On the occasion of Paris+ par Art Basel, Louis Vuitton renews its commitment to art by exhibiting a selection of creative collaborations and original works by renowned international artists. The House says it is proud to be a Global Associate Partner of Art Basel and confirms its close relationship with it, which began almost a century ago when Gaston-Louis Vuitton, grandson of the founder, began commissioning artists to collaborate with the brand on advertisements and perfume bottles. The Louis Vuitton stand at the Grand Palais Éphémère was designed to resemble a Louis Vuitton trunk: the exterior is inspired by Pharrell Williams’ Copper Courrier, presented on the catwalk for the debut of his Spring/Summer 2024 collection. The interior walls of the stand, on the other hand, are done in the iconic malletage motif. Louis Vuitton also presented the fifth edition of the Artycapucines collection on this occasion.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Daniel Buren – Paris + par Art Basel, Palais d’Iéna
Beyond the physical confines of the Grand Palais Éphémère we find the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, which hosts a double exhibition of Daniel Buren and Michelangelo Pistoletto, curated by art historian Matthieu Poirier and supported by Galleria Continua. The exhibition brings together two artists with exceptional careers, Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, Italy, 1933) and Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 1938). The project will bring together elements conceived and realised on the basis of the specificities of the Palais d’Iéna, built by Auguste Perret in 1937: a monumental architecture with the subtle polychromy of rough concrete. Its singular luminosity and complex symmetry gives the room an incredibly sophisticated sculpture. Daniel Buren has been exploring the relationship between motif and support, as well as between form and context, since the 1970s. This led him to choose as his exclusive motif fixed vertical strips 8.7 cm wide, alternating white with other colours, based on an industrial fabric pattern. Starting from this neutral visual register, Buren further impoverished it by systematically repeating it to achieve a ‘degree zero’ of painting. While in the mid-1950s, Michelangelo Pistoletto began a pictorial exploration of the self-portrait, followed by the monochrome, using metallic paints. Around 1961-62, this exploration was synthesised, resulting in mirror paintings, made by collaging a single image onto a shiny metal plate, the ones Pistoletto presents at the Palais d’Iéna. The dialogue of these works offers the viewer both an image and a fleeting reflection of himself and the surrounding space.
“I like the idea that the solemnity of architecture can be shaken by Pistoletto and Buren’s combined interventions, that the works invite visitors to experience together, to see themselves and even to dialogue.”
Mike Kelley – Ghost and Spirit, Bourse de Commerce
Bourse de Commerce‘s new retrospective is dedicated to one of the most influential American artists of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mike Kelley. The exhibition Ghost and Spirit is an opportunity to get to know a large body of work that has always resisted easy categorisation. Mike Kelley (1954-2012) worked primarily with performance, drawing inspiration from militant feminist practices to propose an innovative approach to art making that overturned the institutional canon. Throughout his life he was a member of various bands, starting in 1974 with the proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters, and collaborated regularly with other artists. Among his most famous works are sculptures and installations made of stuffed animals that highlight the gender and consumer conditioning to which we are subjected from an early age. All his work is imbued with a dark and frank humour. Mike Kelley’s work on show at Bourse de Commerce feeds on the tension between the depth of critical thinking and the apparent superficiality of a pop aesthetic.
Issy Wood – Study For No, Lafayette Anticipations
Located in the heart of Paris, in the Marais district, Lafayette Anticipations invites visitors to discover other ways of seeing, hearing and listening to today’s world in order to better imagine, thanks to artists, tomorrow’s world. Study For No is the first solo exhibition of Issy Wood, a British painter who explores contemporaneity through the themes of intimacy, interiority, care, desire and femininity. Borrowing its title from a 2019 painting, the exhibition develops around the notion of rejection and resistance. Wood’s work casts an amused and disconcerted glance at the power dynamics that govern her, the characters and scenes she portrays unfold as allegories of the power games that govern the way we live. Themes explored by the artist through a series of paintings of hypersexualised leather jackets, gleaming car interiors, immaculate porcelain services, singular portraits of pets, invasive dental examinations and a multitude of self-portraits. Hyper-productive, Issy Wood approaches her painting practice as a form of diary, which she accompanies with daily writings and musical compositions that form an intimate portrait of the artist. Her work is distinguished by a rejection of a certain order, expressing an unease at the systems of oppression – both conscious and unconscious – that control beings and make them vulnerable. The exhibition Study For No invites “to learn the power of using the word no”.
Elmgreen & Dragset – Perrotin
Perrotin Paris presents a solo exhibition by Elmgreen & Dragset. After 20 years of collaboration with the gallery, the two Scandinavian artists based in Berlin portray the emotional effects of a life dominated by devices, a preoccupation that persists for them across time and media. The duo’s artistic practice tells stories of our times, immersed in technology but represented through a traditional medium, sculpture in the round, sometimes put at the service of installation. The context of the exhibition at Perrotin Paris is articulated as a scene of everyday life in a kind of choreography of sculptural groups. The experience is rarely direct and spontaneous, because everything is reflected, like the lacquered bronze children arranged inside a circular mirror. The identity of the characters is entrusted to their gestures, stereotyped and filtered by virtual reality helmets instead of eyes. The objects present are those of technology, but also of everyday life when depicting an accident in Delivery (2023). In the technological drama of the exhibition, human feeling remains as the only imperative reaction to the contemporary condition.
Delcy Morelos – El oscuro de abajo, Marian Goodman Gallery
El oscuro de abajo is Delcy Morelos’ inaugural exhibition with Marian Goodman Gallery and is the artist’s first solo show in France. The exhibition presents a large-scale installation using earth, the material at the centre of her work since 2012. Morelos’ work also includes pictorial works on fabric, natural fibre and paper, created over the past two decades. Taken together, these works delineate a practice rooted in ancestral cosmovision and the aesthetics of Minimal Art. Morelos’ abstract works, with their formidable evocations, inspire a reflection on the interaction between humans and the earth, the human body and materiality. Her chromatic research has directed attention towards the intersection of body and violence and, over time, her exploration of materials has extended to ceramics and textiles, along with the constant use of natural materials such as earth, clay and plant fibres. Currently, Delcy Morelos has gradually discovered a more sculptural practice with large-scale multi-sensory installations.
“I create an experience for the human senses with images, smells, silences, tastes, textures. I like synesthesia and I am moved by the alchemy that awakens different emotions in each person. I speak to the human body, I take it through a sensory threshold to the dimension of the sacred, to emptiness, to the primordial earthly womb.”
Urs Fisher – Gagosian
Gagosian is presenting paintings, sculptures and photographs by the gallery’s artists, with a special focus on new works, in some cases created specifically by the artists for the fair and never before exhibited in Europe. Activating the Gagosian stand is Carol Bove‘s architectural intervention, with four sculptures using sandblasted, twisted and painted stainless steel. Sensual Math and Peradam (both 2023) are works that incorporate discs of the same metal, painted with contrasting finishes. The resulting juxtapositions allude to Art Deco and related historical styles. A unifying element of the exhibition is the use of a soft grey-brown tone, called Dead Salmon, used for the walls and the pedestal that Sensual Math occupies. Eternity (2023), a new work from Urs Fischer‘s Problem Paintings series (2010-), interrupts the romantic air of the stand, casting the irony of a painting of a couple in love with a piece of bacon. The artist also emphasises the hybrid aspect of his practice with the staggering public sculpture Wave (2018), which Urs Fischer makes soar over five metres high at Place Vendôme. The organic body of gleaming metal described as “a sensual, repetitive gesture like a bodily movement” rises into the air and arches into a rounded, biomorphic form that immediately evokes the sensation of a crashing wave, resulting in an explosion of energy.
Jamian Juliano-Villani – MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique
The space of MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique renews its original idea of offering a new exhibition model by presenting the work of Jamian Juliano-Villani. The attraction for painting, fashion, photography, illustration and art history is channeled in order to create scenes and portraits hyper-saturated with cartoon aesthetics. Beneath the unstable surface of formality of Juliano-Villano’s works lies the whole essence of American popular culture: a strong coexistence of humor, eroticism, fragility and trauma. Through a process that the artist describes as “the poor man’s Photoshop”, drawing on a repertoire of images taken from films, memes, stock photographs, art history and collected print media, her airbrush acrylics, despite being chaotic, they serve as accurate mirrors of the anarchy of everyday life. The compositions on display by Juliano-Villani are personal memories transposed onto canvas.
Gaetano Pesce, Double Heart – Jardin des Tuileries
Gaetano Pesce presents Double Heart, a sculpture created drawing inspiration from a lamp he designed in 1969. The motif of the double pierced heart is presented during his drawing practice. The piece embodies one of the key tenets of Pesce’s artistic philosophy: the idea that the contemporary age should engage with the exuberant joy and romance inherent in so many objects and humans alike. Placed at the entrance to the Garden des Tuileries – a place to walk and love – the image of pierced hearts, profoundly poetic in its symbolism, also contains a form of uncertainty and the possible tragedy of fate.
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