Galleries in Paris » rue de seine

BUBLEX – VALLOIS

Galleries — Fri, 31 May 2024 16:24:23 +0000

In keeping with his practice as a photographer, Alain Bublex has produced a series entitled “105 x 135” consisting of accidental photographs – representations of a landscape with an uneven horizon or completely pink images, the only color that has survived the malfunction of his camera’s shutter – images that are at once “funny and tragic” in the artist’s own words. Around it, drawn frames anchor the work of art in an imaginary world of its own, accentuating its resemblance to a painting with which the viewer is familiar. For, as Alain Bublex points out, we appreciate a landscape in relation to a place we know and this comparison between the two is the primary condition of our gaze. His inspiration comes from anthropologist Philippe Descola, who explains that a landscape is only created through our experience of a represented landscape. Questioning this gaze, Alain Bublex has drawn on the trompe-l’œil process, inviting us to leaf through magazines he has created from mock-ups of existing free magazines: the high-speed train magazine, M Le magazine du Monde and the Hermès magazine. The artist slipped his photographs into them, appropriating the magazine page numbers and replacing texts with blocks of colour to give a better idea of the structure of such an object.

For Alain Bublex, it is essential to reveal the production process, including that of his own work, to offer « possibilities for future gazes » as he himself puts it. Hence the incompleteness of certain forms in the paintings in his oeuvre. It is not about creating a misleading image, easily generated by artificial intelligence today. Instead it is about offering a vision to the viewer.

This vision also emanates from his video Paysage 20 minutes, a stroll along an American motorway not far from New York, where the view of a magnificent sunset gradually comes into focus, the sky blazing in shades of orange and pink, questioning the poetry of everyday life in a prosaic setting. What is more, the film was shot in the home of the American painter Frederic Edwin Church, famous for his glowing sunsets, in a nod to Alain Bublex’s video.

WEGMAN – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:59:52 +0000

William Wegman’s first monographic exhibition at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois offers a journey through the artist’s work, emphasizing its deep consistency across various techniques and subject matters.

Bringing together over 60 works, ranging from 1970 to 2022 and selected in conjunction with William Wegman and Christine Burgin, the exhibition revolves around the notion of agility, a recreational and athletic discipline partnering man and dog. “I’ve always considered my work a shared recreational activity,” claims William Wegman. In his pictures, the dog is no longer a mute bystander, such as Carpaccio’s German Spitz, a background actor like Picasso’s teckel Lump, or merely a ‘little assistant’, as Martin Luther dubbed his Pomeranian, but an equal partner in the creative process. One could compare this relationship of ‘disciplined spontaneity’ or ‘stimulated attention benefitting both dog and owner’ to the one discussed by American philosopher Donna Haraway relating to agility in her 2003 book, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People & Significant Otherness: an “ontological choreography, a vital game invented by participants from stories of body and spirit they inherit and adapt in order to compose the flesh verbs that make them who they are.”

The William Wegman, Agility Conceptuelle exhibition spans both of the gallery’s spaces, 33 and 36 rue de Seine. Each space orchestrates the interaction between photography, film, painting, drawing, writing… and creates a dialogue between iconic pieces featuring Man Ray (1970-1982), Fay (1986-1995), and other members of their illustrious Weimaraner dynasty – so indubitably linked to the artist’s life and work – with many unpublished works, with or without dogs.

At 36 rue de Seine, Spaces of Species gathers together, in a constant play of fluidity and metamorphosis, works which blur and abolish borders between different types of spaces (pictorial, architectural, two- and three- dimensional…), species (man, dog, other animals, talking objects), genres and categories. Together, as enunciated (once again) by Donna Haraway, “they invent this game; this game transforms them.”

At 33 rue de Seine, the exhibition’s second facet, Significant Otherness revolves around the very notion of playfulness, an essential element of the conceptual art sphere to which William Wegman is central: ball games, agility games, language games. These are two-person games where diptychs, duos, double imageries, combinatory and permutation effects favor the jubilatory relationship between companion species, beyond any kind of essentialism.

Martin Bethenod

MACHNEVA – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 14:03:49 +0000

Zhenya Machneva was born in 1988 in Leningrad, a Soviet city whose name existed between 1924 and 1991, also known as St. Petersburg. From the beginning there is the story of a disappearance, of a ghost. During her studies at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Zhenya Machneva chose to train in the textile department. She is immediately struck and seduced by weaving techniques. At this time, she is not yet free of the subjects she wishes to weave, the tapestry is confined to a strictly decorative function. A function and a role that she will shift when she starts working alone in her studio.On two manual looms, she creates tapestries representing industrial landscapes, factories emptied of their workers, useless machines, patterns and colors. Why would you try to represent by hand a heritage that no one seems to care about anymore? The artist finds in it a family history, as well as the fallen fantasy of an era. She points out that “the Soviet industrial period has enjoyed great glory, but now what we can see are just collapsed dreams.It seems important to me to collect different objects and different landscapes in the process of disappearing.” Like an archaeologist from the Soviet industrial era, Zhenya Machneva begins by visiting the factory where her grandfather worked. On site, the machines appear to her as sculptures, organisms and autonomous entities. She needs to «touch her subject.» Before weaving, she sets off to explore deserted factories, abandoned sheds, wastelands turned into landfills. On site, she photographs what she calls «patterns.» The collection of images will give rise to extremely graphic drawings rendered in black and white. The drawings are the sketches from which she will implement the tapestries. Zhenya Machneva creates a contrast between subject and technique. The steel is made visible by cotton, the rate of work at the factory gives way to slowness, while the weight, coldness and rigidity of the buildings are soft and subtle in the weaving. The black and white drawings are transformed into colorful tapestries. Colors are intuitively chosen.

Zhenya Machneva wants to maintain a part of improvisation within a laborious manual process. “I hope that you can feel my energy through the works.” The choice of tapestry is physical. Zhenya Machneva gives the technique an organic dimension to which it is intimately attached. Sitting in front of the loom, the artist tirelessly repeats the same gestures to generate successive frames. Repetition, slowness and loneliness are part of a meditative state in which each cotton thread becomes a mantra. A gestural repetition that echoes that once applied by workers, active in these factories that today are ghosts. The choice of tapestry is also political. If you look at the history of art, tapestry is a medium.

It has an authoritarian, timeless, sensory aspect. Through the thread and the loom, Zhenya Machneva represents the Soviet industrial heritage that has become invisible and unproductive. The motifs, machines and buildings are the archives of a bygone era, a time when industrialization and the figure of the worker were over-glorified. A vanished era of which barely visible ghosts remain. It is then for the artist to embody this heritage to give it a new existence.The making of tapestries is a physical incarnation, but also metaphorical. She pays particular attention to patterns, or to the details of machines whose zoomorphism or anthropomorphism she accentuates. She then plays with the pareidolia, which brings out familiar faces, skulls and other forms.The artist thus engages a new reading of the woven motifs by opening a fictional space. Through her weft threads and her chain threads, Zhenya Machneva awakens ghosts, revives and makes the poetry of sleeping landscapes palpable.

Julie Crenn

ALBARRACIN – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 13:53:20 +0000

Pilar Albarracín makes transgression and humor both plastic and political tools. Since the early 1990s, the Spanish artist has opened areas of feminist claims through her works. For this, she chose to analyze in a viscerally critical way the Andalusian folklore, popular culture and vernacular. She thus examines the culture which has been transmitted to her and constitutes a large part of her identity. From flamenco to Catholic rituals, bullfighting and baroque art, the artist takes each tradition head on. By physically imposing herself at the heart of powerful territories and symbols of a patriarchal culture, Pilar Albarracín is claiming part of a collective history, that of women. With undisguised anger, she exaggerates, she multiplies, she moves, she assaults or strangles stereotypes and ancestral traditions. In this, she appropriates costumes, props, symbols and decorum of rituals where men and women are confined to specific roles. If we focus exclusively on women, their roles and modes of representation are particularly limited and/or invisible. The actions, photographs, embroidery and misappropriated objects aim to deconstruct these roles and to become aware of the shortcomings, absences and prohibitions. The rituals she invests and revisits are inscribed in an identity thought guided by religious morality and patriarchal ideology that the artist strives to turn around and undo.

Pilar Albarracín’s new exhibition in Paris is based on a critical and political exploration of the Semana Santa («Holy Week») in Seville. For a week in April, the whole city lives to the rhythm of plural and thematic processions. About sixty fraternities commemorate the Passion of Christ by carrying pasos, richly decorated floats on which are placed extremely heavy sculptures. According to long and precise routes, the men carry the pasos at arm’s length to reach the cathedral of Seville and do penance. In absolute silence or, on the contrary, in musical effervescence, hundreds or even thousands of men move painfully towards the same geographical point. Pilar Albarracín then questions these spectacularly painful processions during which bodies are tested by beliefs, the weight of morality and respect for traditions. The new works are more tinged with violence and solemnity than with humor and irony. She proceeds in this way by blasphemous gestures to make palpable an oppression and suffocation generated by ideologies and the idea of a Spanish identity. The artist relies on the codes of Baroque art to dramatize gestures, emotions, postures and objects.

Albarracín plays with the highly theatrical dimension of religious rituals to create images with powerful symbolic power. She holds a mirror to the violence inherent in the authoritarian systems against which she struggles. The title of the exhibition contains an order, then a request: no apagues mi fuego, dejame arder, «don’t put out my fire, let me burn». The fire that must not be extinguished by the other is that of her commitment, her convictions, her history, her body. She asks that the other let her burn, in hell as is implied, if that is her choice. Individual choice is at the heart of the artist’s plastic and critical reflection. During the 1970s, feminist activists advocated, and still advocate today: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. By taking up the codes and decorum of the dominant ideologies, Pilar Albarracín fights against the guidelines, taboos, morals and prohibitions that regulate and shape bodies. Through her work, she continues to demand the fundamental right to self-determination.

Julie Crenn

PEYBAK – VALLOIS

Galleries — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 14:04:39 +0000

The Iranian duo Peybak -Peyman Barabadi and Babak Alebrahim Dehkordi- returns for a third solo show at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois and continues to tell us stories depicted through their two pairs of hands. Following Abrakan (Birth) in 2015 and Abrakan “Sparkle” in 2017, the artists lead us today into the depths of the earth with the central figure of the well, Abra-Chah in Farsi, around which all sorts of peculiar creatures will gravitate and individualize themselves.
The small people of Peybak’s works are humanized over time, they indulge in many enigmatic activities in the middle of a twilight desert. At the heart of this mystical landscape of deep ochres and blues, the cryptic figures are detailed, unveiling their faces, their looks and their know-how. In the many scenes with elaborate frames, the creatures dance, hunt, fight, just as much as they peacefully and quietly gather themselves. Peybak reveals a dreamlike civilization whose paintings, scepters and notebooks are archaeological remains.
As the ancestors still relate, Peybak tells us: “In a barren place at the westernmost point from the eastern reaches, far from the light of the sun, there is a bottomless well named «Abra-Chah»; no one can venture into its depths. When the sun rises, the howls and cries of angels, demons and wild beasts, farm animals and men are heard followed by a foul stench. As the hours go by, the Abrakans gather around the well and pray, confide in it and treat the well as a person in its own right… By the end of the day and at the beginning of the night, the moon rises from this well and illuminates for miles around. Under this light, they tell their secrets to the well. A shrub grows inside the abyss and from its branches, the Abrakans shape the sticks that help them clear their passage on dark and unknown paths”.
Peybak’s world can put us in a hypnotic state, it takes us without warning, and it moves us. Abrakan is our ancestralism, our archaism: we are Abrakan.

LE VAISSEAU D’OR – VALLOIS

Galleries — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:46:53 +0000

With Gilles Barbier, Bianca Bondi, Alice Guittard, Matthieu Haberard, Charlotte Heninger, Edward Kienholz, Benjamin Loyauté, Gaspard Maîtrepierre, Lucie Picandet,
Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri

Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!
Arthur Rimbaud, extract from « Adieu », in A Season in Hell, April-August 1873, as translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row.
Exhibitions are born for thousands of reasons and one of them is sometimes a matter of friendship. From time to time, it is a question of elective affinity, this complex process that takes root in the history of medieval alchemy «to explain the attraction and fusion of bodies». (1) For my part, I have never wanted an exhibition to be too explicitly a slave to a subject. On the contrary, I prefer that it allows us to mix artworks that then become like beings and which, in some cases, produce a new aesthetic material, at the heart of the athanor. We do experiments, we do exhibitions, not presentations. We tell stories. It is all about letting your mind waver, like when you walk from gallery to gallery on a weekday with your fists in your pockets. Anger, drunkenness, snapshot of contrasts.

But at the local café, we realize that galleries are perhaps like borders, beaches or cliffs at the corner of the street, that separate us from the mainland of our urban boredom. Rare places in the city where anything remains possible.
From this beach, therefore, it seemed possible to show something of the bowels of this great golden ship, with multicolored flags, of which Rimbaud speaks.

Let the artists invent this excavation, in the present, all in the same boat: when it runs aground and breaks open, they invent themselves. So yes, come new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages. Let everything connect on the immaterial sand of the gallery. Whether they are known or not, it doesn’t matter, since they recognize each other. Careers, all mixed up, are as many fantastic journeys as history forgets, transforms into legends, or into posterity. This great golden vessel moves away obliquely as one approaches it: it multiplies and pulverizes to float better, like an intuition.

TRENQUIER – VALLOIS

Galleries — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:41:05 +0000

SAMUEL TRENQUIER

For many years, Samuel Trenquier has been developing a personal and singular writing that he calls « robinsologie », based on the history of Robinson Crusoe and Vendredi. His works explore fictional cycles that would punctuate their daily lives on the desert island.
The exhibition in the Project Room plunges us into a new « episode » where the two accomplices would have planned to organize this time an exhibition… We discover the artist’s new drawings, gouaches made on cigarette paper, ceramics, as well as various transformed objects, most often including natural elements. Samuel Trenquier continues in this series his visual safaris where our eyes get lost in the tangle of shapes and colours of the living. It is also the story of men that seems to be transposed here into the lives of plants: large leaves and « Ralik’s style » navigation maps punctuate the hanging, to help us to leave easily our shores…

LADIES ONLY – GALERIE VALLOIS 33

Galleries — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 10:14:28 +0000

A recurring project proposed by The Drawer, « The Window » envisions the gallery windows of the 33 rue de Seine gallery space as a creative medium in its own right. With each new exhibition, an artist is invited to take control of the window, covering it partially or totally and in the manner which he or she so wishes. Their intervention functions as an invitation to discover what lies behind: a solo exhibition or a group show designed to echo the exhibition at 36 rue de Seine space, bringing together artists from the gallery and elsewhere, emerging or unpublished in France.Playing on surprise and revelation, « The Window » is an opportunity for discoveries and rediscoveries of works and artists, a show-case of the gallery in the true sense of the word.« The Window » will be inaugurated on February 21 with a work by Lauren Coullard specially created for the occasion. Candid, a large curtain of neon, will frame the window and reveal « Ladies Only », an exhibition curated by Sophie Toulouse and Barbara Soyer.

« Ladies Only »is a reaction exhibition. An amusing response to Jacques Villeglé’s exhibition, « Jeune, Gay et Impudique », and his series of sexy posters from the late 1980s, relating to the prurient Pink Minitel period and its miscellaneous 36 15-prefi x coded gateway points to various directories including sex-related ones.With the provocative and garish aesthetic of the advertisements of the time, with girls’ open mouths and fl aunted breasts, « Ladies Only » answers by choosing to put the women really forward, those of the gallery and other guests, and by presenting a selection of works from 1988 to the present that explore the question of desire from a completely different viewpoint. With modesty, humor, restraint if not elegance, without apparent excess – or almost. A set of visions in a range of possible, minus pretentious demonstrations.Here, the works are not so easy to view. It is necessary to move around the lenticular photographs of Pilar Albarracín, which show the Spanish artist, with her authoritarian and severe air, in a corseted stripping session. It is required to lose oneself in the details of Bianca Argimón’s drawn imaginary scenes, recounting in a singular manner the condition of women and modern men. One must decipher the signs and the hidden meaning of Aurélie Gravas’ colorful compositions, that all speak in their own way of Love and Art. It is important to distinguish the profi les, the faces and the diaphanous forms that characterize the strength of the painting of Vivian Greven. It is essential to fl ush out the intruders in the small, falsely naive canvases of Lauren Coullard, who takes pleasure in having fun with rules, eras and genres

« Ladies Only » could have been called « Nanas », in tribute to the original one, Niki de Saint Phalle, an historical artist of the gallery included in the exhibition. « Ladies Only » is a misleading title; if women are alone at the controls, the men are no less present, or represented. Drawn here, carved there, their image is embraced. Nothing censored or forbidden on this side of the rue de Seine either.Neither boudoir nor gynoecium, « Ladies Only » is a space where desire fl ows in all its forms. A fantasy place where breasts spit milk and oil, where blouses open, where water regenerates, where mouths seek each other in a shades of green and pink and where dice throw themselves towards and ideal and dreamy quotidian. « Ladies Only » – but not only.Ladies Only

Barbara Soyer & Sophie Toulouse

WINSHLUSS – GP&N VALLOIS

Galleries — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:34:18 +0000

You might say there are two kinds of artists. The ones who spend their whole lives working on a specific question or a style, and those who blow apart all too soon, in mid-flight – in which case, picking up the pieces calls for an atlas and a good GPS. The map shows the great Winshluss deflagration saturating a territory extending from sculpture to drawing, from comics to the movies, from art-ifacts to joint creation of a supermarket. The fragmentation’s there in his drawing, too: a mishmash of styles, colour work and references adding up to a brilliant global demolition job. You’re tempted to acclaim him as the prince of pastiche – a sampling whiz – and leave it at that. But there’s still a lurking, sardonic something… While his scathing line foregrounds black humour, irony and withering cynicism, there’s also a background buzz that can’t be ignored. Winshluss Art is a gallery of rejects, defectives, reprobates, parasites, radiation victims, has-beens, halfwits and losers. They’re violent, relentlessly bent on staying alive and invariably naive, even when utterly perverse. But there’s one realm where their marginal humanity rules supreme: junk. The junk dealer, the black economy, scrap, trafficking, stolen goods, shady deals, car cemeteries, old iron. Winshluss is to finance what antifreeze is to cooking oil, but his junk culture keeps the wheels turning for his outsiders. And he’s got class: that culture is implicit in his line, genres and references, and in styles whose interlocking dispenses with speech bubbles. Obviously there was a place for Pinocchio on this netherworld Olympus from the very start. Out of respect for the purest junk tradition, of course, he’s not made of wood: the bodywork is Z-series robot, all tin and rivets that gleam better in the light of Hades. Collodi’s puppet has morphed into a misfit, a stateless discard, a member of that 19th-century community birthed in the ditches of nation-building, industrialisation and capitalism; the embodiment of people written off in their time as the underclass and destined for the apocalyptic end we all know about. It was by a curious quirk of history that between 1939-44 Benito Jacovitti turned out the first comic-book version of the story – with no bubbles, since the censor didn’t allow them. Winshluss’s Pinocchio is speechless too, in this graphic novel with no bubbles, or almost: the coveted chatterbox role falls to Jiminy, his conscience, back from Disneyland dressed as a cockroach and living as a parasite on Pinocchio’s mechanical brain. Pinocchio’s silence versus the chatterings of conscience: a face-off that typifies the Winshluss spirit. If ever our artist decided to do Melville’s Moby Dick, you can bet Ishmael would come out Shitmail.

Galerie GP&N Vallois – Paris 6

Galleries — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:43:22 +0000

Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois Gallery opened its doors in 1990 at the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Contemporary Art/Nouveau Réalisme duality has always been one of the main characteristics of the gallery. The idea that a galerist can do the same work for a young emerging artist as for an accomplished one has always been central in our approach. Since our opening, we have exhibited the following artists : Boris Achour, Pilar Albarracin, Gilles Barbier, Julien Berthier, Julien Bismuth, Mike Bouchet, Alain Bublex, Massimo Furlan, Taro Izumi, Richard Jackson, Adam Janes, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Martin Kersels,Paul Mc Carthy, Jeff Mills, Joachim Mogarra, Arnold Odermatt,Henrique Oliveira, Pierre Seinturier, Keith Tyson, Jacques Villeglé, Olav Westphalen, Winshluss, Virginie Yassef. This approach is still ours today with exhibitions of the estates of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, as well as a personal exhibition dedicated to younger artists, such as Henrique Olivieira, a young Brasilian artist who created a buzz at the last Sao Paulo Biennale