Author: admin

Caroline Achaintre, M.A.Z.E., 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & von Bartha. Photo: Angus Mill

Moments of transformation, shifts between forms of being and ambiguity form the thematic framework for this two-person exhibition by Caroline Achaintre and Raphael Sbrzesny. The Cast brings together multifaceted characters rich in associations that not only question our embeddedness in the world but transcend reality at the same time in highly imaginative ways. Hybrid beings and forms populate Caroline Achaintre’s sensual tapestries, ceramics, and watercolors. In playing with our longing for identification, the seemingly animate objects evoke various associations. Central to Raphael Sbrzesny’s work is the question of how stories are inscribed in the body. The artist creates wearable sculptures that can be activated as instruments in performances, enabling an exploration of the body, social roles, and societal issues through music. Although the artists employ different approaches and contrasting materials such as steel and wool, they share a focus on the body, identity, and performativity. Moreover, their fascination with carnival rituals and the temporary, extraordinary states they evoke serve as a unifying element.

Caroline Achaintre (b. 1969 Toulouse, lives and works in London and Halle) initially trained as a metalsmith before studying fine art at the BURG Giebichenstein in Halle and in London at Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths College. Selected solo exhibitions of the artist have been presented at: VISUAL, Carlow, Ireland; Neues Museum, Nuremberg; Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart, Biel; CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux; MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain; Belvedere 21, Vienna; and Tate Britain, London. Her works have also been shown in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle Basel; and the Baltic Triennale. Caroline Achaintre has held a professorship for textile art at the BURG Giebichenstein since 2019.

Raphael Sbrzesny (b. 1985 in Oberndorf a. N., lives and works in Berlin) studied fine art, sculpture, new music, classical percussion, experimental music theater and theory in Stuttgart, Munich, Bern, and Paris. Raphael Sbrzesny’s works have been presented nationally and internationally in renowned institutions including the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; HAUS DER KUNST, Munich; ECLAT Festival New Music, Stuttgart; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin. From 2018 to 2023 he was Professor for Creation and Interpretation with a focus on sound, performance, and concept at the Bremen University of the Arts. What Remained of the Second Body, a comprehensive publication on Sbrzesny’s work, was published in 2024 by Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne.

The exhibition is generously supported by VR-Stiftung der Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken in Norddeutschland, Volksbank eG Oldenburg-Land Delmenhorst, Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, Oldenburgische Landschaft and Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.

Further information

The Bass Museum of Art announces a new exhibition as part of the 2024-2025 fall season, Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue, on view September 4, 2024 through July 6, 2025.

Ulla von Brandenburg, the German-born artist based in Paris, engages with idiosyncratic moments and overlooked figures from the histories of art and culture. Her exhibitions and projects draw a wide range of subjects, including occultism, psychoanalysis, modernist architecture and Hollywood cinema, into contemporary contexts.

Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue is a presentation of von Brandenburg’s work paired with The Bass’s recently acquired ceramic mural by the Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021). A leading figure in contemporary Arab American visual art and literature, Adnan created rich, geometric fields of color in her paintings and drawings, some translated into large-scale murals and tapestries that reflect the artist’s enduring interest in architecture and the built environment. Comparatively, von Brandenburg’s multifaceted practice combines film, textiles, drawings, watercolors and sound into immersive exhibition scenarios where the different art forms harmonize into a cohesive whole (or Gesamtkunstwerk). 

Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue explores this cross-generational engagement with geometric abstraction—its interplay of circles, squares and triangles—evident in both Adnan’s mural and von Brandenburg’s practice, and staged alongside the rich history of the Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay. Here, Adnan’s lyrical abstract mural (Untitled, 2023), at 14 × 21 feet, serves as both a protagonist and theatrical backdrop in von Brandenburg’s exhibition scenography. The works interweave through the language of abstraction and the artists’ shared interests in the social and spatial environment.

Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue is organized by James Voorhies, The Bass Chief Curator, and Claudia Mattos, Associate Curator of New Media Art. This exhibition is supported by Etant donnés, a program of Villa Albertine.

Further information

Press release (pdf)Download

Corentin Grossmann, *The power of ginger*, 2024. Graphite et crayon de couleur sur papier / Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 130 × 90 cm (51 ⅛ × 35 ⅜ inches)
Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo Corentin Grossmann

Art : Concept is delighted to present Corentin Grossmann’s solo exhibition.

Grossmann’s fifth solo show reflects the continuation of the artist’s pictorial research. His in-depth explorations of color and light expand the expressive possibilities of drawing while enhancing the sensory and sensual dimensions of his works. For these latest pieces, the artist adopts a musical approach to creation, beginning with a pigment or emotion and evolving toward detail, aiming to evoke resonances in the viewer. He favors a vibratory approach, where the viewer’s eye follows a colorful composition unfolding into an infinite range of sensitive nuances. His soft pencil work envelops landscapes and figures in a unique, ethereal atmosphere.

In the exhibition, planets and stars take center stage, appearing as silent witnesses that bring continuity and unity to the collection. They symbolize a vision dear to the artist—one of recurring structures connecting the microcosm and the macrocosm. The title of the exhibition is in line with his previous shows, reflecting his refusal to confine himself to a single theme. Instead, he invites us not to seek resolution in what we see but to embrace the complexity of the world and the interdependence of beings, aiming to subvert the processes of categorization.

The celestial bodies, sources of both fascination and wonder, reflect the ambiguity of suspended time (which is also the time of creation), where the boundary between night and day, dream and reverie, fades away. These celestial bodies, with their revolutions, speeds, and distinct trajectories, occasionally intersect, creating configurations as unexpected as they are poetic, much like Corentin Grossmann’s images. This coexistence of different worlds, each with its own reality, illustrates how the artist perceives the world. For him, dream and reality are not opposites; rather, they harmoniously coexist. After all, doesn’t reality itself change depending on one’s perspective?

The artist’s dreamlike approach to his works does not prevent him from addressing contemporary issues. Environmental concerns, present since the beginning of his career, continue to evolve in his work, often approached in a subtle and indirect manner. He also questions sexuality, body representation, gender stereotypes, and associated power dynamics.

Opening on Saturday 7 September.

Kate Newby, Hours in wind (detail), 2024, cast glass, hot-worked glass, bronze, salvaged rope, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia with support from Lead Patrons Ginny and Leslie Green, 2024, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist, photograph: Zan Wimberley

Kate Newby’s Loti Smorgon Sculpture Terrace Commission, Hours in wind (2024) is a three-part installation inspired by the site of the MCA and Warrane/Sydney Cove.

Hours in wind unfolds across three locations at the MCA: the entrance, a space on Level 2 and the Loti Smorgon Sculpture Terrace on Level 4. Made from locally sourced and recycled shipping and sailing ropes, cast bronze, and cast and hand-blown glass, Newby’s installation navigates thresholds between interior and exterior space. It captures a sense of place and the constantly changing conditions of the harbour, including unpredictable weather patterns and the shifting light.

Newby was born in 1979 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand and is currently based in Texas, US. She is known for sculptures and installations made from materials including glass and ceramics, as well as site-responsive works and architectural interventions. Attentive to natural phenomena such as light, wind and other weather conditions, Newby often blurs distinctions between public and private, and interior and exterior space in her works.

The 2024 Loti Smorgon Sculpture Terrace Commission is generously supported by Lead Patrons Ginny and Leslie Green.

Further information

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Place du jour, September 29th, 2023 – September 29th, 2025, set of 24 paper posters, rue Braque, Arras/FR.

Place du jour is a project by Pierre-Olivier Arnaud. It is part of a program launched by the CNAP in 2019 to commission temporary, reactivatable works for public spaces.

The artist presents a two-year billboard display on rue Braque, in Arras: each month a new image replaces the one from the previous month. This rotation on five panels features a total of 24 black-and-white photographs. Pierre-Olivier Arnaud works meticulously on his pictures, in particular their texture, and plays on the contrast with the simplicity and fragility of paper. His artistic approach is characterized by great spontaneity: he captures, immortalizes, and sublimates the objects he encounters on his travels.

This project was conceived in and for the urban space to propose a radical and democratic art form, accessible to the public outside institutional cultural spaces. At the end of the display cycles, a newspaper containing all these images will be printed and distributed to the city’s residents.

With Place du jour, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud invites us to reconsider the images we encounter in public spaces, often used for advertising or electoral purposes. By hijacking this tool of communication and influence, the artist transforms the poster into an artistic medium, exploring the aesthetic qualities that emerge from its fragility, ephemeral nature, and inevitable deterioration.

Michel Blazy, La Cantine, artistic commission as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires initiative, 2024. Photo : Centre International d’Art et du Paysage – Île de Vassivière

**Clément Villiers, Réfectoire, film, 24 minutes, 2024 © Clément Villers**

The former Chamet vacation center in Faux-la-Montagne, Creuse, France, has been abandoned since the late 2000s.
In 2018, it was taken over by a group of independent researchers who set up create and build a place for research and study.
In 2019, the group calls on CIAPV to accompany them in the commissioning of a work that questions the takeover of civilizational sites by new forms of life.

Chosen to respond to this commission, artist Michel Blazy is developing La Cantine, a garden of anticipation in the site’s former refectory. He treats the ruin as a living being in its own time, observing its movements and exchanges with other species. It becomes a new nurturing environment without human domination, a space of symbiosis and reconciliation between artifact and organic, between human, plant and animal.

Commissioned as part of the Nouveaux commanditaires program,
Lac du Chamet, Plateau de Millevaches.
Sponsors: Center for Forest Research and Study.
With the support of Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso Foundation, the Fondation de France and the volunteers who participated in the production of the work.

Press release (pdf)Download

Vue d’exposition / Installation views Caroline Achaintre. The Seeker, 2024. Art : Concept, Paris.
Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo Romain Darnaud

“Before we had language and written stories we had images. There were ways of holding and communicating knowledge that did not require words; ways that had to do with the body and movement, like the form of a dance or a facial expression, or produced through drawing and images such as cave paintings. There is a language of the imagination and a life of the mind that predates logical reasoning and the urge to categorise. They are modes of thought deeply embedded in human culture and psychology.

Encountering the works of Caroline Achaintre is like taking a field trip to this different life of the mind. Her creations are full of idiosyncratic personalities and psychological resonances. They are at the same time majestic and absurd, transgressive and homely. Like artefacts of a lost civilisation or creatures that have wandered from the pages of an otherworldly bestiary, they challenge and play with our perceptions and emotions. They return our gaze, they get under our skin, they make us laugh, they hide secrets, they resist interpretation, and pose questions that do not have answers.”

Excerpt from the press release, Brian Cass

Abonnez-vous à notre newsletter pour recevoir l'actualité de la galerie !