
Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to announce Chris Succo’s fifth exhibition with the gallery, on view from February 2 to March 9, 2024 in our Show-Room.
In the elegy of perpetual return, where impasto engages in a punk minuet, there exists a sotto voce murmuration of recurrence—a reverie that oscillates between optimism and emptiness. Succo, whose ladder of chaos, encapsulates resonance, each brushstroke is like a musical note, a reverberation of the temporally boundless.
In this exhibition, life unfolds its chromatic vivacity dominated by chiaroscuro—an existential chiaroscuro where hard boundaries delineate forced confusion and agency in music. Shadows are phantoms, while luminescence cleaves through the continuum, creating contours of eternal recurrence—a choreography replete with rhapsodies of jubilation and lamentation, triumph and tribulation, ardor and bereavement.
The eternal recurrence, the lyrical pavane, beckons one to examine the circumferences of temporal recursion, to cradle the repetitions as harmonies within a bridge. It implores contemplation of a profound inquiry: Would one, laden with the weight of both joys and burdens, elect to choreograph this interminable ballet once more?
In the dominion of monochrome, a pantheon of hues materialises—an augury of sanguinity. It is the infusion of vibrant pigments that transcends the dichotomy of black and white, transforming the canvas into a palette of resurgence and metamorphosis. It’s a fucking rebellion.
As the recurrence unfurls, envisage the sudden crucible of affection. These chromatic cascades, akin to petals strewn by temporal zephyrs, become heralds of optimism, rupturing the cyclic cadence with panache.
WIth every iteration, the incorporation of colour becomes a hymn of defiance—a canticle voiced by the human ethos. It signifies the cognisance that, in this ballet, one is not a mere spectator but an active alchemist empowered to permeate the vast expanse of existence with their own chromatic imprints.
So let the macabre of eternal recurrence unfold, acknowledging the interplay of penumbra and luminescence. Seize the palette of optimism and illumine existence with the resplendent strokes of meaningfulness, for in the infusion of colour Succo argues that we are the architects of our destiny, the artificers of our own diorama.
— Alexis Schwartz, writer
Press release courtesy Almine Rech




Chris Succo, a German artist, paints with a roughness gleaned from a youth spent on the road, and a softness, like the coo of Neil Young lyrics or the lines of poetry that title his paintings (YOU LOOK LIKE NIRVANA JUST BROKE UP, one quips). Succo is indulgent, even belligerent, in his application of paint, and this attitude—in which process, and a passion for the basic tactility of painting—trumps all other concerns. Channeling the personal evolution that Christopher Wool brought to painting, Succo’s newest canvases are an extension of his previous series, riffing off his signature ‘White Paintings,’ in which spray-painted pigment shines through gestural layers of thick, white oil paint. This time, delicate markings recalling handwriting, heartbeats, or meandering scribbles à la Twombly appear on flat, further reduced canvases. There’s less gesture, and no brushstrokes, but every bit of the attitude of an artist who has a telltale longing for long hours in his studio—with no signs of slowing down.




Almine Rech opened its doors on April 1st, 1997 in the 13th arrondissement in Paris. The gallery was founded on an axis of California Minimal, Perceptual art and Conceptual art, representing artists such as James Turrell, John McCracken and Joseph Kosuth.

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