Galleries in Paris » mark dion http://www.galleriesinparis.com Best Galleries in Paris Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:39:14 +0000 fr-FR hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 DION – IN SITU http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/dion-in-situ/ http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/dion-in-situ/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:24:40 +0000 Galleries http://www.galleriesinparis.com/?p=5103

BACK TO SCHOOL

Born in 1961, New Bedford, Massachusetts, US
Lives and works in New York, US

Known for his complex installations inspired by the Wunderkammern as scientific laboratories, Mark Dion is particularly interested in man’s relationship to nature through the construction of knowledge and scientific discourses in use since antiquity.

His projects are often strangely evocative of naturalist and archeological expeditions, sometimes even implicating the artist personally, who finds himself imitating the explorer, the biochemist, the detective or the archeologist in uniform or behavior.

What ensues are installations evocative of the cabinets of curiosity popular across Europe in the 16th century, but with quite different intentions. Mark Dion not only imitates but also subverts the penchant for classification: he appropriates methods, qualities and vocabularies in order to call both knowledge and the display of knowledge into question.

The humor and intentional absurdity of his works rapidly divulge the deep desire of the artist to confront the limits of scientific knowledge with Nature’s reality.

Extract from Tableau noir, Natacha Pugnet, 2021 :

« Retour à l’école [Back to School], Mark Dion’s latest exhibition at the In Situ Fabienne Leclerc gallery, is focused on extinction and expresses a certain nostalgia. “Understanding how, when and why we have evolved toward societies whose relationship with the environment is suicidal,1” is what seems to be at stake. For an artist, how can our relationship to the natural world be questioned if not from the retrospective angle of its representations? The title sets the conceptual framework of works that miming old didactic models, probe their heuristic value. Dion has long been motivated by ecological questions, but the so urgent nature today of political decisions that should be made required a bit of updating. Intertwining past, present and future, arts and sciences, the marvelous and a rationalist approach, humor and darkness, the return to school proposed by Mark Dion proves falsely comfortable. The semblance of a bourgeois décor installed at the exhibition is part of a subtly unstable plan.»

1. Sarina Basta and Armelle Pradalier, « Entretien avec Mark Dion », Mark Dion, Extranaturel, Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions, 2016, p. 148.

]]> http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/dion-in-situ/feed/ 0 STOP – IN SITU http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/stop-in-situ/ http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/stop-in-situ/#comments Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:42:19 +0000 Galleries http://www.galleriesinparis.com/?p=4540 Stop, let’s stop in this new venue, in this unusual environment. Let’s take the time to explore each floor of the space, from the basement to the terrace, to discover, through an itinerary of works by the gallery’s artists, this new destination of Grand Paris. The periphery questions, it opens new territories. Our urban habits dialogue with an industrial and rural history. Time may seem suspended, far from the frenzy of central Paris.
Stop is also a reflection on the need to give oneself time: reflection, the relationship with others, to the other, to what is different, to reflect on the state of the social world and that of our planet, to equally reread our history?

Komunuma (community or common in Esperanto) brings together, on the same site, several independent public or private entities, connected by contemporary art. The diversity of activities will generate collaborations and discussions, by providing a broad opening onto the world of French and international contemporary plastic creation. We would like the multiplicity of the proposals, on this enormous site, to encourage our public to spend time in it.
To inaugurate this new space, In Situ has decided to show most of the gallery’s artists in order to share with them the discovery of this venue that they will invest in the near future.
In the basement, Gary Hill presents the sound installation ?Up Against Down,? 2008.
The artist’s fragmented body is pressed up against an infinite surface, in extreme tension, whose feeling is heightened by a sound environment comprised of low-frequency waves linked to the pressure of the body. The physicality of the sense takes on a performative dimension here to which the artist is very attached.

Constance Nouvel created for the entrance of the ground floor space a wall work in a corner that questions the new venue’s architecture. Photography, as a starting point, is compared here with its environment, between real space and suggested space.
Drawing is asked here to move out of the flatness of the image in a mise en abyme of the space and its representation.
The architectural particularity of the glazed stairwell captivated the artist Vivien Roubaud, who deployed three fireworks explosions in it using a cascading hanging.
The artist reveals the object’s possibilities, seeking to extract its hidden qualities and their development in the space, and in a moment that is usually impossible for us to grasp.
The first and second levels of the gallery propose group hangings, creating bridges between the works the explore the intersections between art and science, the economy and society, history and memory, great art and popular culture, the idea of territory through environmental disturbances and their consequences?

You will discover Patrick Corillon’s flyer in the Komunuma tote bag.
Between reality and fiction, the Belgian artists ponders what the cultural history of Romainville could be. He will create the performance « A sentimental history of the ventriloquist » on Sunday October 20 starting at 4 p.m. as an avant-première.

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