Fall exhibitions
October 21, 2015–January 10, 2016
Opening: Monday, October 19
Press opening: 4:30–6pm
VIP preview: 6pm
Opening: 9pm
Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris
T+33(0)1 81 97 35 88
contact [at] palaisdetokyo.com
Palais de Tokyo’s new season, “The Magnificent Life,” presents three generations of artists in three major solo exhibitions: Ugo Rondinone: I Love John Giorno, Ragnar Kjartansson: Seul celui qui connaît le désir, and Mélanie Matranga, [fanfu] (again and again), as well as a project by Mathis Collins and an installation by Lee Bul.
Ugo Rondinone: I Love John Giorno
With: Anne Collier, Angela Bulloch, Verne Dawson, Judith Eisler, John Giorno, Mark Handforth, Matthew Higgs, Pierre Huyghe, Françoise Janicot, Scott King, Elizabeth Peyton, Michael Stipe, Ugo Rondinone, Erik Satie, Billy Sullivan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andy Warhol
I Love John Giorno is the first retrospective devoted to John Giorno, a poetry icon of America’s counterculture since the 1960s. The exhibition is a work of art in itself and an open declaration of love by Ugo Rondinone.
A seminal figure in Andy Warhol’s early films, Giorno took his inspiration from Pop Art’s free appropriation of found images, capturing the popular language of advertising, the television and the street. Since the mid-1960s, Giorno has developed viral strategies to share poetry with as many people as possible. In 1968, he created Dial-A-Poem, a telephone service offering random access to poems, sound artworks, songs and political speeches. A new version of the work will be accessible on the phone number T+33( 0) 800 106 106* (from 19 October 2015 to 10 January 2016).
Combining poetry, visual arts, music and performance, the exhibition reveals the significant influence of Giorno’s life and work on several generations of artists who have portrayed the American poet.
Curator: Florence Ostende
An issue of Palais magazine is being entirely devoted to this show.
*Free service and calls from numbers in France
Ragnar Kjartansson
Seul celui qui connaît le désir
Palais de Tokyo is presenting the first solo show in France by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, whose singular work is a cross between performance and cinema, sculpture and opera, plein air painting and music.
In a poetic way, the show aims at depicting daily desires, in a quest for transcendence which disturbs the boundaries between the banal and the sublime.
Ragnar Kjartansson has created several original pieces for his show at Palais de Tokyo. These include Bonjour, a performance which will repeat, for the entire duration of the show, a fleeting encounter between a man and a woman in a life-size setting, and Scenes from Western Culture, a video installation made up of a set of cinematic and idyllic portraits that simultaneously celebrate and deplore the desires produced by Western culture.
A monographic book published by Palais de Tokyo is accompanying this show.
The performance Bonjour is a coproduction by Palais de Tokyo and Festival d’Automne, Paris.
Melanie Matranga
[fanfu] (again and again)
Ever loyal to its mission to promote young French artistic creation, Palais de Tokyo presents the first significant solo show by Mélanie Matranga (born 1985, lives in Paris).
The title of the show, pronounced “fan-fu,” means “again and again” in Mandarin. Intentionally elusive, it participates in the creation of a state of uncertainty.
Mélanie Matranga combines signs that reflect upon interiority with elements linked to social attitudes and habits. Together, they make up places where the singular is expressed by the common, and where intimateness is uncovered, exposed.
A monographic book published by Palais de Tokyo is accompanying this show.
And also:
Mathis Collins, Dry French
Les Modules Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent
For this show, Mathis Collins has reproduced an artist’s studio on the terrace of a café, made especially for the creation of works made up of sculptures and photographs.
New intervention on the building
Lee Bul, Aubade III
This installation has been produced in collaboration with the MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea) in the context of France-Korea year 2015–16.
