Features

Almine Rech is pleased to announce a new film series entitled 'As Seen By', which invites scholars, curators, critics and other cultural figures to share their perspective on an important work by one of the gallery’s artists.

"Both their artistic idioms are ostensibly non-modernist. They gather inspiration from popular culture, without however transferring it one to one, as postmodern artists tend to do."
— Franz W. Kaiser, Karel Appel Foundation

Erik Lindman and Robert Motherwell are two artists who, though born seventy years apart, share an interest in using found materials to generate compositional decisions in their work. This can be traced back to their shared lodestar Picasso, and the collage technique he developed at the turn of the last century. 
— Alex Bacon, Art historian, curator, and publisher

Emily Mason’s paintings are celebrated for their unique fusion of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, conveyed through a personal, intuitive process. Her works radiate emotion, light, and motion—qualities that have defined her as a leader in lyrical abstraction. She worked prolifically across oil on canvas, works on paper, and printmaking, always pushing the boundaries of her medium.

"Painting is my attempt at processing and synthesizing the stories and information I’ve become curious about. Human beings advance by looking at things from different perspectives and by changing the way in which they look at themselves."
— Zio Ziegler

George Rouy is recognized as a leading figure in a new generation of international artists. His dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire, freedom, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time. Bodies - captured alone, gathered in quiet groups, or imprisoned in crowds of amorphous energy - move from absorption and poise to expansive forces of incitement and charge.

When we gaze at the stars, we are actually locking eyes with starlight that has traveled from decades, millennia, trillions of years ago, or even from the primordial source of all things. A similar kind of direct, readily accessible time travel occurs, in a way, when encountering Oliver Beer’s solo exhibition, 'Three Nymphéas'.
— Sun Man, curator and translator

"Combining, replacing and layering over and over again, each painting seeks out a condition of poise that has enough of stillness and imminence to suggest a new 'invitation to the voyage.'"
— Christopher Le Brun

Chloe Wise’s paintings are vignettes in a keyhole. Sometimes her bon vivants appear ignorant to what lurks outside—outside their frames, that is—and the burden of their naiveté falls on the viewer, much like it does when we watch characters in a horror movie plan a fun adventure in the woods. 
— Gideon Jacobs, writer

“I think that true culture is essentially political. So it's not a question of it being content. Content, you stick into that, it creates our thinking. It's essentially political. If you understand how art works, it's like that for me.”
— Joseph Kosuth

Moods. Environments. The fun begins. Oil paint. Acrylic. Spray-paint. Silkscreens. Music in the studio sets the rhythm and pace of production. The music is in the painting. The “freedom and flow” is in the painting. The colors in the work represent ambience and create tension. If the work is monochrome, grey, it’s to focus the eye on the image and brushwork. For Scharf, “Colors are emotions.” 
— Cedar Lewisohn, writer, artist and curator.

"To me painting offers a respite from the turmoil of the world. Opening a space outside of words and language. A break from the “cacophony of soloists” (O. Tokarczuk). Space for silence. Space for breathing. A place where we suspend meaning for a moment."
— Sasha Ferré

"It was love at first sight. When I saw the Memphis show in September '81 in Milan. I had just got a big apartment in Monte Carlo. And had no idea how to furnish it. I had never lived in a modern building. I wanted it all modern and instantly thought that Memphis would be the Art Deco of the '80s. I was right. The influence was enormous. Memphis tried to breathe fresh air into the word "design." And what I like about all the Memphis stuff is its humor."
— Karl Lagerfeld

"I think it’s important that you paint a real narrative, an honest reflection. I don’t think [my saints] look like saints as they have been given to us...[those] were false narratives."
— Genesis Tramaine

An essential figure of the 20^th and 21^st century art and poetry, John Giorno (1936- 2019) lived like he wrote- generously, unceasingly and collaboratively. Ten years after the landmark exhibition ‘UGO RONDINONE: I ♥ JOHN GIORNO’, held at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Almine Rech and Giorno Poetry Systems present ‘Merci! John Giorno’, an exhibition celebrating the artist and his enduring. Works by Giorno are presented alongside his contemporaries as well as a younger generation of artists for whom Giorno has acted as an inspiration. A decade later, Giorno returns to Paris as the global community he built comes together to celebrate his life and work.

Light in Mack’s work suggests both the solar light of the sun and the chemical light of the mushroom cloud. In Mack’s work, brightness is not only a natural phenomenon but also, emerging in the wake of two world wars and under the shadow of the threat of nuclear conflict, his work suggests the interrelation of the duality of life and death.
— Alex Bacon, Visiting Scholar, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.