AGENDA
From September 24th until January 22nd 2022
Learn more
Thursday, November 4th 2021
Learn more
TICKETS
AMERICAN FILMMARKERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
REPRESENTED BY LA GALERIE DU JOUR
After relocation to La Fab, place Jean-Michel Basquiat, in Paris’s 13 arrondissement, la galerie du jour agnès b is pleased to present a group show featuring American filmmakers and photographers, running from February 19 through April 3, 2021.
On view will be the work of seven American artists.
agnès b.’s enthusiasm for American creators is not a recent phenomenon.
She first met Kenneth Anger (*1927) at Café de Flore in 1960, as she read Hollywood Babylon, which had just been published, while waiting for her husband, Christian Bourgois. Then, she discovered his work as a filmmaker.
In 1997, in la galerie du jour’s new premises at 44, rue Quincampoix in the 4th arrondissement, agnès b. programmed a solo show by Kenneth Anger titled Icons, featuring the filmmaker’s collection of memorabilia.
Fifteen years later, in 2012, agnès b. organized Kenneth Anger‘s second solo show, focusing on the artist’s major works, Hollywood Babylon, and The Magick Lantern film cycle.
On view in our latest exhibit are enlarged film stills of Anaïs Nin as Astarte, Claude Revenant as Harlequin, Marianne Faithfull as Lilith, and Sampson de Trier as Lord Shiva.
In 1999, la galerie du jour held the first Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) exhibit with the series This Side of Paradise, featuring stills from the original 16mm movie This Side of Paradise, Fragments of an Unfinished Biography (1999). The show marked the first-ever screening of the complete, rare, personal footage of the Kennedy and Radziwill families on vacation in Montauk, NY.
In 2009, agnès b. organized a retrospective of Jonas Mekas‘ work titled A Few Things I Want To Share With You My Paris Friends, comprising videos, films, sound pieces, and stills covering five years in Mekas’ life. Telling of his life, friends and the world around him since the 1950s, Mekas continued to explore new approaches and formats, such as video installations, live music, and his 365 Day online project. This exhibit is a tribute to the longstanding friendship between the filmmaker and agnès b.
Of all the artist’s works on the inventory at la galerie du jour, agnès b. has decided to show a selection of stills from the series This Side of Paradise and From a Film in Progress.
agnès b. continued to explore American culture with passion and curiosity with two major shows that she organized in 2003, What About New York ? A New New York Scene, in which she showed the work of Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley, Craig KR Castello, Dash Snow and others for the first time in Paris.
Dash Snow (1981-2009) was active during a singular chapter in American history, as an artist in New York City, then the focus of the anxieties of a whole nation. Snow was a distinctive voice, speaking on his own terms to a generation emerging from a post-911 reality.
His work articulates his reaction to his politically charged and socially paranoid times, laying down his own pure vision of his existence.
In his short lifetime, Dash produced a multitude of images, capturing the world around him with brutal honesty, particularly the close friends who became his family.
Dash Snow‘s legacy is a prolific body of work composed of collages, videos, photographs and installations.As the child of art collectors, who rebelled and left the family home at age 13 to wander the streets of NewYork City, he turned his encounters into the main subject of his photographs.
In 2010, agnès b. devised the 3+1 exhibit. 3 stood for Ryan McGinley, Harmony Korine and Dash Snow. 1 was agnès b. This was not an homage to Dash Snow by agnès b. Rather, she pictured bringing his later works to life amidst those of his friends and peers. La galerie du jour will present five enlarged polaroids titled Untitled, dating back to 2006.
They feature papa smurf, a well-known figure in an East Village squat, and friend of Dash Snow.
In 2011, with an exhibition titled My New York Friends, agnès b. inaugurated her Galerie Boutique at 50, Howard Street, in the heart of NYC’s Soho district.
In 2014, at the same venue, agnès b. showed a series by a young Portland photographer, Olivia Bee (*1994). Kids in Love was her first solo show, and later became a monograph, published by Aperture. Olivia Bee is a photographer and director living and homesteading in Eastern Oregon, whilst also traveling the globe for her work. She is intrigued by the beauty of everyday life and how the beauty of memories (real or imagined) touches us.
In 2011, Bee quoted Ryan McGinley and Nan Goldin as influences. Agnès b. had been the first to show the work of those two artists in Paris.
A selection of prints from the Kids in Love series will be shown at La Fab.
In 2015, Blues, an exhibition by Tim Barber (*1979) ran at the Galerie Boutique on Hudson Street.
Tim Barber grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, studied photography in Vancouver, and now lives in New York City. Photographer, curator and designer, Barber is a leading figure in contemporary photography. He was Vice magazine’s photo editor, and ran his own online gallery and image archive, Tiny Vices. Barber co-curated with Martin Parr and others the inaugural NY Photo Festival.
Tim Barber‘s unembellished photos naturally draw the viewer’s eye through their raw, detailed vision.
In 2017, agnès b. met Chad Moore (*1987) in New York City. Later the same year, she offered to hold his first solo show at her NYC Galerie Boutique. In his work, Moore captures emotions. He depicts the beauty of our thoughts, feelings, desires and intuition. His work can provoke a sense of wonder, hope or despair, adoration or anger. It hinges on what he’s going through in life, and the way he examines the natural world to imagine the world he wishes for.
On view at La Fab will be prints from his Memoria series, previously exhibited in 2019 at the agnès b. Galerie Boutique in Tokyo.
In 2017, agnès b. discovered the work of Mark Cohen (*1943) through the book Mexico, published by Editions Xavier Barral, and promptly exhibited the artist at la galerie du jour.
In the course of a dozen trips toMexico between 1983 and 2003, Mark Cohen traveled widely in Mexico City, Veracruz, Campeche, Oaxaca and Yucatan.
Mark Cohen gets up close to his subjects and grabs images, dazzling them sometimes with the artificial light of the flash. In color and black & white, his pictures taken at arm’s length are snatches of movements, poses or bodies. From the effulgent arrangement of lines emanate a sense of nervous energy and the strangeness of daily life.
The Mexico series, from which prints will be on view at La Fab, is shot through with an undercurrent of vital energy, which is practically interiorized, as if the photographer, on one of his urban peregrinations, had been sucked into what is before his eyes.
agnès b. on Kenneth Anger :
“It was in 1960, when my then husband Christian Bourgois was publishing Hollywood Babylon, with René Julliard, that I had the good fortune to see the magnificent Kenneth enter Café de Flore,where we met up every day. Dressed from head to foot in black leather with his legendary bikers’ jacket, black cropped hair, kindly dark eyes, and tender mouth. An apparition. Like Christian, he called me agneau (“lamb”), and the Mexican dinner that we shared set fire to my mouth after he insisted on “more hot chilis.” I took my time discovering his films, whose beauty, mysteries, and dreamlike or nightmarish characters engulfed me. Later, much later, I opened la galerie du jour with Jean René de Fleurieu, my second husband, and our gallery bookstore was devoted to books published by Christian Bourgois, the father of my twins. I decided to offer Kenneth an exhibition of his exquisite movie stills. I can still see him arriving, beautiful and “burning” in his redand black sweater.“
agnès b. on Jonas Mekas :
“In 1992, Jonas Mekas had a show at the Jeu de Paume, and my friend Brigitte Cornand introduced me to him at a screening of his film on George Maciunas. I was sitting to his left, and his emotion—tears running down his cheeks—was overwhelming. A few evenings “drinking with friends,” as was his wont, brought us closer together. I had taken him to Hôpital Ephémère, where the basement club in the former hospital’s boiler room seemed the right place to show him. We became firm friends. 1996 was the year of Jonas’ first one-man show, This Side of Paradise, featuring stills from footage of John and Jackie Kennedy’s children on vacation in Montauk with their cousins, the children of Jackie’s cousin, Lee Radziwill. Jonas was there to teach them how to use a camera (Jonas’s famous Bolex). In 2009, A Few Things I Want To Share With You My Paris Friends: videos, films, sound pieces, images—a kind of retrospective of his life, friends and encounters since the late 1950s. Video installation, music and a website he already had in his mind.”
