For the People of Paris - Viewing Room

Since the early 1990’s, Liz Deschenes has produced a body of work that emancipates photography from its conventional definition as a document and explores the material condition of the medium and its processes. Working without a camera, the silver-toned photograms that Deschenes makes are a direct record of atmospheric conditions during the process of their production: light, humidity, and the outside temperature, among other factors, determine the surface of the final works.

Liz Deschenes (b. 1966) lives and works in New York. Her work is currently included in the exhibition Une seconde d’éternité at the Pinault Collection - Bourse de Commerce, Paris. Her work has been exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2022); a series of exhibitions with Sol LeWitt at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2017), Miguel Abreu Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2016); ICA Boston (2016); MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2015); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); and the Secession, Vienna (2012).

Cheyney Thompson’s work methodically deconstructs how painting is created, often imposing on his practice a set of constraints that involve mathematical formulas, protocols of observation and other orders of abstraction. His series of Displacement paintings posits each canvas’s ground as a touch-sensitive surface. The works adopt a uniform structure of fivemillimeter square black marks painted in a gridded pattern atop a white ground. Before the paint is dry, Thompson deploys an assortment of custom silicone tools against the surface, forcing the wet squares out of place. He adds no new material, but rather subjects the existing marks to this process of reorganisation. The resulting transformations appear as extensions of squares into lines, glyph-like forms, and sweeping, sinuous fields of paint.

Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975) lives and works in New York. His work was included in Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MAXXI, Rome (2019) and in Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum, New York (2019). His work was on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016) and Whitney Museum, New York (2015) in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner. Thompson had a survey exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts (2012) with an accompanying monograph and a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2012). His work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial as well as the 2003 Venice Biennale, curated by Francesco Bonami.

Feinstein is a legendary painter whose work and ideas about abstraction have influenced generations of artists. Over the past four decades, she has deflated the dogmas of modernism with humor and verve, liberally borrowing from different schools of painting, as well as other mediums, including drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video, and installation. Though it takes myriad forms, her singular project always centers painting within culture at large. She moves freely through the history of late 20th-century painting, rejoicing in materiality while poking holes in the notion of pure painting.

One of the key aspects of Feinstein's early works from the 1990s’ is the reinterpretation of the modernist grid. Symbol of artistic autonomy, Feinstein uses the grid as a tool to deconstruct its authority and integrate the elements it was supposed to eradicate: lived experience, political criticism and even humour.

Rochelle Feinstein (b. 1947) lives and works in New York. A major survey exhibition of Feinstein’s work was shown at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2016), and subsequently travelled to Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2017), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2018-2019). Past solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2012). The artist was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Benni Bosetto (b. 1987) is an Italian artist based in Milan. Her work combining drawing, sculpture, installation and performance always involves the body and its gesture. Her artistic practice is based on the superposition of fragmented narratives from anthropology, religion, popular beliefs and art history. Her research draws in particular on the study of ancient and contemporary healing rituals, and on the states of semiconsciousness specific to meditation and sleep. Bosetto creates openended visual narratives in which the gaze wanders from one scene to another without ever focusing on a specific point.

The works on silk are inhabited by a multiplicity of unicellular organisms, humans, animals, saints, and visceral parasites all interconnected by biomechanical pipes that pass through their orifices to form a single living system. The drawings are freely executed by the artist directly on silk, mounted on cotton and framed in a handmade steel frame which give them a sculptural quality. When they are not absorbed in some kind of reflection, Benni Bosetto's characters are grappling with a series of ritual gestures and self-care exercises. The body reveals itself here as the origin of perception, the source of material knowledge and the holder of an intergenerational memory.

Benni Bosetto (b. Milan, 1987) lives and works in Milan. She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan, IT, and she studied at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, NL. Recent solo exhibitions include: MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (2022); Almanac, Turin (2020); Kunstraum, with Xenia Perek, London (2019); Fonderia Battaglia, Milan (2018); Convento de los Domenicos, Eivissa (2017); Tile Project Space, Milan (2016). Recent group exhibitions include: MAXXI L’Aquila (2022); Galleria Civica, Trento (2021); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (2021); Quadriennale d’arte, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene (2020); among others.

Throughout his career, Daniel Lefcourt has continually engaged the space between painting and technical imaging. The Terraform series conveys the impression of abstract landscapes seen from an aerial perspective. The works continue the artist’s exploration of painting in relation to technical and scientific imaging. An important reference for Lefcourt’s landscapes was the recording of the first image of Mars by Nasa scientists in 1965. The initial planetary image was taken by a satellite and transmitted to Earth as a numerical sequence representing varying tonal intensities.

Daniel Lefcourt (b. 1975) lives and works in New York. Lefcourt’s work was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015) in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner. He had a solo exhibition at White Flags Project, Saint-Louis (2012). His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including the ICA Philadelphia (2012); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2012); MoMA P.S.1, New York (2011); Sculpture Center, Long Island City (2010); Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden (2008); Swiss Institute, New York (2005).

Kianja Strobert’s recent series of works presents the process, the raw material, the motivations and the goal simultaneously, devoid of any hierarchy. Strobert’s troughs filled with color are made with papier mâché covered by a painting evoking pewter, a metal primarily used for decorative metal items and tableware in ancient times. The work shares the context of other products of consumption,suggested by the repetition of utensils, objects and themes. Strobert’s works propose an attitude toward finish, in which the painter does not disguise the means of arriving at the final work.

Kianja Strobert (b. 1980) lives and work in Hudson, NY. She recently had a solo exhibition at ArtOMI in Ghent, New York (2021). Past solo exhibitions include The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014) and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2012). Group exhibitions include: Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York (2015); Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City (2017) and The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013). The artist received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale University.

John Miller’s Pedestrian paintings are derived from his photo series, The Middle of the Day – a project he began in 1994, in which he captures images between the hours of 12 and 2 pm. Here most individuals are unaware of the camera, generating an ambient or multi-directional attention, as opposed to the glorified self-image exhibited daily in social media. The groups Miller depicts resist idealization, in part because their interactions unfold indifferent to the aims of production and utility.

In the Pedestrian series, the transition goes from photography to painting, which accounts for the fracture between spontaneity and labour. Their shapes as cut out tableaux reinforce the aspect of realism. In conjunction with this, Miller deploys a particular grisaille technique in which he mixes a fair amount of grey into all the colours. By reducing the range of values ordinarily fo und in realist painting, this palette imposes a limit on the realist effect and puts the rendering involved at one remove.

John Miller (b.1954) had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2021) and at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2020). A survey exhibition was organized at the ICA Miami (2016) with an accompanying monograph. Miller is the recipient of the 2011 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, which coincided with a solo exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In 2009 Kunsthalle Zürich held a retrospective exhibition of his work.

Scott Lyall’s series of modulated mirrors titled Talent are made of glass, printing ink, and a hand-mixed paint composition of varnish and gold nano-particles that reduce the mirror’s reflective quality. For Scott Lyall the use of gold introduces a surprising fugitivity: because of the intimate scale of nano-particles, a quantity of the gold is absorbed into the pores of Lyall's hands as he rubs it into the mirror's façade. It is as if the painted surface was divided on a scale between a world-reflecting image and an adventure of embodiment.

Scott Lyall (b. 1964) lives and works in Toronto and New York. He earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Art in 1993. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Superstar at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2019), Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2018), DRAGONS at Campoli Presti, London (2017),Dragons. SLStudio. clone 1/2/1 – SLStudio.clone 1/10/1 at Campoli Presti, Paris (2017), Black Glass at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2015), οἴνοπα πόντον [Winedark Sea] at Campoli Presti, London (2014), among others.

Cinzia Ruggeri’s personal and committed creative path began in 1960, when she had her first exhibition at Galleria del Prisma in Milan, accompanied by a text by Dino Buzzati. Ruggeri shared an affinity with the Radical Design scene in Milan in the seventies and was captivated by the transgression of limits between different disciplines like architecture, art, fashion and design. Cinzia Ruggeri's work is animated by a desire to transform everyday objects into unique, idyllic designs. With Tavolo Milos (2017), Ruggeri turns the shape of the island of Milos, her favorite destination in the Cyclades, into a table.

Cinzia Ruggeri (Milan, 1942 - 2019) had her first retrospective this summer at MACRO Museum in Roma. In 2018, a solo exhibition curated by Mariuccia Casadio was held at Galleria Federico Vavassori and, in 2015, she had a solo exhibition at 10 Corso Como. Her work has been presented in Arts & Foods, curated by Germano Celant, Triennale di Milano (2015); at Salone del Mobile (1988); in Pianeta Italia, Kaufhof Stores, Cologne (1988); in Fashion and Surrealism, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (1987); at Internationale Mobel Messe, Cologne (1987); in Extra Vacanze di Cinzia Ruggeri, Galleria Tucci Russo, Turin (1986); among others.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) lives and works between New York and Maine. She recently had a survey exhibition at The Portland Museum of Art, Maine. She exhibited at The Modern Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (2013) and participated in group shows at MoMA P.S.1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Chrystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas; The Nerman Museum, Kansas; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, New York and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, as part of the fourth Prospect New Orleans Triennial.

Reena Spaulings emerged in 2004 from the daily operation of Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, a gallery founded by John Kelsey & Emily Sundblad and named after Bernadette Corporation’s novel of the same name.
In order to introduce a different authority to the concept of authorship, Reena Spaulings has frequently adopted the practice of commissioning a third party or entity to execute their work. The Later Seascapes paintings were made with the help of a floor-mopping robot. Its spinning brush covers the surface of the canvas and leaves painted traces of every change of direction.

Reena Spaulings had a solo exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2017) and exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner (2016) travelling from the Whitney Museum, New York. Past exhibitions include Painting 2.0, Expression in the Information Age at Brandhorst Museum, Munich (2016); Dystopia at Museé d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2011); Pop Life at Tate Modern, London (2009) and How to Cook a Wolf, a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich (2007).

Eileen Quinlan explores the material boundaries of the photographic process by producing abstract images that are deeply grounded in feminist history, and the mechanics of presentation and consumption. Quinlan exposes the constructed nature of her medium by either mobilising commercial photography techniques or manually altering the surface of the negative.

Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972) lives and works in New York. Her work was recently presented in the group exhibition Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. She was featured in the exhibition Objects Recognized in Flashes curated by Matthias Michalka at MUMOK, Vienna (2020). Quinlan had a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany. Her work was shown in the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017 as part of the exhibition “Viva Arte Viva”, curated by Christine Macel.

Xylor Jane's explores vast textural and chromatic ranges, orchestrating intensely intricate paintings that reference numerical, time-based, and other patterned systems. Her personal writing systems measure different periods of her life, unpacking the artist’s fascination with time in a vast spectrum of colors. While generated with often esoteric mathematical prompts, they deliver powerful emotional experiences.

Xylor Jane (b.1963, Long Beach, CA) lives and works in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She was recently featured in the exhibition A Spirit of Disruption presented by San Francisco Art Institute in celebration of their 150th anniversary. The artist has had solo exhibitions at University Museum of Contemporary Art, Amherst (2019) and Santa Monica Museum of Art (2014).

Blake Rayne's Cover Letter series oscillates between the pictorial and the sculptural, the rectangular historical shape of the canvas and a flexible alien form that derives from the decorative logic of graphic design, making the meaning of the letter “a” oscillate between applied and fine arts. The series focuses on the contradiction between the determination of painting and its irresolute nature.

Blake Rayne (b. 1969) lives and works in New York. In 2016-17, Cabin of the Accused, the first survey exhibition of Rayne’s work, was presented at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas. Solo exhibitions include Yogurt Cinema (A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto, 2019), Brother Ass (Central Fine, Miami, 2019), DOGSKULLDOGS (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2018), and Carbon Days (Nuno Centeno, Porto, 2018), among others.

Started in 1978, the Babel series evokes the image of a labyrinthic tower, growing vertically as division and movement reigns on the inside. Taking the canvas as a three-dimensional object, Bonnefoi sets a series of operations that aim to dismantle the unity of the plane. In his more recent paintings from the series, Bonnefoi explores further manipulations of the tarlatan, a sheer, open-weaved fabric applied in varying volumes, allowing the surface to reveal different levels of visibility.

Christian Bonnefoi (b. 1948) lives and works between Paris and Changy. In 2008, he had a retrospective at Centre Pompidou, Paris, with an accompanying catalogue. More recently, Christian Bonnefoi had a solo exhibition in 2020 at Centre d'Art Contemporain Bouvet Ladubay in Saumur, France.

The American/German artist Nick Mauss has formed his work through a finely tuned sensory register, with drawing at the centre of a praxis which otherwise eludes all simple categorizations. Expanding the medium of drawing through multiple registers at the same time, Mauss’ approach to drawing fuses peripatetically to other possible formats, including sculpture, publications, the format of the exhibition, and writing.

Nick Mauss (b. 1980) lives and works in New York. His recent solo exhibitions include Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. at Kunsthalle Basel, Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Intricate Others at Museo Serralves, Porto. His works are included in numerous public collections, including those of the Whitney Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museo Serralves, Porto; among others. This July, Mauss contributed as an invited artist to the survey exhibition of Christian Bérard at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, Amy Sillman paints and draws using innumerable layers, none of which the viewer sees in the final one, but which can be sensed from their active surface. Over the last three decades, she has interrogated the language and practice of painting, re-evaluating its history and extending its reach into emergent mechanical and digital processes.

Amy Sillman (b. 1955) participated this year in the 59th Biennale di Venizia. She has had solo exhibitions at many major institutions, namely at the Arts Club of Chicago (2019); The Camden Arts Center, London (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), as well as group shows at Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2021); Neues Museum, Nuremberg (2020); the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015) and MoMA, New York (2015).

Heike-Karin Föll's work examines the materiality and status of painting, drawing and writing in a culture increasingly dominated by the circulation of digital images. The quotation of pre-existing references, such as Martin Barre's works made with bomb-shaped spray cans in the mid-1960s (Total Femme, 2016) and the appropriation of specifically non-pictorial techniques, such as collage and writing, are at the core of her work.

Heike-Karin Föll (b. 1967) lives and works in Berlin. The artist is a Professor for Drawing and Critical Digitality at Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK). She had a major solo exhibiton at KunstWerke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2019). Past exhibitions include Centre d'Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2018); Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin (2016); Mumok, Vienna (2016); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2014); The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2014); National Museum, Tbilisi (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel (solo exhibition 2012) and Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2011).

Sarah Charlesworth is best known as an established figure of the Pictures Generation, as well as a prominent conceptual photographer of the 1970s and 1980s. Charlesworth’s influential body of work deconstructs the conventions of photography and establishes the medium’s centrality in our perception of the world. Charlesworth stages volatile worlds, isolating objects on monochrome backgrounds to reveal the constructed nature of visual culture and question systems of image distribution.

Sarah Charlesworth (1947-2013) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of institutions, including a solo survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017-18) and a solo survey exhibition at New Museum, New York (2015) and a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998).

As an artist, writer, activist and curator, Fernanda Laguna created several cultural spaces that are until today an effective part of her practice. Laguna started showing her work in the post-dictatorial Argentina, where artists highly questioned the idea of artistic professionalism and taste by defending a recovered space of joy and desire. Cleverly weaving together craft, local painting traditions and popular culture, Laguna replaces the belief in the sleek and erudite work of art for an intuitive, empathic and more intimate approach to the role of the artist.

Fernanda Laguna (b. 1972) lives and works in Buenos Aires. She recently had a solo exhibition at The Drawing Center, NY (2022). She had a survey exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2021). Her work was part of the exhibition Take Me (I'm yours) curated by Christian Boltanski, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Chiara Parisi at Villa Medici, Rome (2018); and Casa Tomada curated by José Luis Blondet, Ruba Katrib and Candice Hopkins, SITE Santa Fe, NM, (2018).

Emily Sundblad is an American-based, Swedish-born painter, gallerist, and musician. She co-founded and co-directs Reena Spaulings, an art collective and gallery located in Chinatown that exhibits one of the most consistent programs in New York. As an artist in her own right, Sundblad is known for her vibrant paintings—especially of flowers, which she describes as “a good empty subject.” Her approach is that of a Sunday painter—humble and modest, using oil, pastel, gouache, and watercolor in “a simple impulse to record everyday life.”

Emily Sundblad (b. 1977) lives and works in New York. Past solo include: Galerie Neu, Berlin (2019); House of Gaga, Mexico City (2019); Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2017); The Kitchen, New York (2016); Le Consortium, Dijon (2014); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2013); Off Vendome, Düsseldorf (2013). Her work was featured in Double Lives, MUMOK, Vienna (2019) and was part of the Whitney Biennial (2014).

Nora Schultz's work explores questions of the emergence of pictures and production as an artistic dynamic. She is more interested in the genesis of images and objects and its material traces than in the completed work. The work below is a study for Lucia’s Four Roads, a single beam of blackened pine which appears like an outlier too, but of a dimensional kind. The diagonal reappears as a line that traverses both actual and virtual space, a line of thought whose length is determined by the proximity of ideas and the density of glass, wood, stone and paper.

Nora Schultz (b. 1975) had a solo exhibition at Secession, Vienna (2019). Her work was included in Skulptur Projekte 2017 in Münster and she had a two-persons show at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2016-17). Past solo exhibitions include Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014); Portikus, Frankfurt (2012); Bloomberg Space, London (2011); Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2010) and Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009).

Questioning the traditional hierarchies of painting, Jutta Koether’s work deconstructs the distinction between copy and original. Painting opens up a broader discursive space through the incorporation of performance and the appropriation of art historical subjects and positions.

Jutta Koether (b. 1958) lives and works in New York and Berlin. Koether had a major survey exhibition at Museum Brandhorst, Munich and MUDAM, Luxembourg (2019). Past solo exhibitions include Dundee Contemporary Arts (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2008); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2007) and Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2006).

Anna Franceschini (born in 1979 in Pavia) studies objects, artifacts, commodities and modes of exhibition, in order to rediscover their role and configuration within the aesthetics of capital, through a continuous research on sculpture and moving images, as well as performance and installation. Her videos and films have been presented in several festivals, including: Rotterdam Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Turin Film Festival, Courtisane in Ghent and Vilnius Film Festival.

Anna Franceschini's (b. 1979) work has been the subject of solo exhibitions organized by: Kunstverein Duesseldorf; Spike Island, Bristol; Museion, Bolzano; Fiorucci Art Trust, London; Almanac, London; KIOSK, Ghent; Vistamare Milan/Pescara; Vera Cortes Galeria, Lisbon; Almanac, London. The artist participated in the Quadrennial of Art in Rome in 2020. Her group exhibitions include: Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; HFKD, Holstebro, Campoli Presti, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Istituto Svizzero, Milan-Venice; ICA, Milan; CAC, Vilnius; Kunstraum, London; The Breeder Gallery, Athens; Matadero, Madrid; MAXXI, Rome; Villa Medici, Rome. In 2017, she won the Italian Council Grant, promoted by the Ministry of Culture.