Contemporary artists offer narratives that, through their diversity, suggest and reinvent new ways of living, understanding, and interpreting the present. As part of the Online Viewing Rooms, open to the public from October 20, alongside the second edition of Paris+ par Art Basel, here is a selection of artworks made in 2023.
Leda Catunda, Paisagem macia II (Soft landscape) (2023)
Bortolami (New York)
Leda Catunda has been an icon of Brazilian culture for the past 40 years. Her work symbolically and materially embodies all of Brazil’s diversity and exuberance. Using needle, thread, an old T-shirt, and paint, she brings together the paradoxes of her homeland in her sculpture Paisagem macia II (Soft Landscape).
Eliza Douglas, Untitled (2023)
Air de Paris (Paris)
Musician, painter, performer – a close collaborator of the artist Anne Imhof – and model for Balenciaga, Eliza Douglas transcends genres. Her repertoire seems inexhaustible. For the OVRs of Paris+ par Art Basel 2023, the American artist presents a series of four oil paintings covered with onomatopoeia ('SHHHH', 'WOW', 'BOOM', 'HAHAHA') that crystallize sounds in the manner of concrete poetry, marking the rhythm of our time.
Charlotte Dualé, Mismade (Yellow) (2023)
Parliament (Paris)
Poetic and profound, French sculptor Charlotte Dualé’s work is part of the ‘Impuzzibl’ series, a three-part metaphorical narrative in which ceramics – a living, pliable, and fragile material – tells the story of the domination exerted by patriarchal society and its representations of the female body. The artist was inspired by the illusionist act of the ‘Mismade Girl’, in which a magician dismembers his assistant.
Arthur Marie, Sleeping Beauty (2023)
Fitzpatrick Gallery (Paris)
Arthur Marie, a French artist from Normandy, uses the painting techniques of the old masters – particularly glazing – to portray his generation – both disconnected from reality and searching for meaning. The oil painting Sleeping Beauty features a youthful, pale figure haunted by the present, who calls out to the viewer.
Arlene Shechet, For Paris (2023)
Pace Gallery (New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Seoul, Tokyo)
The intense, electric blue artwork by the American sculptor Arlene Shechet is part of the gallery’s tribute to Mark Rothko – a response to the major retrospective of his work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris this fall. As in Rothko’s paintings, color here becomes the very material of the work. Paper, wood, clay, water, air, and fire meet in a constant transition of states, nuances, points of equilibrium, and rupture, to provide an imaginary and imagined framework to the possibilities of our lives.
Zineb Sedira, Dreams, Have No Titles (My Parents’ Tapestry) #2 (2023)
Selma Feriani Gallery (Tunis, London)
Artist Zineb Sedira was the first Franco-Algerian woman to take on the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. With Dreams Have No Titles (My Parents' Tapestry) #2 (2023), she delivers a captivating tapestry in the form of a genre scene illustrating women’s struggle for freedom and emancipation, a theme that has always been fundamental to her practice.
Philemona Williamson, Crush on Crush (2023)
Semiose (Paris)
Poetry, references to childhood, and rites of passage recur throughout New York artist Philemona Williamson’s colorful compositions. In Crush on Crush (2023), Williamson stages the tensions and risk-taking of adolescence, to form a lexicon through which she invites viewers to recall their own history.
Jonas Wood, Two Bonsais with Cressey, Frimkess, and Kusaka (2023)
David Kordansky Gallery (Los Angeles, New York)
American artist Jonas Wood paints what he sees. In this instance it is the ceramics of his partner Shio Kusaka, and those of David Cressey and Michael Frimkess, present in the large canvas Two Bonsais with Cressey, Frimkess, and Kusaka (2023). Bringing together these elements, the whole appears strangely familiar.
Paris+ par Art Basel will take place at the Grand Palais Éphémère from October 20 to 22, 2023. Book your tickets here.
The Online Viewing Rooms will be open to the public from October 20 to 29, 2023. You can access them here.
Henri Robert is a writer based in Paris.
Published on October 13, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed image: Arlene Shechet, For Paris (detail), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.