions precise. However, these lines are not smooth. When viewed up-close, one notices rough
edges of these finely etched lines, indicating the inherently forceful nature of the act of cutting into a physical surface. The incisions cluster and disperse, they are springy. Yet, one can sense the orientation
of these marks is horizontal, from left to right, and suggests temporal progression. They imply an affinity with musical scores.
Each of these plaster pieces is based on a red chalk drawing on paper. And these drawings indeed departed from graphic scores by composer Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (1919–1994). He was an
influential figure in Vienna in the 1970s and 80s and his works were associated with musique concrète, and was notable for introducing ideas from visual art. “Departed from”, and not “based on”, as Pumhösl
took visual elements from the scores and subjected them to an intense process of drawing, that is rearranging, breaking apart, reassembling, compressing and expanding them. A set of drawings was
selected from this group, which became the basis for the etched plasters. The works are relatively small, the largest piece in the group only measuring 39 cm by 25 cm, meaning that the plaster pieces maintain the intimacy of the drawings’ scale. As pictures made not through addition of material, but through subtraction of matter from surface, they offer an unusual experience of depth.
By definition, scores are not the final product, but an instruction for generating that product in the form of music. Graphic scores, though they require musicians to have special training to read them, are no
different. They are a guide for creating temporal acoustic experiences, made manifest by musicians.
What happens if a non-musician uses graphic scores as directions? He then proceeded to answer this question by “rehearsing” the scores of Haubenstock-Ramati, using drawing, the medium he is most
adept at wielding. One can see how the density of composition modulates from piece to piece. They do not make what directs the concentration or sparseness of marks explicit, but one can easily sense that
there is an internal logic that guides how each picture is organized, comparable to how music progresses.
Much like the same composition could never be played in exactly the same way even by the most accomplished musician, the marks applied by hand could never be perfectly repeated.
Abstraction saw numerous attempts at such decoupling of form and content. Dadaist mechanical drawings for example, where no engineering purposes were assigned to seemingly technical drawings.
These were instructions without objectives, technological plans with no aim. Similarly, works of Pumhösl carry the traces of their sources. One can see how the density of composition modulates from
piece to piece. They do not make what directs the concentration or sparseness of marks explicit, but one can easily sense that there is an internal logic that guides how each picture is organized, echoing
how the score progresses.
Yuki Higashin

MALJKOVIĆ – DVIR

Galleries — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:05:28 +0000

Over the past few years, the exploration of painting as a medium—specifically its capabilities and capacity as a visual language—has become more prominent in the work of David Maljković. To be sure, the problematization of media codes and epistemological dispositions within painting, the abstraction of pictorial properties, and their transfer to different media realities are constants in Maljković’s art. Therefore, the presence of easel painting at an exhibition or the use of painterly procedures should not be viewed as a return or revival, but rather as a continuation of his poetic protocols. These protocols are, very generally speaking, aligned with the logic of deconstruction, which is based on the dissociation of various visual formations or entire sign systems (such as individual works of art, painting, architecture, scenography, etc.) from their essential properties, identities, and functions, reducing them to fragmentary, peripheral aspects of appearance. This remnant of form becomes a factor of the new symbolic reality that the exhibition somehow holds together.

Similar principles are at work here. The exhibition at Dvir consists of several interconnected elements from different classes of objects. Maljković forms a loose spatial installation, supplementing paintings and drawings on canvas with large-formatted MDF panels, whose fronts are painted to suggest a kind of colour chart, and a direct intervention on the wall—another “painterly” colour palette, studded with ambiguous stucco accents. All these elements are objects held in tension by the multiple conflicting codes they carry. Thus, in addition to compositions made using classic painterly procedures, the easel paintings are occasionally enhanced by laser drawings, which in some places extend beyond the painting’s field onto the supporting boards and frames. In some instances, painting is missing altogether, and the laser drawing is the only intervention on the raw canvas. The colour charts on MDF panels seem to be part of the working process, a rehearsal for the paintings. However, as these panels are conventionally used to make doors, they are also articulated within the exhibition set-up in a sculptural-spatial sense; massive supports and door knockers enhance their materiality, opening up further connotations that negate their ability to function as neutral backgrounds. Something similar happens

with the walls, onto which the artist has transposed analogous painterly and other formative procedures, disturbing the clear and unambiguous demarcation between the space of the painting and the space outside it, between the artwork and the environment.

BERENHAUT – VOLBERG – DVIR

Galleries — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:50:56 +0000

GREEN – WILLIAMS – DVIR

Galleries — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 16:11:46 +0000

Bri Williams born 1993, Long Beach, United States. Lives and works in Oakland, USA.

Williams received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and MFA from Mills College in 2017. Their work often includes found objects and materials that are repurposed and reworked. In some cases, the objects are molded in soap, a material which is used allegorically, to contain and examine past traumas, but also function as a spiritual cleansing. Connecting personal associations with these objects and their history, Williams’ work addresses collective memories and trauma, identity structures and power roles.

Recent solo exhibitions include « Out”, Progetto, Lecce, Italy; a two-person exhibition at Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark; ‘Mock Serenade’, Dvir Gallery, Paris, France; ‘Angel Abra’, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; ‘The Ghost in Me’, Murmurs, Los Angeles, CA, USA; among others. Recent group exhibitions include CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, Switzerland; Del Caz Projects, Santa Monica, CA, USA; Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna, Austria; Essex Street Gallery, New York, NY; Baloise Park Art Forum, Basel, Switzerland; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York. Williams has been featured in articles for Art Viewer, Frieze Magazine and Artillery Magazine.

Eggshell on Palm – DVIR

Galleries — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 12:32:41 +0000

with

Nelly Agassi, Yossi Breger, Mircea Cantor, Latifa Echakhch, Sigalit Landau, Yudith Levin, Moshe Ninio, Ariel Schlesinger,

Naama Tsabar, Bri Williams

FENÊTRE DU STUDIO – DVIR

Galleries — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:12:08 +0000

“Fenêtre du studio” is a group exhibition centered around the question of painting, with works by Aysha E Arar, Miroslaw Balka, Marianne Berenhaut, Mircea Cantor, Latifa Echakhch, Douglas Gordon, Sigalit Landau, Yudith Levin, David Maljkovic, Jonathan Monk, Sarah Ortmeyer, Florian Pumhösl, Ariel Schlesinger.

The exhibition explores the various conceptual and artistic approaches these artists, coming from different backgrounds and generations, have with the medium of painting.

WILLIAMS – DVIR

Galleries — Wed, 17 May 2023 12:41:27 +0000

Dvir Gallery is delighted to announce “Mock Serenade”, the first solo show of Bri Williams (United-States), on view from May 11 to July 13, 2023.
« The mocking serenade is a centuries old ritual described as a form of street theatre meant to humiliate and ridicule someone who had violated either a public or private social norm. It was carried out not by those seeking power over others, nor was it a protest; it was people living by their own rules. A mocking serenade stakes a claim to the use of humiliation, refusing to be numbed by it, using it instead, as a means to control one’s own cultural life.
I wish to reclaim the idea of mockery, the external and the internal, the mind games, the shame, the violence. What does it mean to celebrate failures and the journey that becomes of it? The moments of anger, fear, hopelessness, and then, acceptance. For all thoughts, dreams, and nightmares that come to surface in the mind could only be true if they are
conditioned to be.
It can be loud, monstrous, and invasive. But also fruitful, alive, and delusional. It is thrilling to be strapped to a chair and paraded around naked. Here it all is. Flawed, but always beautiful. »
Bri Williams

TSABAR – DVIR

Galleries — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 11:53:28 +0000

Dvir Gallery is delighted to announce “Layers and Formations”, an exhibition by Israeli-born, New York-based artist Naama Tsabar. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo show in Paris, her fifth solo show with the gallery, on view from March 30 until May 6, 2023.

Naama Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Collaborating with local communities of female identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the passive viewing experience to one of active participation. The artist draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Resting someplace between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual and corporeal potentials within these transitional states.

In Tsabar’s Work on Felt series, slabs of felt are layered with carbon fiber and epoxy to create works that are sculpted through the tension introduced by piano strings. Each Work on Felt has a set of microphones that picks up the vibration which is then amplified by a guitar amplifier. The merging of felt and carbon fiber lends felt, tension and rigidity. The hybrid material subverts expectations: no longer the dampener of sound (reminiscent of Beuys’ use of felt), but the resonating chamber itself.

In these works, sound and form are in a direct relation – the shape is determined by the entry and exit points as well as the length of the piano string, while the pitch of the string is changed with the shape of the work.

The Work on Felt series can be seen as referencing the history of both Post-Minimal and Fluxus sculpture: from Robert Morris to Joseph Beuys’ social sculptures. However, it is equally in dialogue with the work of the 1970s conceptual sculptures and performances of Terry Fox and Paul Kos.

Tsabar began the ongoing Work on Felt series in 2012, with large floor-based sculptures. In 2015, the first wall felts were exhibited introducing a new nocturnal color palette of dark blue, black, bordeaux and purple. In these latest Works on Felt, Tsabar introduces a new color palette that is suggestive of warm desert landscapes with colors of copper, sandstone, and graphite. A gentle shift, through color, from an urban nocturnal landscape to one related to the earth. This shift suggests an expanded reading of the works’ curves and twists as landscapes of slopes and geologic formations.

In addition, Tsabar debuts in “Layers and Formations” the first Overlap Diptych, a variation in which two separate-colored felts are layered on top of each other moving together through the tension of a single string.

In her newest works from the ongoing Gaffer series, instrument cables travel through fields made from layering numerous strips of gaffer tape, the same material used to mask and stabilize cables in performance spaces. The monochromatic field of tape holds the cables suspended in different visual compositions as they flow in and out of the rectangular frame. The suspended cable compositions play on the border between the geometric and the erotic. While the layering of tape transforms the gaffer field into an elusive surface, reminiscent of both organic materials, such as leather, and industrial materials. In these works, Tsabar continues her interest in gaffer tape as a hidden utilitarian material within a performative order – a material she first used in her works Twilight (Gaffer Wall), 2006 and Encore, 2007. This series moves the tape from the unseen location on the stage floor to its scrutable position on the gallery wall. Tsabar specifically calls attention to the hidden labor associated with the material through the meticulous layering of the tape, creating a significant thickness and a subtle textural rhythm of lines on its surface. She further calls attention to the labor involved in their creation by naming those who contributed to the act of “gaffering” in the credit lines of the work. These artworks refuse to be confined to a single category, borrowing from elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture. They hinge the functional and the visual; while the cable running through the work can be read as a gestural mark, and the tape itself a color field, the works never lose their potential to actively transmit sound.

MONK – DVIR

Galleries — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 14:56:14 +0000

Metallic Sunsets

Dvir Gallery is delighted to present the latest series of prints by Jonathan Monk, “Metallic Sunsets”, for his first solo show in our Parisian gallery, opening on February 2^nd.

“Metallic Sunsets is a new series of digital UV cured print assemblages, based on None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip, a group of photographs I made in Los Angeles in 1997, inspired by Ed Ruscha’s famous book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966).

I recently tried to remember exactly what motivated me to walk along the Sunset Strip and photograph the streets leading away from this once iconic boulevard…

This is a kind of introspective retrospective, a behind the scenes where the camera looks at the process of making a picture.

I was living in Hollywood at the time – Ed Ruscha was still the godfather of dry point and shoot photography, along with more conceptually motivated John Baldessari et al, Los Angeles felt like it contained the human side of ideas-based art… this always felt ironic when thinking about Los Angeles… cars & freeways, movie stars & lost dreams…

But this was a kind of photography I could relate to or at least mimic in a straightforward point and shoot kind of way.

What did encourage me to take my father’s somewhat broken 40-year-old camera, two rolls of 35 mm black and white film, no light meter and head towards the sunset hoping for the best?

My research continues…” Jonathan Monk