Germain, Paris
Group Exhibition
Grids
CrèvecœurAnne Bourse Claudine Monchaussé Emma Reyes Martin Wong Based on a free interpretation of Rosalind Krauss's seminal essay Grids (1979), this exhibition featuring works by Anne Bourse, Claudine Monchaussé, Emma Reyes, and Martin Wong explores the grid as an aesthetic form, ideological tool, and perceptual device. As Krauss writes, "the grid announces, among other things, modern art's desire for silence, its hostility toward literature, narrative, and discourse." A symbol of purity and autonomy, it has long embodied the promise of art freed from the world, sanctified in its abstraction. As a motif of order, the grid also transcends the realm of art. It structures urban space, maps territories, organizes flows, and administers bodies. It measures, standardizes, and controls. It delimits as much as it encloses. A simplifying fiction, it makes the world legible at the expense of its complexity. The artists gathered here all have a détourned relationship with the grid. Their practices do not reproduce it as a modernist ideal, but displace and contaminate it. They deterritorialize, decolonize, and desacralize it, revealing its latent uses and internal tensions. Through these works, the grid ceases to be silent. It speaks of power, spatialization, and prevented narrative. It becomes a place of resistance as much as projection. The work of Anne Bourse (b. 1982) draws inspiration from a wide range of references, mainly from pop culture. Like a poetic tapestry woven from Bourse's personal desires and obsessions, these references are woven into the artist's highly distinctive aesthetic universe. Her works and exhibitions are filled with pastel colors, mirror-painted surfaces, textiles, and recurring motifs. Sculptor Claudine Monchaussé (b. 1936) creates a body of work marked by great consistency, whose geometric forms combine the universal and the mystical. The sculptor's early silhouettes have evolved into more austere forms shrouded in a certain mystery, oscillating between spherical principles, symbols of fertility, and salient elements. A central figure in the post-war Colombian art scene in Paris, Emma Reyes (1919–2003) was above all a self-taught painter. Her compositions are brimming with formal inventions, where lines unfold infinitely. A self-taught painter, Martin Wong (1946–1999) learned the craft of figurative art by portraying the bustling New York City of the 1980s. He painted the everyday life of his neighborhood and developed innovative approaches to technique and form, creating rich surfaces and intricate details inspired by astrology, architectural space, and various modes of language.