Galleries in Paris » galerie magda danysz

MONTGOMERY – DANYSZ

Galleries — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 15:25:12 +0000

SALVAGE PARADISE

« To encounter the work of Robert Montgomery is to make a tender encounter whose tenderness is enhanced by the public, communal quality of his work. To encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light”- Dane Weatherman

No one has blended language, form and light in such a direct way as Robert Montgomery. From December 4 to January 15, the Scottish-born, London-based artist who stands out by bringing a poetic voice to the discourse of text art, presents the vitality and richness of his work at Danysz gallery – Paris.

Verse after verse of translucent and intuitive poetry, Montgomery invites us to reflect on ways to salvage paradise, rebuilding it from wreckage and going back to a natural sense of peace through an awe-inspiring melancholic yet hopeful lyricism. As he explains, “I think melancholy is really interesting, because it is the creation of beauty from sadness… It’s only when we begin to destroy the planet that we realize we were living in paradise.”

For “Salvage Paradise”, his first solo show within the walls of Danysz gallery Paris – in collaboration with Writer and Art Curator, Barbara Polla – the artist who works in a conceptual post-Situationist tradition, recreates the wealth and complexity of his universe with light installations, paintings, woodcuts, watercolors, photographs of his fire poems (works with fire as a nod to Celtic tradition) and digital works.

Cutting to the core of the most crucial issues of our times, Montgomery who defines himself as an « artist who works with poetry,” works in language and is best known for his site-specific installations, light, solar, fire and space. Commenting on our contemporary society and highlighting his personal and philosophical beliefs, he engages completely with the public through his evocative, cryptic and emotionally resonant art.

« In his work Robert Montgomery proves why and how poetry is of the utmost importance today, maybe more than ever. Poetry helps us link our inner world and dreams, terrors, desires… to the world around us. Poetry is sharing our inner world with the world. This is the magic of Robert Montgomery’s art. » – Barbara Polla

Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in Scotland. He was initially inspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, but also the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the art of James Turrell. He was the British artist selected for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012, the first biennale in India, and the Yinchaun Biennale in 2016. He has had made public installations across Europe including major outdoor light installations on the site of the old US Air Force base at Tempelhof in Berlin. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and the Albright Knox in New York. He has had solo museum projects at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, and the Cer Modern Museum in Ankara. He has worked with low consumption LED lighting and solar power since 2010 and he was one of the official artists for ArtCOP21 in Paris in 2015. His work is hugely popular on the internet, the piece “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You” has been shared online more than 20 million times.

Photo : Robert Montgomery, Salvage Paradise – Courtesy Danysz gallery

PANTONE & LIMON – DANYSZ

Galleries — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 14:59:29 +0000

Casa Variable, Art and Architecture Complete by Magda Danysz
Born from the pooling of the skills, inspirations and dreams of artist Felipe Pantone and designer Pablo Limón, ‘Casa Variable’ is a work of art and an architectural project… But it is also much more. It is at the same time a device, a series of principles, an exhibition, a journey and a house to live in. The artistic project unfolds here in the form of an exhibition – a tangible experience – which in line with the activatable integral pieces of artists such as Sol LeWitt leads us both to conceive mentally and to experience the making of a private house.
This house stems from an original work by Felipe Pantone. An initial seed, this two-dimensional painting is representative of the work of Felipe Pantone. From this embryo were born floorplans, then a three-dimensional perspective and a model, as if the starting work was the aerial view of the project. The major aspect that has evolved is the scale. The shapes and colors remain the same, without ever betraying the art of Felipe Pantone both in its graphic language and its chromatic vibrations. In this experience where art is transformed into architecture, the abstraction of Felipe Pantone stands out as both the initial inspiration and the challenge to overcome. Enriched in contact with Pablo Limón, the work becomes functional both in its entirety and in the details. The mosaic swimming pool is visible from above, while furniture, chairs and rugs are deployed inside the house, in harmony with everything. We realize that these details were most likely already inscribed in the matrix of the original painting, but its abstraction served as a metaphor for a plan just waiting to come to life.

LI HONGBO – DANYSZ

Galleries — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 09:56:04 +0000

Li Hongbo – All is Illusion

After the success of his last solo exhibition presented by Danysz in Shanghai, Li Hongbo takes over the Parisian space of the gallery to turn it into a strange place where everything appears different than what it really is. Classical marble sculptures that can bend and stretch like accordions. Natural elements with eccentric shapes. Steel figurines carved out of butcher knives…

You can’t help wondering how this is done, that is the magic of Li Hongbo’s work. It stands on its own, defiantly unique yet always relatable. The themes are that of nature, childhood, our relationship to art history. All of this presented in ways that are as playful as they are poetic. Li Hongbo’s great talent is to offer fresh perspectives while always challenging our understanding of sculpture and its possibilities.

This exhibition includes works made of paper and others made of steel, two materials that are at the core of the artist’s vocabulary. Part of the show centers on the revisiting of ancient statuary, for which the artist is best known. Other parts take us to some hallucinatory landscape where stones and timber wood appear completely distorted.

Also on show, a set of sculptures rarely seen representing children carved out of textbooks, a powerful commentary on how knowledge is passed on and how individuals are shaped.

For his first solo show in Paris, Li Hongbo settles in with his full palette, recreating for us the wealth and complexity of his world as an artist, with a number of works produced especially for this exhibition. An adventurous experience, full of surprises, where our entrenched conceptions of reality and illusion may well begin to lose their footing.

Rahman Katanani – GALERIE DANYSZ

Galleries — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:58:00 +0000

« I couldn’t invent a color that was uniquely mine, so I started working with materials that no one wanted. »

- Abdul Rahman Katanani

With this new solo exhibition at Danysz Gallery, the second since « Hard Core » in 2018, Abdul Rahman Katanani continues his exploration of the world using his favorite materials: corrugated iron, barbed wire, recycled oil barrels, which the artist purposely takes from his everyday environment: « I like to use materials that are shaped by human experiences, I find that it adds values and questioning that lead us to think and consider things differently. « With these raw materials, this time the artist evokes figures of children absorbed in their games, in the middle of swarms of birds that could well be carrier pigeons. Moments of creative freedom on which the oil business casts a shadow, both figuratively and literally.

This figure of a playing child allows the artist to make an allegory of life itself, following the example of Nietzsche who speaks of it thus in the first speech he lends to his prophet Zarathustra: » Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first motion. »(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, « TheThree Metamorphoses »). The figures of playful children appear in Katanani’s early work in the late 2000s. They play all sorts of games, which are like an inexhaustible inventory of activities that a child can engage in on the streets: hoop, ribbon, skipping, kite, sack race, ball, etc. An open-ended series that are still in progress to this day

Why this recurring interest in play for Katanani? Play can also refer to a space, as when we say that a door or a window has « play ». Play is that space of freedom and creativity that allows us to apprehend the world, the tensions that organize it and the forces that run through it. A place to reinvent and appropriate the world. These figurative works should not be dissociated from the artist’s other productions, sometimes more abstract and less narrative (circles, spirals, carpets or waves). In the whole of his work, it is indeed the same mechanism which is at work: symbolism and allegory.

There is no place in these compositions for a nostalgic vision of childhood, which, from our adult perspective, would be like a lost paradise, a golden age where everything was necessarily simpler and lustre. These playful children do not enlighten us as a bygone moment but as a moment to strive for: the child is no longer what we have left, but on the contrary what we should reach. A resolutely confident vision of the future, opsing any fatalism or determinism, is what Abdul Rahman Katanani invites us to do here.

Abdul Rahman Katanani was born in 1983 in the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra, Lebanon. He holds a Master’s degree from the Beirut School of Fine Arts. In 2009, he was awarded the Young Artists prize at the Salon d’Automne organized by the Sursock Museum in Beirut. His work has been presented in many institutions around the world, such as the Abu Dhabi Biennial, the Royal College of London, the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the Cité Internationale des Arts and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Abdul Rahman Katanani is currently on show in the 2021 Art Season of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, for which he has created an in situ installation in the park of the Domaine. His works are present in public (Mathaf, Doha) and private collections.