With Frieze London and Paris + right around the corner, galleries across the two cities are gearing up to stage concurrent shows that both expand and challenge the fairs’ abilities to capture the pulse of today’s art world. This month will see the official introduction of many an artist to these two European creative fulcrums—from Delcy Morelos, who, after dazzling at last year’s Venice Biennale and being taken in by Marian Goodman, will have her French debut at the latter’s Marais space, to Anna Weyant, the figurative market darling who will open a show at Gagosian’s Place Vendôme address.
Other exhibitions will synthesize decade-long careers into poignant studies of modern life. Riding the high of his Whitney Museum retrospective opening, Henry Taylor crosses the pond to inaugurate Hauser & Wirth’s new Paris location. In London, Nicole Eisenman and Sylvie Fleury’s respective critiques of the caricature-worthy byproducts—industrial, historical, or emotional—of patriarchy feel refreshingly necessary today. Across both cities, artists cannibalize their own crafts, reworking old ideas to new ends. Sculptors show everyday life through a dystopian lens, abstract painters hide symbols that unlock personal histories, and figurative painters find fertile ground in the unreliable nature of memory. From perverse adaptations of popular culture to contemplative meditations on memory, CULTURED brings you the 12 gallery exhibitions worth a visit in Paris and London this fall.
“Sylvie Fleury: S.F.”
Sprüth Magers, London
September 22 - November 4, 2023
For the last three decades, Sylvie Fleury has reappraised and frankenstein-ed visual symbols associated with fashion, pop culture, and art history, fleshing out ubiquitous undercurrents of sexism and consumerism. At Sprüth Magers, an immersive installation connects the dots of the Swiss artist’s prolific career: a pile of old TV monitors display her infamous video art, and an office belonging to the artist’s ‘90s all-women motorcycle club is recreated with its name—“She-Devils on Wheels”—emblazoned on a red wall. There are fuzzy phallic rockets, metallic heels in plexiglass cases, and various marketing slogans plucked from beauty packaging. Fleury’s years-long critique of male-centric power structures couldn’t be more relevant today when all the creative directors of Kering’s brands are male, and men made up a staggering 88 percent of the art market share in 2022.
“Anna Uddenberg: Home Wreckers”
The Perimeter, London
October 6 - December 22, 2023
In “Home Wreckers,” Anna Uddenberg’s fembots take center stage. The exhibition features the Berlin-based Swedish artist’s works from the last seven years, including her debut film co-directed by Thyago Sainte. Ten sculptures of hypersexualized, cyborg-like women are staged in sterile, uncanny domestic environments inspired by reality TV and performative authenticity. Their faceless forms contort to the edge of human capacity, seductively arching their backs and splaying their legs on medical exam tables and beds: one reaches beneath a stroller, while another balances her Croc-laden foot on a picnic basket. (Uddenberg originally created three of the sculptures for a Balenciaga x Crocs campaign in 2021.) This is the artist’s first solo show in the U.K. and is presented in conversation with her exhibition, “Premium Economy,” at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which launched with a performance late last month.
“Urs Fischer: Flea Circus”
Sadie Coles HQ, London, 8 Bury St
October 7 - November 18, 2023
Lately, Urs Fischer—the artist best known for the large-scale sculptures that have punctuated his three-decade-long career—has taken up an interest in cutting-edge technology. He has minted NFTs, created massive A.I.-generated sculptures, and worked with robotics. For “Flea Circus,” the New York-based Swiss artist is downscaling and returning to the analog. Fischer’s new series of “memory paintings” draws inspiration from Victorian photography and personal ancestry. Family photos and quotidian snapshots are transposed upon each other in painstaking layers until individual memories morph into homologous, shared experiences. Also on display are multiple small cast sculptures of cats, the artist’s self-proclaimed spirit animus. Viewed together, the works offer a thought-provoking study of the ways memories are stored in an increasingly digitally altered world.
“Austyn Weiner: Blood on Blood”
Massimo De Carlo, London, 16 Clifford St
October 10 - November 11, 2023
Concealed within Austyn Weiner’s colorful large-scale, abstract oil paintings are tender odes to her siblings, childhood memories, and the Los Angeles-based artist's own writing. “Blood on Blood” offers an introspective reflection of the deep bonds between the artist and her immediate family, underscored by titles such as Big Sister Little Brother, 2023, and Thunder Moon (The Twins), 2023. Weiner created these fluid, frenetic works in her large, warehouse-style studio, often working on multiple pieces at once. This exhibition (its title is a reference to Bruce Springsteen’s song “Highway Patrolman,” from his 1982 album Nebraska) is an amalgamation of the artist’s influences, from the music she listens to to the books she reads.
“Nicole Eisenman: What Happened”
Whitechapel Gallery, London
October 11, 2023 - January 14, 2024
Nicole Eisenman is an idiosyncratic storyteller who approaches themes—from gender identity and social unrest, to dependence on technology—with a tender and subversive sense of humor. Her first major U.K. retrospective features over 100 works (some never-before-seen) that span the French-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s career. A range of mediums, including large-scale paintings, drawings, prints, and recent sculptures oscillate between realism and surrealism: real friends are rendered cartoon-like and in jarring colors; bodies tower over lilliputian buildings and abolitionists convene for a sit-in at a city park. In Fishing, a group clad in white lowers a hog-tied man in a suit into an ice fishing hole. In a more recent work, Morning Studio, 2016, two women in a lovers’ embrace recline half-dressed on a futon as a projector displays a computer’s galaxy homepage behind them. Eisenman’s cast of characters hold space for each other across the walls, exchanging inside jokes and private truths.
“Eddie Martinez: Enough”
Timothy Taylor, London
October 12 - November 18, 2023
Eddie Martinez approaches his work with an energetic and obsessive force, sometimes using various objects in his studio, such as a paint cap and a screw, in lieu of a paintbrush to apply oil, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and spray paint to giant canvases. The self-taught, Brooklyn-based artist is a collector favorite who has seen a rapid rise in the art market. “Enough” features nine new large-scale paintings made in the last two years, including three from the artist’s ongoing “Whiteouts” series. The exhibition runs concurrently with Frieze London, where Timothy Taylor will present a solo booth of the painter’s work. Martinez’s abstract composites recall the cryptic iconography of graffiti, while fragmented limbs à la less grotesque Guston offer hints of figuration. Flower pots, butterflies, human faces, and children’s toys refract and collapse into each other, hinting at the artist’s figurative past.
“Peter Uka: The Triumph of Being”
Mariane Ibrahim, Paris
October 13 - December 2, 2023
Peter Uka’s vivid figurative paintings start with a memory. While the artist’s early works recalled his childhood in Nigeria in the ‘70s and ‘80s, his recent paintings deal with composites: memories that are more porous and nonlinear in nature (a result of the passage of time as well as our increasing engagement with the Internet). Archival photos, contemporary textiles, images culled from mood boards, and scenes from the artist’s current home in Cologne all swirl together at Mariane Ibrahim. Indirect incantations of the imagined past and lived present point to deeper truths like the death of the artist’s younger sister last year, a loss reflected through the presence of various women in the works. Uka explores the permeability of memory in an evocative, personal way. References collapse into each other, transforming into composites more indicative of poetry than autobiography.
“Henry Taylor: From Sugar to Shit”
Hauser & Wirth, Paris
October 14, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Henry Taylor is an astute observer and a generational force. The acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist manages to capture personal and shared histories in every work he creates. Leading up to his exhibition, which inaugurates Hauser & Wirth’s Paris outpost, Taylor spent most of the summer in the city taking in his surroundings and metabolizing them in his studio. This series of works continue the prolific artist’s legacy of intuitively drawing from his immediate environment, Black history, vast art historical references, and community. The artist’s assemblage sculptures made from found objects, like laundry detergent bottles and branches, bring fragments of everyday life into the space. “From Sugar to Shit” coincides with “B Side,” Taylor’s powerful, career-spanning survey at the Whitney Museum in New York.
Venezia, 2022. Photography by Roberto Marossi. Image courtesy of the artist and Mariam Goodman Gallery.
“Delcy Morelos: El oscuro de abajo”
Marian Goodman, Paris, 66 and 79 rue du Temple
October 14 - December 21, 2023
Delcy Morelos offers a healing, restorative return to the primordial balance between Earth and its inhabitants; it is also a reckoning with environmental injustices past and present. Morelos’s first solo presentation in France spans both of Marian Goodman’s locations and kicks off the artist’s representation with the gallery. The Earth has always been intrinsic to the Colombian artist’s multidisciplinary practice from her early paintings with natural pigments to her use of clay and plant fibers in ceramics and textiles. Her reverence for ancient Andean and Amazonian cultures and organic materials challenges the violent land dispossession that still reverberates through her homeland, where millions of Indigenous and marginalized Colombians have been forced to surrender their land. On the bottom floor of Marian Goodman, a large-scale installation made from soil and spices will envelope the room, inviting visitors to step into Morelos’s spiritually-charged landscape.
“Wade Guyton: Galerie Matthiesen, Ausstellung, Edouard Manet, 1928, 6. Februar bis 18. März, Vol. II”
Chantal Crousel, Paris
October 16 - November 18, 2023
If you’re expecting an Edouard Manet-inspired exhibition, you’ve come to the wrong place. At Chantal Crousel, the late French modernist’s work serves as a jumping off point for Wade Guyton’s lithographs, part of an ongoing exploration of how images are digitally reproduced. Here, the New York-based artist zeros in on ten Manet catalogs from a 1928 exhibition, tearing the pages apart, printing his bitmap files over them, and rearranging them across rooms on the gallery space's second floor. Guyton is famous for pushing his ink-jet printers beyond their intended functions to create warped artworks that exist in a liminal space between abstract paintings, drawings, photographs, and digitally rendered glitches. With A.I. and robotics aspiring for perfection, the artist’s work offers a refreshing counter narrative framed by technology’s flaws. The French capital will get a double Guyton treat, with a presentation of five of his black paintings, made between the years 2013 and 2015, opening at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris on Oct. 13.
“Anna Weyant: The Guitar Man”
Gagosian, Paris, 9 rue de Castiglione
October 18 - December 22, 2023
Anna Weyant’s muted studies of everyday life oscillate between angular shadows and supple curves, hinting at something simmering beneath the smooth surface. For “The Guitar Man,” named after a song by the 70s soft rock band Bread, the painter mined classic American pop culture to find inspiration for her haunting and contemplative portraits and still-lifes. Harkening back to her years-long fascination with dollhouses, the New York-based artist built a replica of the Bates family house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960, to set the stage for her paintings. This will be the rapidly rising star’s European solo debut, following the Weyant’s first exhibition with the gallery last year.
“Alvaro Barrington: They Got Time: You Belong to the City”
Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Pantin
October 18, 2023 - January 27, 2024
Alvaro Barrington’s exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac is an ode to the artist’s childhood in New York. The painter weaves textiles, found images, and various materials into tender and layered paintings that capture the sound and style of the city in the ‘90s. There are nods to the golden age of hip-hop and traces of school-day mornings spent wandering through Central Park or visiting friends at boutiques on 5th Ave. Barrington recalls the city via cultural touchstones: images of Notorious B.I.G. dressed to the nines with the World Trade Center towering behind him, Michael Jordan playing at Madison Square Garden, and the opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The result is a moving portrait of a formative time for the artist, assembled from the memories he carries and the culture that surrounds him today.
