Le temps de Giacometti (1946–1966) | Les Abattoirs, Tolosa de Llenguadoc


The exhibition Le temps de Giacometti (1946–1966) [Giacometti's years], held at Les Abattoirs (Tolosa de Llenguadoc) co-organised with the Fondation Giacometti, gives visitors an unprecedented look at the art and life of artist Alberto Giacometti in the context of the post-war years up until his death in 1966.

The artistic journey of Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), an iconic twentieth-century artist, was quite unique. In the 1920s he joined the Cubist movement, then in its closing years, before going on to become the embodiment of the ultimate Surrealist sculptor. After World War II however, as abstraction was gaining ascendancy on both sides of the Atlantic, he held to his own approach (which he shared with a few others) – that of figurative art. His was an extraordinary path. He was greatly esteemed for his famous portrayals of humankind, both wounded and undergoing change; he was in tune with existentialist thought; and he was the creator of an art that reflected recent history with its war, massacres and anxiety over the nuclear threat.

He was a humanist, totally absorbed in his work, but he was also a man of his time, a social creature whose creative work must be read in the various contexts that surrounded him: the circle of artists, writers and philosophers he frequented, the younger generation that visited him, the photographers that took his picture, and the galleries he exhibited in and for which he developed the staging design, such as at the Galerie Maeght in 1951. This exhibition aims to bring to the fore all these aspects, which came together in his response to the great artistic and philosophical questions of his time, from late Surrealism to the beginnings of Existentialist thought.

The exhibition is primarily composed of works loaned by the Fondation Giacometti, which preserves artworks that the artist retained throughout his life. It brings together some one hundred emblematic works such as Women with Chariot (ca. 1945), The Cage (1950), Walking Man II (1960), and Tall Woman I (1960), as well as a collection of paintings, drawings on magazines, photographs and archival material, thus creating a vast account of the artist as a key actor in the post-war world, through his artworks, connections with the intellectual and artistic world of the time, exhibitions and writings.

In a continuation of the exhibition, a contemporary section generates encounters between Giacometti and artists of today, around the action of the “Walking Man”, exploring its downfalls but also the hope it continues to hold. With works from: Pilar Albarracin, Claude Cattelain, Esther Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mona Hatoum, Rebecca Horn, Hiwa K, Kubra Khademi, Éric Pougeau, José Alejandro Restrepo.

In addition to the main exhibition, E.R.O.S (1959): The Story of a Surrealist Exhibition through the Daniel Cordier Collection takes visitors on a journey to the eighth Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, which was presented in Cordier’s gallery in 1959 and in which Alberto Giacometti participated. 

An exhibition co-organised with the Fondation Giacometti.

About Fondation Giacometti

The Fondation Giacometti is a private foundation of public utility created in 2003. It is the universal legatee of Annette Giacometti, the artist's widow, and owns the world's largest collection of works by Alberto Giacometti, with nearly 10,000 works and objects. Based in Paris, it is directed by Catherine Grenier, general curator of heritage and art historian.

The Giacometti Foundation aims to protect, disseminate and promote the work of Giacometti. It organises exhibitions, grants loans in France and abroad, and organises the authentication committee for the artist's works. The Giacometti Institute is the current exhibition space of the Giacometti Foundation, which is also dedicated to art history research and education.

Exhibition with the support of the City of Toulouse / Toulouse Métropole.

Exhibition:

Le temps de Giacometti (1946-1966) 
[Giacometti's years]
22.09.2023 - 21.01.2024

Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse
76 allées Charles de Fitte - Tolosa de Llenguadoc



[Israel Shenker, "Alberto Giacometti in his exhibition, Galerie Maeght", 1951, photographie Fondation Giacometti © D.R. / Alberto Giacometti, "Walking Man II", 1960, Plaster – 188.5 x 29.1 x 111.2 cm ; Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto Giacometti Adagp, Paris 2023].


Roman Ondak. Infinitum | Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona


Roman Ondak’s practice brings together various methodologies, from simply formulated situations in which he binds relationships between members of his family, various groups of people or spectators entering his exhibitions, to modified found objects or constructed spatial installations. Space and time are often systematically thematised in his works and intertwined with his personal history, bearing fragments of his memories of the years he spent as a child and teenager in relatively isolated Czechoslovakia during the autocratic communist regime.

Ondak grew to understand society’s attempt to order existence through divisions and classifications of inclusion and exclusion. This structure’s failure is what the artist questions in his work by revealing the potential of other orders, other patterns of behaviour, and, ultimately, alternative social and political possibilities. The impression that his work often gives, of reality having been slightly adjusted, is in part a tactical replication of the propagandist alterations of image and statement that were an everyday fact of life for the artist while growing up.

The exhibition Roman Ondak. Infinitum plays between fiction and reality. Reality, which is informed by the artist’s personal experiences from the past while he grew in a society where reality was partially experienced as a fiction. The sculptures, spatial installations and photographs in this exhibition pay tribute to the everyday. The ready-made or constructed objects or situations depicted alternate between what they were while they were still part of reality and now, when they are shifted to subtly fictionalised forms confronting a viewer.

Roman Ondak (Žilina, Slovakia, 1966; lives and works in Bratislava)

Roman Ondak. Infinitum
12.05.2023 – 23.11.2023
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

The point of sculpture | Fundació Joan Miró



The Point of Sculpture offers an overview of the practice of modern and contemporary sculpture from an asynchronous, heterogeneous perspective that also includes older pieces and anonymous objects. The exhibition, arising from the ambition of twentieth-century sculpture to move beyond representing and generating images, also aims to show the major transformation of this discipline in the twenty-first century with the implementation of new techniques and the emergence of new imaginaries and sensibilities.

The exhibition illustrates how sculpture has held a tense dialogue with reality over the course of its history, capturing objects, bodies and narratives, and how it continues to have ties to the earliest expressions of the urge to sculpt. Accordingly, close to one hundred pieces selected by David Bestué are presented in seven spaces and address issues such as the copy and representation of reality, experimentation with materials, the exploration of the physical properties of sculpture, the relationship between the object and the subject, the relationship of sculpture with time, as well as the representation of the human figure and the expression of complex emotions such as sexual desire.

The show begins with the time prior to modernity, but focuses primarily on the period spanning from the early twentieth century until today, featuring artists such as Antoni Gaudí, Julio González, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Apel·les Fenosa, Lygia Clark, On Kawara, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, David Medalla, Eva Lootz, Susana Solano, Pipilotti Rist and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others.

The Spanish title of the exhibition, El sentido de la escultura, evolved from the essays by the Peruvian poet and linguist Mario Montalbetti in which he defends the concept of 'sentido' literally, as a notion closer to the expression of a direction than to the honing down of a meaning.

Curated by David Bestué, in collaboration with Martina Millà

The point of sculpture
15/10/2021 — 06/03/2022

Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc
Barcelona, Catalunya


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BUNKER | Manera Dance & A. Martínez | Fundació Tàpies


This show takes as its starting point a questioning of existence and the place human beings occupy in the universe. Removed from their roots, protected by an artificial world, human beings seek security and the meaning of life, positioning themselves in a collective delirium, over and above everything that surrounds them. And yet, they are forever enslaved to their minds, something that distorts their vision and understanding of the world, while feeding false expectations and insecurities. Humans forget that survival often depends on actions that go beyond mere existence, and that they are not the beginning or the end of anything, but a small part of a cosmic dance.

Much of Antoni Tàpies work and ideas addresses philosophical questions related to existence. Tàpies saw reality as a whole in which the individual is part of the universe and the body is never separate from space. In an attempt to fight nature’s antagonistic, hostile and conquering character, he defended the need for identity and collaboration. Influenced by Buddhism, he advocated a unifying view of the universe and all the beings that are part of it.

Bunker is an artistic proposal and the first solo work by the dancer and choreographer Aleix Martínez (Barcelona, 1992) together with the ManNera Dansa company (Hamburg). Aleix Martínez made his debut as a choreographer in 2012 with Trencadís, a work created for the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus, Hamburg, for which he received the Tanz Award in the category of ‘Young Talent’. Since then, he has collaborated independently with various festivals, institutions and companies, creating Le Surrealisme, c’est moi, 2014, for the Sant Pere de Rodes Festival; Orígens, 2015, for the Gong Festival; and Horizons, 2018, a humanitarian project in support of Open Arms. In 2019 he was commissioned to represent the Hamburg Ballet in London with Seelen Spiel, a work especially produced for the reopening of the newly-refurbished Linbury Theatre. Shakespeare Sonnets, his first work for the Hamburg Ballet, was premiered in July 2019, opening the 45th edition of the Hamburger Ballett-Tage annual festival.

Artistic information

Concept and choreography: ManNera Dansa and Aleix Martínez.
Dramaturgy: Montserrat Prats.
Interpreter: Aleix Martínez.
Sound: The Golden Record-Voyager.
Photography: Borja Bermúdez
Costumes: N.O.N.
Acknowledgments: PoolHaus-Blankenese Foundation in Hamburg.

Fundació Antoni Tàpies
Carrer Aragó, 255
Barcelona, Catalonia

Dates: Friday 11 February 2022, and Saturday 12 February 2022, at 20.00 h.

Buy tickets: 11 February 2022 | 12 February 2022



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Sensible Grounds: Inhale | Tabatabai & Afrassiabi | Fundació Tàpies


Inhale (2016-2021) is an archive of fictional narratives and sounds that trace opium smoke in the junction of writing and breath. The narratives are written passages that chronicle instances of opium use in Iranian modern and contemporary novels and short stories from the 20th and 21st centuries. Each passage is a miniature scene of social interaction, with opium as the central agent. Read together, they imply a genealogy of opium smoking channelled through various characters, objects and situations, mobilised to inhale, pass on, filter and navigate the smoke. A number of sculptural objects produced for the iteration at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies extend this genealogy and the figure of ‘passage’. They hold an algorithmically produced archive of sounds that simulate the sound of breathing as it is affected by the continuous inhalation of opium smoke. Opium smoke enters the lung and the deposition of carbon dust in the airways affects the sound of breathing, increasing the probability of crackles and wheezes in the airways.

Along the installation by Tabatabai and Afrassiabi there is the projection of Night of The Hunchback (1964) by Farrokh Ghaffari and Thicker Than Paint Thinner (2011) by Babak Afrassiabi. While in Inhale opium smoke flows from one scene to another, permeating the human narratives and setting forth its own forms of sociality, the films on display expand on notions of passage, residue, and ‘chronic’ states, in the context of embodied histories and necro-poetics.

Thicker Than Paint Thinner is based on the true story of a former drug addict-turned-revolutionary who sets fire to a cinema in Iran, a few months before the culmination of the 1979 revolution, unwittingly causing the death of nearly 400 people. Ironically, the film being screened at the time of the fire was the The Deer (1974), featuring a drug addict who becomes involved in political activism and eventually dies in a gun battle with the police. While the character in The Deer succeeds in dying for his cause, Afrassiabi’s protagonist is forsaken by the post-revolutionary establishment, even when he wants to give himself up and pleads to be punished. Adapted from a story in One Thousand and One Nights, Night of The Hunchback focuses on the last night in the life of an actor in a traditional comedy theatre troupe, who after a performance in the residence of a wealthy couple, accidentally chokes to death on their food. Attempts to dispose of his body, passes it through various strands of the society, unintentionally bringing into contact remote characters and dubious activities. At the end of the film, the police officer thanks the dead hunchback for exposing the underbelly of the city.

The artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi have collaborated since 2004. They also publish a bilingual (Farsi and English) magazine called Pages, which is edited parallel to the ongoing topical lines of their projects. Issue 10 of the magazine, ‘Inhale’, was printed and published recently. In 2018, they launched an online platform pagesmagazine.net, which expands the magazine’s editorial focus. They often extend their work from unresolved historical narratives that demand forms of approach that are materially, temporally and aesthetically undecidable. Their recent projects are concerned with making speculative junctures between history, archive, technology and the practice of art.

The ongoing multi-chaptered program Sensible Grounds, curated by Azar Mahmoudian brings together moving image practices including sculptural installations, archival material, films that test fiction and other conventions, sometimes even dispensing with images entirely. It thinks through the continuity of intergenerational time and memory and the apparent repetitions of contemporary political struggles. It attempts to understand such chronic experiences neither as pathological loopholes, nor as pre-emptive absorptions of these struggles by the constancies of history. It approaches the chronic as stretched and dilated time. Borrowing the term ‘chronic’ from the drug culture, Elisabeth Freeman brilliantly rearticulates the ‘chronic’ states as a tearing apart of dominant temporalities of the linear, a condition in which multiple and varied presences and rhythms are possible. In this way, intergenerational time and memory could become holding grounds for concurrent and synchronised desires.

Recent iterations of the programme include That’s How We Undo It, at Lux, London; and Tuning into the Rhythms of the Chronic at Nida Art Colony. It is presented as part of the European Cooperation project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, co-funded by Creative Europe.

Sensible Grounds: Inhale
Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi
  
Exhibition and film screenings curated by Azar Mahmoudian
Fundació Antoni Tàpies museum, Barcelona, Catalonia


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Quayola | Pointillisme | Galerie Charlot


Pointillisme is a new video work which continues Quayola’s ongoing exploration of high-precision laser scanning systems and their inherited imperfections. Drawing a parallel between historical pictorial traditions and computational aesthetics, this project speculates new landscape paintings created by machines. While reproducing similar conditions to those favoured by the ‘en plein air’ painters of the late 19th century, the natural landscapes are actually observed and analysed through extensive technological apparatuses and re-purposed through new modes of visual synthesis.

Quayola. Born in 1982 in Italy, he lives and works bewteen London and Rome. Quayola is a visual artist based between London and Rome. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances. 

Quayola’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; British Film Institute, London; Park Ave Armory, New York; Bozar, Brussels; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Cité de la Musique, Paris; Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille; MNAC, Barcelona; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; Paco Das Artes, Sao Paulo; Triennale, Milan; Grand Theatre, Bordeaux; Ars Electronica, Linz; Elektra Festival, Montreal; Sonar Festival, Barcelona and Sundance Film Festival. His work is part of several private and public collections, including Oddo BHF, Audemars Piguet, Hermès Foundation, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire


Exhibition Opening: November 4th - 4 - 8pm

Opening hours from Tuesday to Saturday - 2pm - 7pm and by appointment

Book Release and signing: 21 Octobre, 18h - 21h

Maison Ullens Showroom, 
346 rue Saint Honoré
Paris, France

Galerie Charlot
47 rue Charlot
Paris, France

Image: Quayola. Pointillisme (stills) 4K vidéo / 4K video 2021 6 exemplaires + 2EA / Edition of 6 +2AP

+ information

Doron Langberg | Give Me Love | Victoria Miro Gallery


Victoria Miro presents "Give Me Love", the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Doron Langberg. The exhibition will feature panoramic works alongside the chromatic depictions of figures in interiors for which the New York-based painter has become widely known. An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for works that hinge on a sense of closeness. Langberg’s paintings, luminous in colour and often large in scale, celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process. His intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity. 

For his first solo exhibition with the gallery Langberg will show paintings depicting a range of subjects from queer love to wildflowers and sweeping landscapes, describing this body of work as ‘a broadening of subject matter and deepening of content’. The most explicit pieces in the exhibition, depicting friends having sex, are nearly abstract because of their magnified scale. These works give material form to moments of desire, evoking the fluid and slippery nature of queer friendships. Langberg also touches on the tenderness and complexity of a relationship with a lover. 

The brilliant palette of these pieces doesn’t only signify queerness, it also creates a parallel between the transcendent feeling of, for example, witnessing a rainbow or magenta sunset and the preciousness of moments when love is most felt. Because of the loss of his sister and being unable to go home or see family due to the epidemic, Langberg’s past year was marked by grief and longing for home. Moved by these difficult experiences, he created portraits of his siblings and encompassing landscapes of the Menashe mountains where he grew up. Their turbulent sweeps of colour or rough, textured surfaces echo Langberg’s attempt to grapple with existential themes such as the finality of death and the life force of spring.

The broad scope of subjects and experiences in the exhibition is connected by Langberg’s deeply felt use of paint. The slow unfolding of colour and gesture transforms figures and objects into materiality. These gaps between paint and the things it describes lend the work its distinct emotional and psychological register. Langberg’s masterful treatment of textiles, clothing, and exterior and interior patterns creates environments that move in or out of focus, in which figures emerge from or recede into their surroundings. In works such as the large-scale painting Bather, flesh, water and the geometry of a tiled bathroom dissolve into a high-key luminescence. Here, a chromatic range – related to the world but not quite ‘of’ it – serves to enshrine the everyday. The flow between inner and outer worlds or emotional and perceptual realities, speaks not only to those occupied by the subject of the painting, but by the artist and viewer as well. These breathing spaces might encourage us to consider painting, in the artist’s words, ‘as a place where experience originates’. 

The work of Pierre Bonnard, Edvard Munch or Alice Neel exemplifies this idea – it does not only represent emotional turmoil or tender intimacy, it is emblematic of it. Inspired by the empathic work of queer artists and writers such as James Baldwin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Agnes Martin or Ocean Vuong, Langberg asks how he might represent a queer experience in a way that is as far reaching. For the exhibition title, the artist has co-opted the title of a pop song – Show Me Love, by Robyn – altering it slightly to foreground vulnerability. ‘Giving yourself over to the emotionality of pop songs is such a corner stone of gay culture,’ Langberg explains, ‘and this one pleads for love, which is ultimately the subject of all my work’. At its core, Langberg’s practice reaches towards experiences we can all share in, pointing to the ways in which painting – as declarative as a pop song – might address fundamental aspects of our lives. Building on Langberg’s commitment to creating space for queer experiences through his work, Victoria Miro and the artist will donate a portion of the proceeds from the exhibition to the Ali Forney Center in NYC, supporting queer homeless youth, and to Queercircle, an LGBTQ+ led charity working at the intersection of arts, culture and social action in London. 

About the artist:

Born in 1985 in Yokneam Moshava, Israel, Doron Langberg currently lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art, holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania, a Certificate from PAFA, and attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk. Langberg has attended the EFA Studio Program, Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo artist residency, and the Queer Art Mentorship Program. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Koch award for painting, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and the Yale Schoelkopf Travel Prize. Works by the artist are currently on view at the Schwules Museum, Berlin (until 30 August 2021) and in Any distance between us, which explores the power and significance of intimate relationships in works of contemporary art, at RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (until 13 March 2022). Langberg’s work is also included in Breakfast Under the Tree, a group exhibition curated by Russell Tovey, at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, Kent (until 15 August 2021). 

Work by the artist will feature in a major group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2022. Previously, his work has been shown at institutional venues including the LSU Museum, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Leslie-Lohman Museum and The PAFA Museum. His work is in the collections of The PAFA Museum and RISD Museum.

Doron Langberg: 
Give Me Love 
Exhibition 

3 September–6 November 2021 

Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
N1 7RW 
London, England 

Image:  © Doron Langberg Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro 


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