December 15, 2007 - January 19, 2008

In 2008, Andy Warhol would have turned 80.

Countless exhibitions have addressed the many facettes of the work of one of the 20th century most genious and influential artists.

For the present exhibition, Chantal Crousel has chosen a specific selection of works, that emphasize the constant presence of the SHADOW, an essential element in the work of Andy Warhol. The shadow that extends the document (subject) into its fiction - that projects the defined into its con-sequence : the infinite. From the start of the artist's process, the shadow is an inseparable actor/factor: the b/w photographs shot in the studio by the artist in search of his model. These still-lives, portraits, will eventually develop into the complex drawings, prints and paintings we know.

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October 27 - December 8, 2007

For his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Chantal Crousel, entitled “Je suis la chaise”, Michael Krebber presents a new series of 25 paintings. This series is the second episod of a trilogy which, was first shown at the Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln and will then be presented at the Maureen Paley Gallery, London.
Michael Krebber is one of the most important German artists working of the past two decades, He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and USA, although his work has rarely been seen in France. A central figure in the Cologne art scene since the 1980s and a frequent collaborator with Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Cosima von Bonin and Kai Althoff, Krebber has a conceptual approach to painting that questions the fundamental roots of the medium. He works within and against the conventions of painting. Krebber’s practice deals with ambivalence, provocation, intransigence and feinted gesture. His work is characterized by a multi-faceted vocabulary-the dismissal and recuperation of painterly qualities, the scrutiny of the boundaries of the picture plane, and the tension between representation and abstraction. This knowledge reverberates with an historical reflection of the medium.
" How figure and ground, form and format, surface and space, color and object, frame and wall, object and installation, light and place, material and reference, title and context, original and found material can be related to one another."
« I do not believe I can invent something new in art or painting because whatever I would want to invent already exists ». Rather than invent something new, Krebber's restrained brushstrokes leave a canvas open and full of possibilities. Like an unfinished sentence, his works leave the viewer guessing what might happen next.

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September 15 - October 20, 2007

“Dépliages” is the term Gabriel Orozco has chosen to name his new series of works on paper presented at Chantal Crousel Gallery this September. The process consists of depositing a drop of oil paint directly from the tube container in the center of a square piece of paper. This amount of paint, making a small cumulus, is the starting point on which the plane surface of the paper folds, generating internal currents in between the “pliages” (or foldings) due to the press of the fingers or the spatula. This pressure canalizes the current of liquid through the open spaces of the surface in the folded paper. Functioning as a kind of envelope, the paper becomes a container of the drop, with the painting circulating inside without spilling it out. Or as Gabriel Orozco decribes it: “The moment you fold the paper to become an envelope, it is an object, but then when you unfold it, it becomes an image, hidden in the envelope. There is a circular movement between an object and a picture, folded and unfolded”.

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Bernadette Corporation
Claire Fontaine
Mario Garcia Torres
Wade Guyton
Sherrie Levine
Reena Spaulings
Rirkrit Tiravanija

June 27 - September 05, 2007

This exhibition is about filiation, reincarnation, copyright and appropriation of forms and pre-existing works.

Some artists show no reservations in applying their own signs of identification on an emblematic image, nor do they hesitate to arrogate the making of an anterior work. Those artists bring us to question the auras of those historic pieces, and the intensity of our attachment to those images and cultural symbols over which there seems to be a common consent of adoration.

Those works’ deferential irony mocks, fools and uses our heritage and our value-added system. By renewing historical actions, they manage to assess their reach and how relevant they can be in a new productive and re-productive system, and they hereby pioneer a new creation and consumption system.

*: Title given to a traveling exhibition curated by Wilhem Schürman in 1997; that title itself initially came from a picture by the Californian artist Meg Cranston.

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May 12 - June 23, 2007

The Chantal Crousel Gallery is proud to announce Jean-Luc Moulène’s new exhibition.

For that occasion, the artist will show 20 new works: 9 photographs, 4 drawings and 7 objects. No Pentagram as a drawing, La Main Noire – guardian of fears – as a photograph and Tête Noire as a molded object.

This exhibition is set where the darkness and shadow meet, between blackness and night, between various suns. Jean-Luc Moulène excavates the ways we represent and define a world within that blurry zone, between reality and apparition.
The works shown at the Gallery focus on the elaboration of the form, color and scale, through “adornment”. In that way they create the conditions for a sensitive and reflexive approach.

The artist is more interested in modeling and systems than in beliefs. In that exhibition, he revives the multiple connections of our implicit, inscrutable and closed-up representations on a new mental and impersonal stage. Horizons are incompatible, perspectives are hallucinated and solutions are soluble.

Quelque Chose Généralisée is a spherical model, made of flat colored wooden pieces, that takes up the entire space of a room. The volume keeps the viewer from entering it any further. However, the eye can access, and glance indefinitely through that borromean structure. The Boule Fixe is a topographical plan of black cobblestones that echoes it in a hard and opaque way, while Cinq Concentrés Concentriques and Quelque Chose Noir et Ombre radiate, giving the exhibition space a structure made out of their mobile directive lines. Trois Standards reminds us of architecture. La Fontaine aux Amoureux and L’Echelle drag us into a whirl.

The prevailing circular tension among the works is echoed in the plural infinites of the exhibition space.

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March 24 - May 5, 2007

The Chantal Crousel Gallery is proud to announce José María Sicilia’s new exhibition. “Eclipses” is the title given to a cycle of paintings (oil painting on beeswax) and drawings (gouaches, graphite on Japanese paper) that explores the butterfly phenomenon as an image of fugaciousness.

"We could almost risk the hypothesis that a different aspect of the butterfly’s life corresponds to each fundamental dimension of the image: their beauty and the infinite variety of their shapes and colours; the temptation and the impossibility of a thorough knowledge about those frail and ever multiplying things that are both images and butterflies; the paradox of the form and the formless implied by the metamorphosis."1

After “La Luz que se Apaga”, the “Eclipses” series is an expression of that stealthy light, still central in José María Sicilia's pursuit, which echoes his attempt to approach the intangible mystery of death.

1 Georges Didi-Huberman, "L'image papillon", in "José Maria Sicilia, Eclipses", ASSN publishing, Chantal Crousel Gallery, 2007

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February 03 - March 10, 2007

About “Concretion Re”

I am Non-resigned and Non-reconciled. Today, those two conditions are essential to me in order to do my work as an artist. As such, my work consists in giving Form, in asserting that Form and in defending that Form against all and against everything.

What does giving Form mean? To give Form means making something that could only come from me, something that I am the only one to see, it means making what I alone am capable of making when I allow myself to make. Giving Form implies only working with myself - that is where the act of giving lies, that is how Form is involved. That is  the process of working – that’s My work!

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December 14, 2006 - January 20, 2007

Melchior d'Hondecoeter lived and worked in Utrecht and Amsterdam from 1636 till 1695. His oeuvre consists almost entirely out of portrayals of birds, to whom he attributes certain psychological and metaphorical qualities. A Pelican and Other Birds Near a Pool (1680), otherwise known as The Floating Feather was produced for the hunting lodge of King William III, and is part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In this painting, d'Hondecoeter depicts a heterogeneous group of birds grouped around a pond in a dynamic composition. Some are precious and exotic to the northern climes, like the flamingo and the pelican, whereas others are more common, such as the shelduck on the right. The Floating Feather reinforces as well as comments on the prevailing tastes and power-structures of its time. The painting and what it represents – rather then its title – could be seen as an emblem for the exhibition.

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