Galleries in Paris » Martin Dammann

DAMMANN – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:08:11 +0000

For over 10 years I have been searching for primeval mammals in the Oligocene sediments of Wyoming. Few things have touched me as much as those summer weeks each year. But for a long time I could not integrate fossils directly into my artistic work. This despite the fact that fossils are in many ways very similar to paintings,
and despite the fact that I believe I seek out fossils for the same motivations that led me to become an artist. I have tried and tried. It has never worked. If you take
a human skull, you have a metaphor; death, transience, fears; all kinds of meanings present themselves. But the skull of a primeval horse? It remains what it is: the
skull of a primeval horse.
The sediments I am searching in were deposited about 35 million years ago during the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene. What was then a forested, moist
habitat with mild temperatures is now an extremely hot and dry landscape. You hike through canyons that crisscross the land, looking for the slightly lighter white of
fossilized bones and skulls peeking out from the walls. It’s hard work to bring them to light. Searching, finding and preparing fossils is a lot like making a painting.
Then came the pandemic. For two years, I could not come to the United States. I looked at the many thousands of photos from Wyoming. Over and over again. In the
second year, I began to translate my longing into work. I was looking for some kind of essence of my experiences there. I wanted to translate the imagery of fossils
into the structure of watercolors. Fossils are often flattened. Like a painting. Or spatial like a sculpture. They deposit randomly, but that randomness leads to en-
viably good compositions. Parts can disintegrate, be displaced, distorted, cut off.
A fossil is the trace of the last moments of a living being. A trace that can be read. Like a picture. I painted and drew my photos of looking for fossils as if they
were settling into a sediment. As if my memories were being embedded. But it is not about telling stories. Pictures do not tell stories. They show moments.
What does it mean to dig into the ground? Into the texture of a place, its history?
One might think that this is mainly changing the place. But the holes I dig disappear in 1, 2 years. Quite different from the touch that searching has left in me.
Martin Dammann

STOP – IN SITU

Galleries — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:42:19 +0000

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.

Galerie In Situ – Romainville

Galleries — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 11:54:29 +0000

In Situ, created by Fabienne Leclerc in 2001, had joined up with the galleries’ association of the Louise Weiss Street in the 13th urban district of Paris, and now she left this district for Romainville

In Situ Fabienne Leclerc Gallery has the ambition to promote young artists in the French and the International art scene, as well as to support better known artists on the long run. So many artists of the Galerie des Archives, created by Fabienne Leclerc in 1989 and closed in 1998, continue to collaborate with In Situ Fabienne Leclerc Gallery : Gary Hill (USA), Mark Dion (USA), Patrick Corillon (Belgium), Patrick Van Caeckenbergh (Belgium), Lynne Cohen (USA), Andrea Blum (USA), Florence Paradeis (France).

From 2001, new artists, French or not, have joined up with the gallery: Bruno Perramant (France), Damien Deroubaix (France), Laurent Tixador (France), Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil (France), Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige (Lebanon), Subodh Gupta (India), Noritoshi Hirakawa (Japan), The Blue Noses (Russia), Patrick Tosani (France), Martin Dammann (Germany) , and this year Meschac Gaba (Benin) and Marcel Van Eeden (Netherlands).
In Situ Fabienne Leclerc keeps working on showing, producing works for the gallery and for institutions/museums, editing catalogs and artist books titled, Around and About, Gary Hill (2001); Atlas des idéations (2005) and Atlas d’une cosmogonie (2006), Patrick Van Caeckenbergh ; Horizon moins 20, Laurent Tixador & Abraham Poincheval (2006) ; Fragment of Travel, Exploration and Adventure, Mark Dion (2007), Bird’s eye view, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil (2008); World Downfall, Damien Deroubaix (co-edition 2008), Bruno Perramant (co-edition 2009).