Muholi defines herself as a "visual activist", her work seeks to shed light on a marginalised lesbian community that is often the victim of aggression. Her work goes far beyond social documentary to ask the question of identity head-on. Each model was photographed at a different stage of her life. Muholi's images may be so powerful because they confront our notions of order and highlight the fact that our language has no adequate expression for what we see.
The Bourse de Commerce présents the exhibition"Corps et Ames", which brings together around one hundred works from the Pinault Collection to explore the representation of the body in contemporary art. The exhibition offers viewers a heightened perspective on the fragility of our existence, man's place in society, the violence he suffers and, more generally, the disorder in the world around us.
Photography copyright , Nazli Kok Akbas, NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
The poetic, coloful diptych of the Ghanaian painter Gideon Appah welcomes visitors to the Salon; his paintings emerge from his childhood imagination, local mythologies, ethereal landscapes, rivers, domestic interiors and recurring figures, both imagined and unknown, such as his grandmother and brother.
Gideon Appah, The Confidant, 2021, Oil,acrylic on canvas,(diptych)
Appah is one of the leading figures in a new generation of Ghanaian painters who have emerged on the global art scene in recent years. Using vivid hues, Appah masterfully illuminates and obscures his subjects.
Gideon Appah, The two women bathing, 2021, oil, acrylic on canvas (diptych) In this exhibition, Body & Soul, the first paradox or advent is to make visible what we have tried to make invisible;the exhibition gives pride of place to African and Afro-American artists who have long been rejected by the dominant presentation, civil rights fighters, jazzed up bodies liberating themselves from the underground.
Marlene Dumas, 1953, South Africa, Blindfolded, 2002, oil on canvas, Pinault Collection.
Dumas is regarded as one of the most influential painters working today. Her works reframe and re-cotextualize her subjects,exploring the bouderies between public and private selves.
In the Rotunda, on screen, Arthur Jafa confronts us with a mosaic of images combining joy, pain and resilience, alternating scenes of overwhelming beauty with fragments of violence. The rhythm, both breathless and poetic, grips and questions:
what does it mean to inhabit a body in a world in tension?
Arthur Jafa's "Love is the Message, the Message is Death", a very moving film with some scenes that are truly shocking to see the wickedness of human beings.Jafa traces the history of African Americans in the twentieth century through a collage of images, both older and more recent, depicting a collective body that exists beyond space and time.
Ali Cherri, 1976 Beirut, The Rokeby Venus, 19th Century martel head sculpture, wood mirror and fabric.
Photography copyright , Nazli Kok Akbas, NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
The Rokeby Venus of Ali Cherri, references the reclined figure of the goddess Venus in Diego Velazquez's painting (The Rokeby Venus held at the National Gallery, London) which was cut multiple times by a suffragette in 1914.
Exploring different geographies of violence in his native Lebanon but also in the broader region, Ali Cherri is a Paris-based artist.
Ali Cherri, Feline and a Bird, 2020,
19 th Century painted bronze sphinx, taxidemy bird. Private collection.
Ali Cherri, Eyes to the Sea, 2025,
Pair of eyes from sarcophagus in bronze and alabaster, from a sarcophagus mark (Egypt, Saite or Late Period,663-525 BCE) Brass plate, brass.
Ali Cherri, Grafting (I), 2019, Head of a woman or Apollo, sculpture stone statue of Bishop (Normandy), plaster, metal nails. Courtesy of the artist and the Imane Gallery.
The artist, Ali Cherri was born in Beruit, Lebanon 1976, in his three decades of artistic practice spanning across film, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installations, interrogating the ways in which political violence disseminates into people’s bodies and the physical and cultural landscape.
Ali Cherri, The Man with Tears, 2023
14 th-15th century sculpted stone head with flat and smooth eyes, painted silver, planter, steel.
Pinault Collection.
Ali Cherri is an artist working across film, video, installation, drawing, and performance.In Cherri's practice, the urgent political realities of his Beruit childhood during the decade-long Lebanese Civil War are positioned besides moments in history.
In Cherri's Man with Tears, one can feel the pain of an artist deeply affected by the loss of his parents in the bombings in Lebanon during the civil war.
On the first floor, the Fondation presents the first French solo exhibition of African-American photographer Deanna Lawson.
Deane Lawson, 1979, US, Chief, 2019. Pigment Print, Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
Deana Lawson, Latifah's Wedding, 2020.
Courtesy of the artist and D.Kordansky Gallery.
Deana Lawson creates a tension between documentary veracity and staging, using reality as a raw material to create powerful portraits.
In Lawson's monumental works, people usually look the viewer straight in the eye from the privacy of their own intimacy. Here the relationship between observer and observed is turned on its head, and the gaze becomes a veritable face-to-face confrontation.
Deana Lawson, Deanare,2019.Pigment Print, Pinault Collection.
A few steps away from Lawson's provocative, powerful images, Hanson's deceptively banal-looking sculptures surprise the visitor.
This paradox - bodies frozen but alive - begs the question: what does it mean to be there?
Photography copyright , Nazli Kok Akbas, NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Duane Hanson,1925-1996, US, Housepainter I, 1984-1988, bodywork put, polychrome, various materials,with accessoiries. Pinault Collection.
Duane Hanson, known for his hyper-realistic sculptures, captures the ordinary with unusual precision. In the exhibition, his immobile figures, seated or standing, seem to be waiting for a moment that will never come.
Duane Hanson,1925-1996, US, Seated Artist, Pinault Collection.
His figures sitting on benches or leaning against walls seem to float between presence and absence, questioning the way we perceive everyday life.
Kara Walker,1969, US, The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back aroud toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos, 2010.
Graphite et pastel on paper. Pinault Collection.
Kara Walker is best known for her unapologetic exploration of race, gender, sexuality and violence through playful, sillouheted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world. Walker is one of the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation.
RITUAL, Miriam Cahn,she was born in Switzerland in 1949,to jewish parents who fled the Nazi regime. She was traîne at the Basel.As a young student she was actively involved in feminist and political activism, paticularly during the 60s. her reponse to contemporary issues including violence, par, and refugee crises forms an integral part of her semi-abstract work.
Miriam Cahn,1949,Switzerland, Ritual,
Chan masterfully seduces her viewers by juxtaposing beauty and violence on the canvas. This shocking for the viewer, who is almost enchanted by the colour palette of beautiful bodies, while realising that in doing so viewver is taking the side of the aggressor.
Cahn questions the role of the spectator in the face of aggression, capturing it and forcing us to confront it, whether we want to or not.
Miriam Cahn,1949,Switzerland, Ritual,
Miriam Cahn,1949,Switzerland, Ritual,
Cahn's poignant paintings, in a dreamy color palette, refer to her interrogation of violence tackling these difficult issues head-on are often explicit.
Miriam Cahn,1949,Switzerland, Ritual, 25.3-7.5.02, 2002 ,Room installation: oil on canvas, photographs, cool on paper.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, 1993, Zimbabwe, Atom Painting #1, 2021
Oil, acrylic, and oil stick on canvas. Pinault Collection.
Hwami's paintings are very offten composite and multi dimensional. These Atom Paintings consists for canvases that are divided into four spaces, each one of which in turn houses muptiple realities.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, 1993, Zimbabwe, Atom Painting #1, 2021
Oil, acrylic, and oil stick on canvas. Pinault Collection.
At the end of the exhibition renowned for his upside-down paintings, George Baselitz is one of the most celebrated artists working today. Rising to prominence in the decades after World War II, he established a new identity for German art, forging a raw and emotive style which spans painting, printmaking and sculpture.
Rejecting the two predominant artistic movements of the time, namely those of Eastern-Bloc Socialist Realism and Western abstraction, Baselitz consistently emphasises the human form, his figures often rendered in vivid and visceral color palettes.
George Baselitz, Was est gewensen, vorbei, 2014, oil on canvas, 8 elements . Pinault Collection, Courtesy George Baselitz (artworks).
Photography copyright , Nazli Kok Akbas, NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
George Baselitz, My New Cap, 2003.Pinault Collection.
Nazli Kok Akbas Reports from Paris,
8 February 2025
NKA Art reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul
Gideon Appah, The Confidant, 2021, Oil,acrylic on canvas,(diptych)
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