GROUP EXHIBITION

Un Hiver à Paris brings together 21 artists from diverse generations and geographies, who demonstrate varying practices within painting. However, the presented works all embody the notion that this medium at the beginning of the 21^st Century continues to be both permanent and vital. It is also a blossoming field of practice and research—catalysed through engaging new ideologies, new populations and new materials.

The included artists are as follows:

John M Armleder

Agustín Cárdenas

Ha Chong-Hyun

Genieve Figgis

Günther Förg

Madelynn Green

Marcus Jansen

Aaron Johnson

Setsuko Klossowska de Rola

Otis Kwame Quaicoe

Wes Lang

Alexandre Lenoir

Cesar Piette

Kenny Scharf

Vaughn Spann

Vivian Springford

Phyllis Stephens

Genesis Tramaine

Tursic & Mille

De Wain Valentine

Tom Wesselmann

Chloe Wise

Madelynn Green, the youngest artist in the show, utilises an imaginative balance between abstraction and representation in her works, often referencing the visual language of film photography through the use of blurred lines and light. Green’s recent subjects have included family and social dynamics— primarily those found in nightclubs and crowds as seen in her magnetic painting, Drinks (2020).

One value of a contemporary portrait is its ability to reinvent the codes of its own genre. Genesis Tramaine is an expressionist devotional painter who creates abstract portraits of men and women who transcend gender, race, and social structures.

Otis Kwame Quaicoe offers a new perspective on African culture through the celebrated form of portraiture. Through his bright and luminous portraits of African men and women, Quaicoe engages with ideas of empowerment, a subject embodied in the postures of his sitters, who appear set against bright monochromatic backgrounds.

Genieve Figgis expertly defines her own contemporary language by subverting and reinterpreting classical portraiture through paintings rich in colour, texture, and humour. With her portrait titled Grace (2020), depicting the iconic actress Grace Kelly, Figgis strikes a balance between abstraction and figuration, the ancient and contemporary.

Marcus Jansen’s Faceless portrait series was first painted in 2012 and he continues developing the series today. His Faceless characters investigate the secrecy of faceless men in suits, exploring anonymity, power and elitism.

French artist César Piette’s work questions the materiality of the image and the nature of painting. His use of traditional techniques—monochromatic layers, perspective, light, composition, and bold use of shadow—connects him to the history of figurative painting. Painted with an airbrush, his images, such as Sunset Landscape, also include three-dimensional effects.

Kenny Scharf’s new paintings recall the artist’s painterly vocabulary of stylised aliens in colourful patterns he developed in the 1980s. During which time he became known, together with his close friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as one of the central artists involved in what became known as Street Art.

Vaughn Spann has created three new powerful paintings inspired by his personal experiences. He explains them as follows, ‘I was stopped and frisked for the first time while I was an undergrad student...I was walking home from studying at a friend’s house. Cops pulled me over. Four other cop cars [came] by. They put me against a gate, and my hands are up, split. That same gesture echoes the X. And, for me, that’s such a symbolic form, and so powerful to this contemporary moment, that I formally needed to figure out the components of that.’

Foregrounding an interest in the history of portraiture, Chloe Wise examines the multiple channels that lead to the construction of a contemporary self, often through faces of those who are most familiar to her. With her two intimate portraits Inès in the daytime and Inès in the evening, both completed end of 2020, Wise masterly celebrates the heroes of everyday life.