It’s no secret that the contemporary art scene in Paris has had somewhat of a resurgence in recent years. Soon after Britain left the European Union in 2020, many Blue-chip dealers opened spaces in and around Paris’ 8th Arrondissement, solving the issue of complex import/export procedures, and capitalising on a newfound enthusiasm coming from European collectors. Bigger galleries opening up European headquarters in Paris also revitalised the museum scene and, when Art Basel held the inaugural Paris+ in 2022, the Paris scene began to really pick up momentum. The progress of this art ecosystem can also be seen in the growth of emerging and mid-tier galleries in the city, the best of which are arguably found in the Marais. Some of these galleries are already showing at Art Basel, and others surely will be soon. Here are five shows from emerging and mid-tier galleries to visit at Paris Art Week and beyond.
Augusta Lardy Micheli at DS Galerie
Augusta Lardy Micheli’s abstract compositions are rooted in the natural world, inspired by the mountainous surroundings of her Swiss upbringing. I first saw her work at Arco in Madrid two years ago where, on the surface, the works seemed serene, but actually had a deep, intense, swirling quality. The works caught the eye of Hans Ulrich Obrist, who also pinpointed this hidden, darker depth to the work, writing in his column for Das Magazin: ‘Behind the layers lie forms and suppositions, but there is also a fear, a sublimated terror. At times, a visual scream forms, but it only penetrates muffled and quietly through the thick blankets of colour.”
In the two years since Augusta seems to have developed that sense of violent terror that was previously suggested; she’s dragged it out and into the foreground, both visually and conceptually. Aggressive red slashes streak up and down and across the canvas, like a final layer added in a fit of rage. The old, calmer quality can still be seen below, depicting an alpine glacier that is melting in the face of an unrelenting hot wind. Augusta has used the DS Galerie space intelligently, having this slashed red current travel around the room as if sweeping the gallery-goer up and taking them along. There’s a nice juxtaposition between architectural sensibility and pure emotional expressionism at play.
Augusta Lardy Micheli , Quiero hacer contigo lo que hace la primavera con los cerezos, 17th October — 16th November 2024 DS Galerie
Jessy Razafimandimby at Sans Titre
Jessy Razafimandimby is a Madagascan painter whose practice expands out towards installation and sculptural light work. He currently has a solo exhibition at Sans Titre’s space in The Marais and also features on their booth at Art Basel Paris. The gallery show uses draped, semi-permeable curtains to split two rooms into three, mimicking a domestic setting. The front and second room house Razafimandimby’s paintings: colourful evocations of Madagascan life, capturing the essence of intense sunlight and coloured clothing.
Moving through to the backroom, there are three lamp sculptures, the shades of which are made by stretching acrylic-marked bedsheets over steel structures. The light permeating the bedsheet in an otherwise dark room is captivating. The silhouettes of Razafimandimby’s subjects creep out of the darkness: mostly people, but also dogs, as he’s interested in the tension between master and slave, dominance and subservience, that he sees in different guises throughout Madagascan society.
Jessy Razafimandimby, Those yes in your eye, 12th October – 21st December 2024 Sans Titre
Paul Maheke at Galerie Sultana
Galerie Sultana are showing a solo exhibition by the wonderfully elusive Paul Maheke. Here, the work is nominally about the challenges of making painting that’s difficult to pin down. How do you skillfully evade the fixed, long-lasting nature of an oil on canvas work? In this show, Maheke is working predominantly on silk curtains that are hung just in front of the gallery walls. He uses an airbrush to spray paint onto the curtain, depicting the outlines of figures rooted in mythology and mysticism. On a couple of occasions, Maheke works directly onto the gallery walls, creating ephemeral work that will eventually be painted over, but, for now, stand mysteriously behind the curtain, subtly altering this visual experience from the other works on silk.
Elsewhere in the space, laser-etched glass cubes sit atop thin column plinths. These works change when you move around the column, as the interior of the glass block refracts and meets the eye in different ways. There’s a sense of playful subversion in the space that you might expect from an artist who is often thought of as a performance-based practitioner. Here, the viewer becomes performer, as they try to capture the form of sensitively shifting works
Paul Maheke, Vert pétri d’eau, 5th Oct 2024 — 23rd Nov 2024, Galerie Sultana
Daniel Weissbach at Ruttkowski;68
Ruttkowski gallery, who are spread across New York, Paris, Dusseldorf and Cologne, are showing the work of Daniel Weissbach, a German painter who passed away in 2020 at the age of just 44. This show has moved from Dusseldorf to New York and is now ending in Paris.
The works are composed of tiles fixed in mostly geometric grids, the regimentation of which is upset at various points, distorting what would otherwise be a soothing continuity. There’s a nice lack of texture here; the works are smooth and reflect the gallery’s floodlights. This format of slightly misaligned tiling, disrupted in parts with gestural marks, feels somehow grungy, as though you’re in a public toilet. Weissbach was German, born in Berlin – the works manage to perfectly reflect a large part of the visual identity of his home city: something unpolished, with an un-refrained embrace of urban culture, and the visual poetics of the gutter.
Daniel Weissbach, Stellen, 5th October – 3rd November 2024, Ruttkowski;68
Manon Wertenbroek at Lo Brutto Stahl
Manon Wertenbroek’s wonderfully tactile hybrid works are on display at Lo Brutto Stahl. Here, wood and metal ‘bas-relief’ constructions appear through varnished layers of Ecco apparition leather that have been stretched across the surface. The works seem to be about the physical experience of existing and how it can feel to inhabit a body. The skeletal shapes gently force the leather out from the wall in different directions, like bone-moving skin in a stretching body.
There’s a haunting quality to the work; the forms aren’t quite right, like a joint has broken or something is growing in the wrong direction. They tap into a corporeal anxiety that so many of us possess, namely the feeling that something is wrong in the body and the fragile structure that keeps us in the world is not as it should be. In this regard, the forms appear otherworldly, nodding to sci-fi depictions of alien skeletons, or fossils of long-extinct species.
Manon Wertenbroek, Home auto-psy, 12th October- 23rd November 2024, Lo Brutto Stahl
All photos © Will Hainsworth
