Almine Rech is pleased to present Dialogues a group exhibition featuring works by Karel Appel, Don Brown, Agustín Cárdenas, César, Günther Förg, Sylvie Fleury, Carlos Jacanamijoy, Annie Morris and Mimmo Rotella, on view from November 18 to December 22, 2022 in Paris, Matignon.
Some of the works in this show of major artists express a pure harmony. This is true of Don Brown’s bronze Eriko (2021), presented for the first time at Almine Rech, which represents a girl huddled on the floor, perched on a base of the same deep black. At first glance, she could seem to be a continuation of ancient sculpture or the Roman neoclassicism of Canova’s Cupid and Psyche. However, her clothing – a leotard – clearly anchors her in the current era. Her fragility and delicacy, emphasized by the oversized height of the base, make her a perfect allegory. In his quest for grace and the sublime, Don Brown is driven by a sense of detail and extreme refinement, where any idealization has disappeared.
Tangible harmony is also conveyed by the new work of British artist Annie Morris, whose artistic practice also includes painting, drawing, and tapestry. She studied under Giuseppe Penone at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and shows a piece from Stacks, her symbolic series of towers made of colored spheres. In a fragile equilibrium, sculpted of plaster and sand, these mineral balls covered with pure pigments – particularly cadmium red, ultramarine blue, and emerald green – are stacked on a concrete base of similar verticality. The piece blends figuration and abstraction, collective and personal experience.
Quite different from this harmony but with a similar desire to grasp fragility, the oil painting Personnage (1969) and the multicolored painted sculpture Head (1975) by Karel Appel, cofounder of the CoBrA movement in 1948, fluctuate between the expressionistic grotesque and popular humor, between animality and a children’s drawing. Their resemblance to unbridled but meticulous art brut brings them into the territory of the unconscious.
— Charles Barachon