3 Exhibitions to See During Paris Gallery Weekend

Sanya Kantarovsky, Teachers and Students at Modern Art (24 May–29 June 2024)

For Rory Mitchell, it's the calibre of painters that line the walls of Modern Art that keeps him returning to the gallery, which has spaces in London and Paris.

Sanya Kantarovsky is a prime example. The Moscow-born painter first showed at Modern Art London in the group show, Live and Let Die in 2014. Since then, the gallery has hosted several of his group and solo exhibitions, Teachers and Students being his latest solo on view in Paris.

While Kantarovsky also sculpts and animates, painting is at the centre of his practice and his Paris exhibition.

It's the depth of colour that he does so well. While a face or a bedsheet may initially appear vague in their rendering, Kantarovsky brilliantly draws out colour and shape through a build-up of lightly-worked strokes.

Actors populate these paintings playing the role of both teachers and students, while the artist himself occupies both. Children are resigned to punishment, yet rather than capturing the 'misdemeanour', Kantarovsky focuses on the child's consequential state of detachment. One figure hunches in a ball on a chair, while another stands vulnerable with underwear around their knees, their cheeks turning crimson after what one can only assume is a strike.

Modern Art opened in London in 1998, but only launched in Paris in October 2023 on Place de l'Alma with a group exhibition of 16 artists, including Kantarovsky.

'Coincidentally, none of the artists on Modern Art's roster are represented by French galleries,' owner Stuart Shave told The Art Newspaper last year. 'It's a great opportunity for me to show them there.'

Zadie Xa, Rough hands weave a knife at Thaddaeus Ropac (12 April–26 May 2024)

Keeping true to her Austrian roots, Eva Fuchs has always kept close tabs on arguably the country's most formidable gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac. Zadie Xa's first solo exhibition with the gallery takes place at in Paris Marais; it's also her debut show in France.

Xa's work has continuously explored concepts of identity, particularly in relation to her experience as a Canadian artist of Korean heritage.

In Paris, Xa draws on the visual language of Korean bojagi patchwork tradition and Korea's rich mythological tradition with her upbringing in Vancouver. Notably, the inclusion of denim in her patchwork nods to fashion trends familiar to the artist from her childhood.

Alongside the artist's most recent paintings and textile works is a group of four bronze sculptures—a new facet to her practice. Having trained in painting, Xa has always danced with a range of mediums, feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities of paint.

'I thought about what I was really excited by within the ideas of painting,' Xa told Ocula in 2020. 'It was always something to do with transformative figures or the idea of shapeshifting. I thought, I'm going to cut all of this art-theorising in order to get to making the work: I'm just going to make a jacket.'

At Ropac's gallery in Marais, you can also catch Sean Scully's exhibition of rare figurative works shown alongside his best-known abstract series, 'Wall of Light' (1998–ongoing) and 'Landline' (2013–ongoing), until 29 July. Over in Pantin, in the northeast of Paris, visit the gallery's first dedicated exhibition to Alex Katz's printmaking practice, alongside a selection of his stand-alone cut-out works (25 May–23 July 2024).

Hernan Bas, The First And The Last at Perrotin (13 April–1 June 2024)

The springboard for this Hernan Bas show is the Olympics, with its title The First and the Last paying homage to the 'magnificent losers' he is so fond of. And Simon Fisher is surely fond of him.

This show also marks a 'first' for the Florida-born artist. Featuring paintings and works on paper, it's the first time his drawings have been presented as stand-alone artworks.

The exhibition presents a whole host of eclectic characters. In The last day it stood (Pisa) (2024), a boy props his hand against the eponymous landmark in that clique holiday snapshot, or the work-on-paper Finding the First Flock of Flamingos to Return to Florida in a Century (2024) which captures a boy paddling a boat through a lake in Florida where the species have returned after being reintroduced from Cuba.

A painting of a sombre museum guard standing in front of Picasso's Guernica (1937), titled The last museum guard at the last museum on Earth (2024), leaves an eerie impression.

It's a comprehensive show. Four rooms are full of 'dandy' boy figures—young, effeminate, and handsome men—whom Bas so often renders with blank expressions in a world that explores the absurdities of existence alongside the beauty in the mundane.