I Prefer Paris: Marais Gallery Shows Part 1-February 2021: Karsten-Greve and Marian Goodman

Since museums, cinemas, music halls and venues, and theaters are closed in Paris because of the pandemic, the only cultural recreation available right now is art galleries.

I strolled to my favorite contemporary Marais art galleries last week and there’s a number of excellent shows. Over the next few posts, I am going write about the current shows along with photos.

Today, it’s Galerie Karsten-Greve and Marion Goodman.

Highlight At Karsten Greve

My favorite show is Highlight, a collection of paintings by Chinese artist Ding Yi . Yi’s previous show at Karsten Greve was titled Grids, and grids are still present in the current show. One of the reasons these paintings resonate with me is because my partner Vincent is a painter, and when I first met him in 1977, he had created a series of paintings also based on a grid, which are similar to these. Highlight brought back my fondness of the discipline of the grid, offset with colorful, abstract brushstrokes in between. The varied color palette was also appealing with one series with black backgrounds that’s densely saturated with black and highlighted with touches of red and chartreuse stars and another series which is much softer tones of yellow, green, and blue. Another series of black and white paintings, the white portions were formulated to look like large snowflakes. There are a few works on paper and one with shades of deep green and ink blues looking more like a textile or tapestry, stood out.

5 Rue Debelleyme, 75003

https://galerie-karsten-greve.com/fr/expositions/detail/10111-highlight

Apres At Marian Goodman Gallery

In the first show in Paris since his retrospective at the Pompidou last year, Christian Boltanski is presenting Aprés. Consisting of sculptures, video projections, and a big new video installation. In the main gallery on the ground level, Les Lignes, an evocative series of bales of crumpled white material piled high onto trolleys and above are thin white neon tubes that are intertwined. A series of children’s faces illuminated on a back wall literally gives a face to the show, titled Les Esprits, perhaps giving the work meaning or putting it into a particular context. Boltanski says of the face illuminations “It’s about the ghosts that are linked to us, the ones we remember, and that appear like this on the walls. Since I used these images many times before, these ghosts are more like my own, and downstairs, they are rather like everyone’s ghosts."

If you don’t know Boltanski’s work, the strong theme in his past shows and installations is about the Holocaust. Boltanski lived in Paris at the end of WWII and as a small child, witnessed his Jewish father hiding under a floor board in their Paris apartment, surviving being sent to the concentration camps.

On the bottom level, the video installation Les Disparus (2020) covers four large curtains on which "clichéd videos of a fabricated vision of happiness hide subliminal images of the horrors that took place in the century I was born into and that unfolded in parallel to part of my life," explains the artist. "For most of us, they remain present in our subconscious."

79 rue du Temple, 75003

https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/433-christian-boltanski-apres/