Editor
Frédéric Paul was born in 1959. Curator at the contemporary collections at the Centre Pompidou, he previously directed the FRAC Limousin and the Domaine de Kerguéhennec. A critic and art historian, he has published numerous books in France and abroad. He is particularly interested in the historical conceptual scene (Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Guy de Cointet, Douglas Huebler, Allen Ruppersberg, William Wegman et al.), together with Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Toni Grand, Shirley Jaffe, Giuseppe Penone, while accompanying the work of contemporaries including Claude Closky, Hubert Duprat, Jochen Lempert, Beatriz Milhazes, Jonathan Monk, Steven Pippin, Barbara Probst, David Shrigley, among others. He is curator of the Shirley Jaffe retrospective, which will be traveling in 2022–2023 from the Centre Pompidou to the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Musée Matisse in Nice.
Contributors
Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955, Abington) lives and works in Elizaville and New York City. She has been showing in New York and internationally since her first solo show in 1986. Featuring large-scale installations of textiles, ceramics and drawings, her work is framed by wider political contexts and the legacy of post-war American art. She combines a variety of media with eye-catching colors and patterns to blur the lines between painting, sculpture, and installation, while also exploring the boundaries between art and handicraft. Recent solo shows include: Happiness Runs at Belvedere 21, Vienna (2018), Waiting for the UFOs at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (2018), Face Geometry, Naked Eyes at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2016). She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Wien.
Pierre Buraglio was born in 1939 in Charenton-le-Pont. He now lives and works in Maisons-Alfort. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he also taught there from 1987 to 1997. A social activist, he put his painting on hold from 1969 to 1973 to work in a factory. Like some of his contemporaries in the Supports/Surfaces and BMPT movements, he has challenged the very act of painting, and his commitment over the decades has been resolutely pictorial. Transcending the abstraction/figuration dichotomy, his work questions the relationship between painting and image. The Musée dʼArt Moderne et Contemporain in Saint-Étienne devoted a major retrospective to him in 2019. Pierre Buraglio is represented by the galleries Ceysson & Bénétière, Jean Fournier, and Catherine Putman.
Alain Clément, (born 1941, Neuilly-sur-Seine) lives and works in Nîmes, Paris and Berlin. A contemporary and friend of the artists of the Supports/Surfaces movement, he combined color with simple gestures that sometimes saturate the picture space with a profuse, painterly interplay of values, strokes, lines, ribbons and grids. In the early 1990s he turned to sculpture, with wall reliefs whose broad, colored lines structure the ambient space. Ten years later this move had developed into monumental works in painted steel. They interacted with his painting in museum exhibitions such as Suzhou, China in 2012; Soissons and Céret, in France, in 2016 and 2017 respectively. They have also been shown alone in the open air, as at the Nyrox Foundation in Johannesburg in 2013. Alain Clément has been represented by Die Galerie in Frankfurt, the Galerie Oniris in Rennes since 1993 and the Galerie Catherine Putman, Paris.
Shirley Kaneda, (born 1951) is an American artist who was born in Tokyo. She came to New York in 1970 to attend Parsons School of Design. She continually explores the possibilities of abstract painting in thought provoking ways. Her familiar vocabulary of biomorphic or linear shapes and patterns often seem to congregate and disassemble across vast white or brightly colored, space less fields. However, by confronting issues of reproduction, repetition and variation, Kaneda literally turns her lexicon on its head and raises questions about how changes of syntax or orientation affect the viewer’s understanding of her artworks and their relationships to one another. Kaneda is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. She is also a contributing editor to BOMB magazine. There is a forthcoming essay on the last thirty years of her work in the Journal of Contemporary Painting by David Ryan.
Robert Kushner (born in 1949 in Pasadena, California) lives and works in New York. Since participating in the early years of the pattern and decoration movement in the ’70s, he has continued to address controversial issues involving decoration. His painting combines organic representational elements with abstracted geometric forms in a way that is both decorative and modernist. Kushner’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Europe and Japan, since 1975. He was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. A mid-career survey of his work was organized at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art in 1987. Kushner’s works are included in many prominent collections including The MoMA, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. He is represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, and Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery, Tokyo.
Marielle Paul (born 1960) lives and works in Paris and Vannes. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne and Lyon. She paints exclusively with gouache on paper and initially built up a collection of landscape archetypes inspired by the banks of the Rhône, Drôme and Limousin rivers. Her focus then moved away from the subject to a more direct confrontation with form and color, representation and decorative drift, and abstract and imaginary space. She was represented by the Galerie Jean Brolly from 2007 to 2021. Solo exhibitions of her work took place at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest in 2007 and the Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie, Roanne in 2021. Acquired by both the FRAC Auvergne and the FNAC, her works are also regularly shown in the collections of the Valence Museum and the Musée des Beaux- Arts, Rennes. Since 2018 she has been making lithographs at the Atelier Michael Woolworth and silkscreens at the Atelier Arcay, both in Paris.
Hugo Pernet (born 1983 in Paris) is a poet and artist living and working in Dijon. His painting is characterized by a loose style, evolving from a form of minimalist abstraction to figuration through a subtle appropriationist approach. He has presented his work in numerous solo exhibitions, notably in galleries like Triple V and Semiose in Paris, Super Dakota in Brussels and Joy de Rouvre in Geneva, as well as in museums including MAMCO in Geneva (2015) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2009). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Villa Medici, Rome (2013), the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris (2010), the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon (2010), Villa Arson, Nice (2007) and Le Magasin, Grenoble (2009). He has published several books of poetry with Fissile, Série Discrète and Vanloo.
Bernard Piffaretti (born in Saint-Etienne in 1955; lives and works in Paris) studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne. The analysis of the components of painting leads him to make duplication his working method. He thus elaborates his “Piffaretti system”, fully formed in 1986. This protocol is at the origin of every work he produces, each composed of two apparently identical panels, separated by a vertical strip; one of the two parts is an attempt to duplicate the other. Once both panels are finished, the distinction between the copy and the original tends to fade. As the artist admits himself, “the repetition, act by act, on the second half of the canvas, can only produce an imperfect image”. Piffaretti is represented by the galleries Klemm’s, Berlin; Kate MacGarry, London; Lisson, New York and Sanghai and Frank Elbaz, Paris.
Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong in 1963. She lives and works in London. Over the last thirty years she has produced a distinctive body of work rooted in a conceptual examination of the problems and possibilities of abstract painting. Rae frequently reinvigorates her practice through self-imposed strategic challenges, which have
resulted in over fifteen different series of paintings to date. The paintings are improvised directly onto the canvas, establishing painterly and semiotic codes within which each visual element has an equal importance and significance in an inclusive and democratic fictive space. Fiona Rae’s paintings incarnate an abstract-pop universe, filled with references to modern and contemporary painting, pop culture, and digital technology. Fiona Rae is represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels and Buchmann Galerie, Berlin.