GROUP EXHIBITION

From the street, through the window of the 66 space, the sculptural cloud of _Portrait (The Concept-Artist Smoking Head, Stand-In)_(2016) by Nairy Baghramian invites visitors to discover the exhibition. The title of the photograph echoes the artist’s reflection onthe political potential of sculpture, which, through its formal and material characteristics and its specificities of presentation,embodies theoretical ideas and principles.

At the entrance of the space, the photograph Makunaíma (1971) by Lothar Baumgarten features another portrait; that of a figurefrom Amerindian mythology, embodied by the artist himself wearing a cardboard mask topped with feathers. This mythical figure,known to Baumgarten through the writings of ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, enabled him to explore the concepts ofidentity and otherness.

The sculpture Clara 1 (2018) is emblematic of the synthesis operated in Leonor Antunes’ work, in which natural materials andartisanal techniques draw inspiration from prominent figures, particularly female, of modernism in architecture and design tocreate a reinterpretation of sculpture. The work in teak wood and cotton cord pays subtle homage to Cuban-born designer ClaraPorset (1895-1981).

With Untitled (Somalia/L’Ange de mer, L’Hydre ou Serpent Marin, Le Marteau, La Tête du Marteau séparée du Corps) (2022), AnriSala proposes an unprecedented encounter between an 18th-century engraving and an abstract drawing he made in ink and pastel.The diptych, part of the Untitled (Map/Species) (2018-2022) series, premiered at the Rotonde de la Bourse de Commerce in Paris,alongside the presentation of his film Time No Longer.

It’s a romantic rendezvous that Annette Messager’s work suggests, except that in Les amoureux (2016), small, intertwined dollswrapped in black aluminum foil, hang from a butcher’s hook. Emblematic of the small assemblages she creates with a variety ofmaterials, the sculpture evokes the duality of the amorous relationship, both comforting and dangerous.

Longtime friends Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu collaborated on a major installation in 2018 entitled Monotype Melody (ninetyworks for Marian Goodman), in which they each created 45 monotypes, including Found Postcard Monoprint (Wolverine Mine) andMonotype #16. While Dean enhances an old postcard with color, Mehretu draws her singular marks in black ink and spray.

Giovanni Anselmo’s interest in the Earth’s force of gravity and energy; in our connection with the cosmos; and in the boundarybetween the visible and the invisible; in the finite and the infinite; infuses his entire practice. His monochrome graphite drawingon paper Particolare del lato in alto della prima I di Infinito (1975) reveals a ‘visible and measurable detail’ of the concept of infinity,in the form of a fragment of the letter ‘i’.

Niele Toroni’s work/painting delivers no message; for the artist, what’s important is what’s on view: n°50 imprints repeated atregular 30 cm intervals. Applied not on a monochrome support but on the pages of an Italian sports gazette, the imprints areintended to re-actualise our visual experience, since according to the painter, each n°50 brushprint is never the same. For Toroni,painting is first and foremost an ‘apprenticeship in vision.’

Renowned for his sculptures and installations that use the physical presence of light to investigate the elusive nature of languageand perception, in 2019 Cerith Wyn Evans created the limited edition, T=R=A=N=S (plane). Its circular void cut into a stretched canvas directs the subtle interplay of light and shadow towards an immaterial drawing projected onto the wall. A deceptively simpledevice, the void becomes a floating chiaroscuro that animates the monochrome work, in a renewed way on each edition.

Through his work, Adrián Villar Rojas explores the conditions of a humanity on the brink of extinction, tracing the boundariesof a post-anthropocene time turned in on itself, in which past, present and future converge. The work on paper from the series Lafin de l’imagination (VI) (2020) was conceived from drawings of posters from his past exhibitions, which after being folded,crumpled, covered or enhanced with coloured pigments, modified with pan-human stencils, are transformed into a hybrid image,political propaganda or battle flag of a futuristic conflict.

For Giulio Paolini, the ‘act of exhibition’ can be likened to a rendezvous, in which the works on display constitute a visualnarrative that visitors are invited to follow in the same way as the artist himself. Paolini’s Per Oscar Wilde (2017) perfectly focuseshis aesthetics and thinking on art and its representation, on the figure of the artist and the viewer’s gaze. In his complexcomposition in homage to Oscar Wilde, Paolini borrows and fragments the image of the painting A Private View at The RoyalAcademy (1881) by William Powell Frith, which depicts a social visit to the museum in Victorian times; the author of The Portraitof Dorian Gray is identified among the visitors.

Interested above all in the unpredictable nature of photography, James Welling has been involved since the outset in a variety ofinvestigations into materiality, abstraction, spatiality and colour, the latter playing a central role in his work since his first chromaticexperiments in the 1970s. With the Degradés series of photograms from 2005, of which Degradé IPMG (2005) is a part, it is in thedarkroom that Welling obtains vibrant colours from coloured light.

A photographic diptych by Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Union City, N.J.; Woman Cleaning, Saint-Jein plein, Antwerp, (1968-2000) features the last fictional encounter in the exhibition, between his friend the artist Robert Smithson, a major figure incontemporary art, and an anonymous woman cleaning a window. Graham’s photographic collages focus on architecture andurbanism, in the tradition of his Homes for America project (1966-1989).

Press release courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery