Archives: expositions

Michele Chu, Chan Ting, Sasaoka Yuriko, Magdalen Wong, Xi Jiu, Zheng Mahler

Curated by PHD Group, Hong Kong

6 Dec – 11 Jan

The curiosity cabinet, or kunstkammer, has for centuries enthralled audiences with its arrays of wonders and oddities. Originating as privately kept miniature rooms or cupboards, the cabinet emphasized the abnormal, showcasing objects considered foreign to Occident intellectuals, and selected by wealthy royals, scholars, or merchants. This Orientalist history—and the elite few who decided what went into them—still dictates much of how we approach object and display today, with curiosity cabinets now existing in the public sphere as institutions and museum spaces. 

But what does it mean to be curious about an object from another place, dislocated from its context? How can the gaze of wonder confront and challenge the gaze of exoticisation and othering? Can curiosity be removed from concepts of ownership and possession? These questions are foundational to “Cabinet Cabinet Curiosity Curiosity,” a group exhibition curated by Hong Kong-based gallery PHD Group and hosted at Abraham & Wolff in Paris.

To name something once is to define it; to name it twice invokes a soft confusion, similar to when one repeats a word too many times, detaching it from meaning. The abstracted doubling in the title notes the experimental links between the artworks, and also playfully hints at the collaborative nature of the two galleries performing in tandem—one playing the host, presenting a literal cabinet that hints at its past as an antique drawing room, and the other playing guest, providing its curious contents. 

The artist duo Zheng Mahler presents abalone-encrusted porcelain pieces from their “A Season in Shell” project, in which they trace the abalone’s trade route from Africa to Hong Kong via Switzerland in a two-fold attempt to understand the mechanical workings of our sociopolitical exchange culture. Sasaoka Yuriko, from Japan, asks how we might be implicated in the capitalist labor of animals with a small singing bear that asks, ever so sweetly, to be employed in a work force. Xi Jiu evokes symbolism in paintings out of her Beijing studio. Hong Kong artists Chan Ting and Michele Chu show new works that engage in the relationship between material, form, and the artist’s hand. Magdalen Wong, also from Hong Kong, plays with the taxonomic naming of plants and the mass market, painting in great detail the plastic flowers she collected from various places over the years.  

With this wide range of works, “Cabinet Cabinet Curiosity Curiosity” delivers a missive directly air flown from Asia in an attempt to reverse and banish the cabinet’s problematic historical entanglements. Open-ended and fluid, the displays and selections do not express the stiff stereotypes of cabinets of old, but instead asks what it means to be curious today. We are left only with the barest suggestions of its charming form, and an invitation to open it up and take a look.

PHD Group, November 2024

Shoppers, Broadway Upper West Side, NYC, 1979-80 and other corners

Curated by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

Oct 30 – Nov 30, 2024

Catherine DeLattre grew up in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, a small town near the heavily industrial area of Pittsburgh. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she studied archaeology at Kent State where a course in basic photography was a requirement for recording in archaeological digs. That led her to the Art Photography program at Purdue where the focus was on black-and-white, but where DeLattre became more interested in color under the influence of her teacher Vern Cheek, and the then contemporary color work of photographers such as William Eggleston, Joe Maloney, Joel Meyerowitz, Jan Groover, Eve Sonneman and Joel Sternfeld. After a series of teaching gigs that took her from Rockport, Maine to Poughkeepsie, by 1979 DeLattre had saved enough money to move to New York City where she found a $200/month sublet on the Upper West Side and a part time job teaching darkroom at ICP. The colorful, eccentric, mostly elderly, women that shopped and lived in that neighborhood were her first impression of New York City. In DeLattre’s own words, “they looked so put together with makeup, outfits, and hairdos but at the same time so vulnerable. I related to that. I loved how they dressed up to go to the bank and the grocery store and run every day errands.” Almost every day from 1979 through 1980, she shot 120 Kodak color negative film with a TLR Mamiya which allowed her to remain anonymous when capturing street photographs of passersby. “It was an opportunity to photograph a passing generation. … Color was integral to my images in mood and description of the people and time. Color is still my main focus today, although in a more formal way than my street photos of the 1970s and 1980s.” Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

As part of its participation in the PhotoSaintGermain festival, which opens on October 30, 2024, Abraham & Wolff is pleased to exhibit the work of Catherine DeLattre in collaboration with OSMOS, NYC, through a selection of photographs from the series Shoppers, Broadway Upper West Side, NYC, 1979-80.  

Manuel Alvess, René Bertholo, Lourdes Castro, Christo, António Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, João Vieira, Jan Voss

Curated by Anne Bonnin

October 4 – October 26

The KWY magazine (1958-1964) was a singular editorial adventure led in Paris by 8 young foreign artists, newly arrived in the capital. Its founders were Portuguese artists Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada and João Vieira, soon joined by Bulgarian Christo and German Jan Voss. They were exiles, some fleeing a dictatorship, others a country ravaged by war and Nazism. They chose to settle in Paris, which then radiated the aura of a cosmopolitan cultural capital.

The magazine is a rich, composite art object featuring original silkscreens, photomontages, collages, postcards, soft discs, poetry, theoretical texts, unpublished works and precious documents. Through its 12 issues, we follow the evolution of a group of artists from the informal, gestural or matierist abstraction on display in galleries at the end of the 1950s, to the new art trends in which the group’s members participated – Nouveau réalisme, Nouvelle figuration, Pop art, gestural abstraction, Lettrisme, Fluxus, Art cinétique, poésie concrète, etc. In the background, we can make out their personal, dissimilar paths within the Parisian or international networks, which were then pursued independently in Paris, London, Lisbon, Munich or New York.

First of all, the title, in its lapidary strangeness, intrigues: is it an acronym, an enigma? Voluntarily cryptic, it sounds like an avant-garde code name. However, for the Portuguese who have chosen it, it is endowed with particular meanings: absent from the Portuguese alphabet (until a recent reform), these three consonants take on a sharp meaning, an ironic and political twist, under Salazar’s dictatorship. This absence at the heart of the language speaks both of exile in one’s own country, stifled by censorship, and of exile abroad, where one’s friends are missing. Indeed, KWY was initially conceived as a letter addressed to absent friends… Functioning as both a witticism and a password, this title condenses the avant-garde aspirations and energy that these young people put into their magazine. Its evolution reflects the movement of its members within Parisian and transnational artistic networks.
Perfectly in tune with the times, KWY reflects the artistic and social mutations of a transitional period between the war-torn late 1950s and the forward-looking early 1960s, full of optimism and revolutionary desires.

When you browse the issues and look at the attractive, different covers, you’re struck by the magazine’s heterogeneous, cobbled-together character. After all, KWY is an artisanal magazine, entirely hand-made and screen-printed in Lourdes Castro and René Bertholo’s tiny apartment. Heterogeneity permeates every aspect of the publication: paper, format, typography, cover, composition, layout and so on. No two issues are alike. The magazine adopts no recognizable graphic identity or aesthetic; rather, it follows the rhythm of life, of encounters and affinities and, therefore, of the new practices that emerge, as witnessed by the guest list, which diversifies and increases remarkably as the number of pages and copies grows – from 60 to 300, with a peak of 500, but still produced by hand and in a 20 m2.

The originality of KWY’s work lies in its inventive and spontaneous use of screen printing, a process that was still little used in the late 1950s. Motivated in part by cost, the choice of this technique is above all for its experimental potential – color, texture, weft, etc. – which KWY plays with obvious glee. In particular, it exploits the plastic resources of a reproduction process that produces the unique, asserting its specificity with the superlative humor of the advertisement: “The only magazine to offer an original hand-silk-screened work.” Shortly anticipating the developments of this technique by Pop art, it could be described as pre-pop. Nevertheless, KWY is distinguished by an unbridled inventiveness that denotes an improvisation typical of DIY and home economics, but also of youth.

The presence of the hand lends a lively allure to this whimsical publication: technical texts – summaries, bears, titles, announcements of publications or exhibitions, etc. – are all part of the story. The hand is the hallmark of a collective in which individualities mingle on equal terms – everyone puts their hand to the grindstone, bringing their own touch to a highly tactile object. In issue no. 6, which marks a milestone in its development, the editorial team explains its origins, making it clear that the group, which was born of the magazine and has grown up around it, does not represent any particular trend or movement. Thus, the varied, profuse style that marks the magazine’s singularity stems from a disparity intrinsic to the group. KWY was first and foremost a laboratory for experimentation, in the form of a quasi-collective work, displaying a joyful independence from the various aesthetic currents: the freedom for each to choose his or her own style.

The last opus came out in 1964 – it’s the natural fate of magazines and groups to disperse, but it bore fruit, building a bridge between Portugal, Paris and abroad, and weaving around it a web of transcontinental relationships that were, to say the least, varied.

The Autour de KWY exhibition, following on from the Lourdes Castro retrospective I organized in 2019 at the Mrac in Sérignan, brings to light the subterranean dynamics, the forgotten or more confidential filiations of a Parisian and transnational history. As part of my research into Portuguese artists active in Paris in the 1960s-1980s, it includes works by Manuel Alvess (1939-2009), who arrived in the French capital in 1963, where he lived until his death. Retired from the art world, he continued his conceptual and pictorial work, taking over from a Franco-Portuguese migration linked to the dictatorship.

Anne Bonnin, September, 2024

Bruno Botella pursues an experimental body of work in which sculpture and drawing play a central role. He develops performative devices that allow him to disengage from himself while capturing the imprint of his psychic activity in a sculpted object. Boxes for sculpting blind, a bed with a hole in the mattress giving access to a box filled with clay hidden under the bed base, sculpture shaped in an aquarium filled with leeches, the use of anaesthetic clay or hallucinogenic modelling clay of his own invention, are just some examples of the devices and materials that Botella uses to free himself from his perceptions, sensations and even his conscience, in order to give form, as he puts it, to ‘figures without kinship or species’. 

For this exhibition, he has imagined a new device, Incubat, that enables him to sculpt while he’s sleeping a modelling paste mixed with medicinal herbs reputed to stimulate dream activity. The public will also be able to activate a Heaume, a sculpture inside which the user can insert his or her head to inhale amyl nitrite vapour (poppers) while watching a cartoon specially designed by the artist. 

Mirroring these plastic and sensory experiments, the artist uses a calligraphy brush to produce drawings of great graphic freedom, through which he develops a strange and unexpected hallucinatory universe. Several of his most recent sketchbooks will be on show.

Entitled Panta Rhei (in reference to Heraclitus’ famous formula meaning “everything flows”, in the sense of “everything passes”), these silkscreens belong to a series of works by Francisco Tropa based on the themes of mimesis and play. They are composed of silk-screened geometric motifs, with cardboard cut-outs representing stones arranged inside them. These stone images can be freely rearranged by simply opening the frame, thus forming new compositions. They evoke other works by the artist in the form of transparent boxes containing natural pebbles and their bronze replicas. The pebbles and bronze casts can be freely extracted and arranged to create arrangements reminiscent of landscapes. A participatory device that unfolds here in graphic works.

Eugène Carrière (1849 – 1906) was one of the most singular painters of the late 19th century. Unlike the artists and movements of his time, he explored a tight register, both in his means of expression and in his choice of subjects. Using a palette limited to shades of brown, he painted sketchy compositions in which the figures are only shaped by chiaroscuro. The forms emerge from a background devoid of scenery or detail, far from any description or narrative. He painted a few landscapes, still lifes, numerous portraits and, above his own family. A painter of intimacy, Carrière tirelessly captured his wife and children in genre scenes of which he gave multiple variations. 

Alongside the paintings by Eugène Carrière, a digital slideshow by Miriam Cahn gives the exhibition its title: schreiender säugling [crying child]. Composed of images edited together to compose a film, the slideshow shows sculptures in various states. A child’s head, mouth gaping. Breasts. These two elements are brought together in a simulacrum of breast-feeding. The sculptures still bear the traces of the hands that shaped them. The artist’s hands appear in some of the photographs, sometimes modelling the forms, sometimes crushing them with the fist. A gesture that, in the ambivalent encounter between the real body and the sculpted body, creates an equivocation that goes well beyond the apparent theme of a child suckling at the breast.

An art critic, curator, bookseller, art publisher and magazine creator, Imre Pán (1904 – 1972) was one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Hungarian artistic life. An early participant in the avant-garde movements, he and his brother founded several magazines to which many Hungarian and European painters and artists contributed, including Jean Arp. In 1935, Pán opened a bookshop-gallery that became a popular meeting place for the Budapest intelligentsia. After the war (during which he had to live in hiding), Pán organised no less than thirty-eight exhibitions in the space of three years. In particular, he exhibited the surrealist painter Jacques Doucet and the Dutch artist Corneille. It was also the meeting place for the European School (of which Pán was one of the founders), a gathering of intellectuals aiming to open up Hungary culturally. This effervescence lasted until 1948, when Stalin’s cultural policy led to the dissolution of the European School and the closure of the bookshop.

In 1957, following the brutal repression of the Budapest uprising, Pán decided to leave Hungary and settle in Paris. There he met up with well-known artists such as Doucet and Corneille, as well as the Hungarian artistic diaspora: Étienne Hajdu, Anton Prinner, Árpád Szenes, Vasarely and Endre Bálint. He also came into contact with artists linked to the new avant-garde movements emerging on the Parisian scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Before long, Pán was actively involved in the Parisian art world. During the 1960s, he organised numerous exhibitions in collaboration with friendly galleries (such as La Main Gauche, La Roue and Le Point Cardinal), showcasing the work of artists as diverse as Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Georges Braque, André Masson, Fernand Léger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer and Unica Zurn, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Corneille, Pierre Vasarely, Serge Poliakoff, André Marfaing, Colette Brunschwig, Marcelle Cahn, Roberto Matta and Margit Anna, to name but a few. Most of them featured in the 150 or so art publications he edited from 1960 onwards, and which he developed and expanded until his death in 1972.

While the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff pays tribute to his career as an art publisher (Imre Pán. Une histoire artistique et éditoriale européenne dans le Paris des années 1960, from 3 March 2024, curated by Marjorie Micucci), Abraham & Wolff is honouring another facet of his prolific activity: that of collector. 

Combining his in-depth knowledge of the avant-garde with his great sensitivity, Imre Pán amassed an exceptional collection throughout his life. Both in Budapest and in Paris, he acquired works from gallery owners as well as from artists he admired and whose studios he liked to visit. He mainly bought small-format works on paper, sketches and preparatory drawings, fascinated by these works in which art is in the process of being made.

Described as a “historical collection” by Imre Pán himself, the ensemble we are presenting here is just one part of his collection. It comprises 53 works on paper covering a period from 1910 to 1968. Two generations of artists come together to form a veritable panorama of European art from the first half of the twentieth century and the post-war period, all trends taken together. It has to be said that the story Pán tells here has, for the most part, been validated by posterity.

With works by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhaïl Larionov, Roger de La Fresnaye, Sonia Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Otakar Kubín, Suzanne Duchamp, Max Jacob, Leopold Survage, Ossip Zadkine, André Bauchant, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Bela Kadar, Marcel Gromaire, Léon Tutundjian, André Derain, Pierre Tal Coat, Francis Picabia, Vassily Kandinsky, Maurice Estève, Georges Valmier, Salvador Dalí, Lajos Vajda, Hans Reichel, Yves Tanguy, Gaston Chaissac, Wilfredo Lam, Jean Arp, Christine Boumeester, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Jacques Villon, André Heurtaux, Henri Matisse, Wols, Victor Vasarely, Óscar Domínguez, Auguste Herbin, Corneille, Pierre Soulages, Camille Bryen, Raoul Ubac, Roberto Matta, Henri Michaux, Hans Bellmer, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Alberto Giacometti, Asger Jorn and Pablo Picasso.

Jocelyn Wolff and Samy Abraham would like to extend their warmest thanks to Sophie Pán, who opened up her father’s archives and collection to us in preparation for this exhibition.

For our first exhibition of 2024, we are delighted to present a rare and previously unseen collection of furniture and drawings by the Turin-based architecture and design duo Gabetti and Isola.

Challenging the precepts of modernism and international style, Roberto Gabetti (1925-2000) and Aimaro Isola (1928-) set themselves apart in the early 1950s with an original vision of the avant-garde rooted in Italian architectural tradition and the art nouveau style. Seeking a harmonious dialogue between the building and its urban context, their style is characterized by pure lines, daring geometric shapes, ornamentations and the combined use of modern and traditional materials. Although the two men later borrowed certain features from the techno aesthetic, they nevertheless continued to attach fundamental importance to the landscape value of their projects, ensuring that each building was at one with its natural surroundings, using materials such as wood and stone.

Their most notable works include the Borsa Valori (Turin, 1956), and the housing and furnishings of the Talponia complex (Ivrea, 1971), designed for the Olivetti residential center in Ivrea, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. 

The first major exhibition devoted to Gabetti and Isola in France since their retrospective at the Institut Français d’Architecture in 1996, Gabetti and Isola – Another modernism focuses on these two emblematic buildings through an exceptional selection of their respective furniture. Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola conceived their projects as total works, designing furniture, lamps and carpets as an extension of their architectural principles. Renowned for their originality, their creations have been included in the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Maxxi in Rome. Abraham & Wolff will also be showing a never-before-seen series of preparatory sketches and technical drawings by Aimaro Isola that illustrate the development of these pieces.

Jocelyn Wolff and Samy Abraham would like to extend their warmest thanks to Aimaro Isola and his son Hilario, who opened up the resources of their archives, reserves and memories to us in preparation for this exhibition.

For this new exhibition, Abraham & Wolff is proposing an evolving display in the form of a retrospective. A constantly renewed dialogue between the artists who have marked our first year of programming. 

Including contemporary sculptures and drawings, editions, multiples and Italian design, this selection of works by William Anastasi, Diego Bianchi, Bruno Botella, Mélissa Boucher Morales, Colette Brunschwig, Miriam Cahn, Aurelie Nemours, Oswald Oberhuber, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Prinz Gholam, Francisco Tropa and Venini is accompanied by an exceptional late 11th-century Romanesque capital from the Alexandre Piatti Gallery in Paris 

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank the galleries who made many of our projects possible : Compasso Gallery in Milan, Gallery Marcelle Alix in Paris and KOW Gallery in Berlin.

Mélissa Boucher Morales develops photographic projects, videos and artist’s editions in which she explores the possibilities and limits of the image, its process of appearance and disappearance, through forms and notions linked to the representation of the intimate. As part of this research, the Scrolling project (2021-2022) was born of the artist’s reflection on the production of images and their alteration, but also of a desire to create an alternative reading to the fascination exerted by pornographic content. Using film to photograph streaming videos of amateur cam girls, postporn and feminist pornography, the artist has captured intimate gestures and isolated fragments of bodies, gestures and attitudes that would otherwise have been lost in the flow. From these details, these images hidden within the image, the artist brings out a new sensuality. She subjects them to a specific film treatment that gives the models a spectral appearance (in contrast to the flesh brutally exposed by the camera), then superimposes a dielectric pane – a glass whose reflective qualities seem to send the viewer back to his or her role as voyeur – a new screen through which she reappropriates not only the image but also the initial viewing device.

To coincide with the PhotoSaintGermain festival, which runs from 2 to 25 November 2023, Abraham & Wolff is pleased to honour the work of Mélissa Boucher Morales by exhibiting a selection of works from Scrolling [faire défiler].