GROUP EXHIBITION

Perrotin is pleased to present Dwellers, a dual exhibition across our New York and Paris galleries that brings together the work ofnine artists who explore how place impacts the making of anartwork. In the ontological sense, to dwell in a house is notmerely to be inside it spatially, rather it is to belong there, to havea familiar place. Participating artists — Liam Allan, Jean-PhilippeDelhomme, Leslie Hewitt, Denise Kupferschmidt, Fared Manzur,Joseph Montgomery, Ann Pibal, Julia von Eichel, and CarrieYamaoka—each explore the notion of dwelling through threedistinct practices: work created in the studio, through digitalspace, and on site.

In the Studio
The title of the show stems from an artwork by Fared Manzur, a Miamibased artist who will make his New York debut in Dwellers. Manzur’sstudio is located in the Rice Hotel, a historically significant structure builtin 1905 in downtown Miami that was left vacant for decades. The clean,minimalist lines of Manzur’s paintings and sculptures are in direct contrastwith the hotel. The exhibition’s namesake work, Dweller, is a horizontalmonochromatic yellow painting that lies flat on the floor, adorned with aclay sculpture of an insect resting on its surface, symbolosing a speciesendemic to the space.

Ann Pibal, working from Vermont and Brooklyn, will contribute a new series of near-monochrome paintings, which over the span of the groupevoke an evolving, fading depiction of glowing light. The use of metallicand iridescent paint, (silvers, golds, and bronzes) adds a sensual elementwhich directly interacts with the exhibition space, reflecting both theambient light of the gallery, and the movement of viewers through theevolution of colour across the panels. The central motif of these works is arectangle which in its proportion echoes the format of the painting overall.Diagrammatic representations of books or volumes in each image extendthe reference to time–allowing an apparently neutral shape to evoke notjust the phenomenon of fleeting, transitory, light, but the mutability ofunderstanding.

Working from a residential home in Brooklyn, Julia von Eichel crafts large-scale organic forms that evoke the studio space itself. Stained withsplashes of acidic colours, Eichel’s works on view in New York stretchbeyond the canvas, spilling out into the surrounding space. Constructedfrom a variety of materials—including a complex armature with wooddowels, wiffle balls, string, and thread covered in silk—each wall relief isa controlled force, imbued with a sense of struggle and imbalance. Thepastels on paper and mylar exhibited in Paris evoke a similar vital growthwith repeated gestures and layering filling the surface.

Emphasising the high ceilings of Perrotin New York’s gallery spaces, Carrie Yamaoka will present disarmingly obtuse reflective surfaces.Yamaoka is interested in the tactility of that which is barely visible, as wellas the very real chain of incidents that determine an object. Her processconsists of rubbing the wall with mylar and pouring resin, which createsa mirror surface that records the artwork’s journey, from an industrial loftin New York to its final gallery space. The viewer’s blurred reflectionbecomes part of the work. In Paris she will present a series of five wallworks, consisting of cast flexible urethane resin.

Denise Kupfeschmidt will present a series of new paintings that include repeated figures or graphic architectural motifs, created from her Brooklynstudio. The motif of the sun, seen in Day Night Repeat as well as otherworks, reference the comfort of a repeated daily routine and the stabilityof a normalised existence–offering a counterpoint to our ongoingcollective feeling of sadness and loss. As the artist says, her paintings”watch the earthly elements of home morph into something that feelsremote, while we stay put.

Digital spaces
Scottish born, Brooklyn based Liam Allan will debut his practice for thefirst time in the United States, presenting work that moves between digitaland physical environments. His drawings, carefully rendered in pencil onpaper, begin with digitally reconstructed contemporary artifacts, which hethen edits and distorts in an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the depicted object. Their forensic acuity suggest an exploration of the real mediated by the digital.

Using a simple unit, wood shim, as a form of ready-made material, New York-based Joseph Montgomery generates wall paintings that are atonce rhythmic and architectural. His abstract, digital sceneries areoccupied by schematic dolls, acting both as animation and physicalsculptures that create anthropomorphic compositions. The artist willconcurrently present a new video and several large-scale doll sculpturesthat will revert the grand scale of the exhibition space into an architecturalmodel.

On site
As a painter of the real, Paris and New York-based Jean-PhilippeDelhomme’s practice revolves around being present in a place, workingdirectly from his eye and never from photography. In New York, the artistwill introduce landscapes recently painted in Greece. Central to thelandscapes are vernacular dwellings: simple houses by the sea, centuriesold, that convey a sense of perennial continuity. Concurrently in Paris,Delhomme will debut a new series of paintings that depict the interior ofa large studio he occupied in Asnieres for a period of time. Scatteredaround the empty space, pedestals, speakers, a motorbike and other objects evoke a sculptural installation.

Leslie Hewitt will introduce in New York a new series of diptych photosculptures. Realized in Marfa, Texas, the works take the sky and light reflections emitted from Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa project), a permanentinstallation at the Chinati Foundation, executed by Flavin in 1996. Thispresentation of works offers a prelude to a project Leslie Hewitt isdeveloping for Dia Art Foundation next summer at Dia Bridgehampton,which also houses the Dan Flavin Art Institute. Both lyrical and controlled,they extend, as Hewitt says, her work’s ‘relationship to the entanglementsof optics, physical space and light.’ In Paris, one of her signature leaningphotographs will be presented along other wall works.