The exhibition sheds light on a selection of recent works, objects made of rope with a vernacular rusticity, but also on fabrics painted with repeated motif, which became his signature. An always-renewed shape while the artist plays on the diversity of the materials and appropriates the raw support for a sound and rhythmic colourism transcending the simplicity of the motif.

Claude Viallat - Kitchissime

Fondation GGL Helenis, Montpellier 

Through May 30, 2022

Galerie Templon is delighted to announce that it is representing French artist Jeanne Vicérial, a clothes designer and researcher.

She was selected for a residency at the prestigious Villa Medici in 2020, and at not yet 30 is the first person in France to be awarded a PhD in the practice of fashion design. She develops a protean body of work, forging links between design, crafts, fashion, the arts and sciences. Baroque and unsettling, her creations are designed as works of art rooted in innovative textiles and textures. They address contemporary environmental issues and the question of the ties between ready-to-wear and haute couture. She founded the design and research studio Clinique Vestimentaire in her quest to use her work to substantially redefine ideas about the body and clothes.

In March 2022, the gallery will be holding an exhibition dedicated to her work in its Brussels space. The show will feature around ten brand new creations from the artist, taking viewers on a voyage of discovery into her visionary world.

Galerie Templon is delighted to announce that American artist Michael Ray Charles joins the gallery roster.

With the valuable collaboration of his agent Hedwig Van Impe, the gallery will unveil for the first time in almost two decades the complex, visually striking and often disturbing oeuvre of one of the most radical African-American artists of his generation. Templon will reveal over time his spectacular series of unseen paintings and sculptures.

Born in 1967 in Lousiana, Michael Ray Charles created a sensation when he first emerged on the artistic scene in the nineties. Along side his contemporaries Kara Walker or Kerry James Marshall, he was a pioneer in exploring the representation of African-American communities within American history and pop culture. By appropriating some of the most disparaging imagery of the 20^th century, his practise subverts the common perception of identity and racial discrimination. Sometimes painful but always deeply political, his multi-faceted works question the power of images. As his friend the film maker Spike Lee put it in a 1997 interview “Michael Ray Charles attacks some serious issues and with a deft humor, which is very hard to do. He makes you laugh while he’s killing you. That’s a real artist.”

The success of his shows at Tony Shafrazi gallery in New York, quickly led him to exhibit extensively around Europe, showing with Hans Mayer in Germany and especially Cotthem Gallery in Belgium and Spain. The controversial reception of his work however, combined with a growing sense of inadequacy and frustration with the American art world, led him to question the commodification of his art. In 2004, encouraged, motivated and supported by Hedwig Van Impe, the artist chose to disengage himself from the public sphere to solely focus on his research. Since then, Michael Ray Charles has been sharing his time between the US and Belgium, building in almost complete secrecy a body of work more powerful than ever.

In a context reshaped by the Black Lives Matter movement, Michael Ray Charles will now unveil for the first time at the gallery, one of his mysterious series, the result of 20 years of relentless investigations and quest for a new artistic language. The first show at the gallery will open in March 2022. As an advance preview, two paintings, ironically titled “Forever Free” were exhibited in Art Basel Miami Beach (December 1-4 2021).

Using samples of vibrant silk, the artist hand sews sprightly embroideries who take inspiration from contemporary life scenes.

Tomorrow is a Different Day spotlights art and design from the collection, from 1980 to the present, by international artists and designers who are helping to shape the changes of today and tomorrow. They challenge the status quo and offer alternative perspectives.

Stedelijk Museum

Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ, Amsterdam

On Going

In Roping, 2019-2020, Cotton switches treats for a surprising encounter between a triumphant cowboy and his fantastic steed which is none other than a pink unicorn. The mythical animal comes here to challenge the norms of the conquest of territories by men. The latter loses its virility in a wonderful world made of softness in which seems to dive a desacralized cowboy who is not without evoking a Queer update of that created in 1989 by the artist Richard Prince. 

Musée des Abattoirs

76 All. Charles de Fitte, Toulouse

From October 30, 2021 to January 16, 2022

The Lambert Collection invites Abdelkader Benchamma to take over the entire first floor of the Hôtel de Montfaucon. Entitled ‘Rayon Fossile’, the exhibition is organized around an initiatory journey through possible worlds, past, imaginary, future, written or dreamed, assembled in a narrative that unfolds slowly in the rooms of the museum.

Rayon Fossile 

Collection Lambert, 5 Rue Violette, 84000 Avignon, France 

October 29, 2021 through February 20, 2022

Conceived as a total immersion in the universe of the artist, the exhibition will feature the artist’s latest works of ink on paper. The opportunity for us to admire the gesture of Abdelkader Benchamma and to unveil the mystery on his so-magnetic works.

Rupture et Associés

1 place André Malraux, Paris

From October 23 to November 27, 2021

The exhibition “Expanded Painting in the 1960s and 1970s” presents radical innovations in painting that testify to a pursuit of freedom and expression in the midst of a period marked by social and political unrest in the United States and abroad.

From Alma Thomas’s mosaic-like painting of flowers to Sam Gilliam’s suspended, draped canvas, these works speak to an upending of barriers-be they artistic, ideological, racial, or rooted in gender stereotypes. By rethinking and systematically probing conventions associated with the painted canvas, these works ultimately speak to the desire for a deeper, more fundamental connection to nature, the body, movement, and light.

Fall 2021

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia

For his first collaboration with a major UK gallery, The National Gallery, Wiley will depart from portraiture to explore artistic conventions and modes of representation in the European landscape tradition through the media of film and painting. Wiley’s first film installation, Narrenschiff (2017), was a contemporary response to the Ship of Fools theme, popular in European culture from the late 15th century. It featured a group of young Black men at sea, struggling to reach the land – a metaphor for both historical and contemporary histories of migration and social dislocation. Building on these themes at the National Gallery, Wiley will explore European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, and humankind’s relationship with nature. The film included in this project will feature Black Londoners that Wiley met and cast for the film on the streets around the National Gallery.

Winter 2021

The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is hosting the exhibition conceived, produced and organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). This major shows explores the work of the designer with a singular imagination as he revolutionized fashion, haute couture and perfume. This Parisian step marks the return of a visionary artist, photographer, perfume inventor and director to the City of Lights. 

Musée des Arts Décoratifs

107 Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris

September 30, 2021 to April 24, 2022

This work attacks the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, a reign marked by torture, murders and disappearances ordered by the government for over 15 years. The video refers to the poet and singer Victor Jara, who was killed in September 1973 in a stadium in Santiago by Pinochet’s armed forces.  On September 27, 2021, starting at 7pm, UNESCO will be transformed into a large philosophical agora and will be the scene of twelve hours of multi-performance for the tenth anniversary of the Philosophy Nights events created by Mériam Korichi in 2010. 

UNESCO, 7 Pl. de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris, France 

September 27, 2021 

L’exposition du musée Albertina fait la part belle cette saison au renouveau de l’iconographie américaine après 1945. Les photographes ont fait un road trip et ont créé des séries qui dépeignent la société américaine sous un jour critique. Pour capter la dynamique des grandes villes, la tendance était d’utiliser un langage pictural spontané, proche de l’instantané. En revanche, d’autres travaux impliquent la mise en scène de tableaux élaborés, semblables à des films, qui permettent de s’interroger sur la réalité et l’illusion photographiques, ainsi que sur les évolutions sociétales.

Albertina Museum, Albertinapl. 1, 1010 Wien Vienna 

Until November 28, 2021

This project, initiated at the galerie du jour agnès b. in 2016, has taken various forms, from a travelling group exhibition to a laboratory of epistemological experimentation. Through a selection of eclectic works, it highlights the precursory character of this editorial and artistic adventure as well as the ever-present relevance of its favorite themes. 

Le Printemps de Septembre

25, rue d'armagnac, Toulouse

September 17 - October 17, 2021

The show examines the “deep blue” from various perspectives: both visually, as a color, but also linguistically, as a phrase describing abstract concepts such as mood, the natural environment, music and even a region’s political landscape. Over 70 paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper and videos by 70 artists from the Hall and Hall Art Foundation collections will be presented.

Hall Art Foundation, 544 VT Route 106, Reading, Vermont, USA

Until November 28, 2021

Chiharu Shiota created a site-specific installation for the Planta Project “In the beginning was…” in the industrial complex of La Plana del Corb. The colours, shapes and textures of the environment inspired Shiota to use stone for the first time in one of her installations. She chose it as a material, not only because of the relationship with the landscape of Planta, but also for its link with the origin of the universe.

Planta Project, Complejo industrial La Plana del Corb, Balaguer, Lleida, Spain

The UNAM Biennale gathers around forty artists who illustrate with originality and talent their vision of “Moi, Je” and its present and future challenges in the mutations of an obviously dangerous society and withdrawal into oneself.

Biennale de l’UNAM (Union Méditerranéenne pour l’Art Moderne)

Château-Musée Grimaldi, Haut-de-Cagnes – Place du Château, Cagnes-sur-Mer

From June 12, 2021 to January 3, 2022

Summer goes with vacation. It is a time for going out, for walking in the middle of nature, for bathing in the sea. It is the period when we pick up fruits, where we cultivate our garden, where we spend time with our family and friends, where we meet people. It is about camping, swimming, tanning on the beach, sailing, surfing, paragliding, discovering new places, traveling. Because of the pandemic we were likely to forget it.

Through their works and installations, the guest artists bring this back to life, and rekindle our emotions.

Abbaye Saint André – Centre d’art contemporain

Place du Bûcher, Meymac

From July 11 to October 17, 2021

The exhibition “Time on my side” presents a selection of masterful works by Berlin-based artist René Wirths that shows some realistically painted patterns from the everyday life, which are larger than life, in front of a neutral white background. In his practice, René Wirths asks himself the most important question, the question of our own existence. Wirths’ work alternates between the objectivity of the things depicted and the subjectivity of the artist’s or viewer’s perception.

In his reproductions, the artist does not use a photographic model or projection technique but paints the objects as he sees them in his studio.

Museum in Kleihues-Bau

Stuttgarter Str. 93, Kornwestheim 

From July to January 23, 2022

Mary Magdalen is a woman of extremes and has given rise to a multiplicity of interpretations: a wealth of representations, conspiracy theories and controversies. This special exhibition will introduce the visitor to the rich, paradoxical and constantly evolving imagery surrounding this mysterious biblical figure. From the time of the New Testament to the present day, Mary Magdalen has proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists.

Museum Catharijne Convent, Utrecht, Netherlands

From June 24, 2021 to January 9, 2022

« Seeing & Perceiving » is an exhibition that challenges the viewer to question their reality. It encourages them to explore and perceive art in different ways and from different angles. With a critical thinking approach, it highlights the importance of how necessary it is for all of us to reflect, assimilate and take part in a dialogue about what is surrounding us.

Ithra brings an exponential selection of highly recognized artists from the international and regional contemporary art scene to re-imagine the viewer’s perspective and their own perception. Drawn from Ithra’s art collection, this exhibition showcases a series of newly commissioned artwork, as well as site specifics and artworks on loan.

Ithra Museum

8386 Ring Rd, Gharb Al Dhahran, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

From June 24, 2021 to March 26, 2022