Galerie Mitterrand

My-Lan Hoang-Thuy opens her second solo show at Galerie Mitterrand from May 23rd to July 27th, 2024. Aged 34, the artist has transformed the gallery space, rendering it feverish: a large number of paintings and drawings cover almost the entirety of the gallery’s walls, in an exhilarating, oozing yet chiseled juxtaposition. Here, a large-format digital print on acrylic is laid bare on the wall. There, a series of head drawings on loose sketchbook pages run rigorously along an imagined ridgeline. Further ahead, is a framed collage, breaking with the compulsive hanging dynamics of the rest of the exhibition.

The vast majority of the works date from 2023, a year marked by My-Lan Hoang-Thuy’s residency in Montmartre and two major exhibitions, where we discovered the artist «and the boys» as well as her hybrid use of photography1. And it is undoubtedly in response or reaction to these three events that the genesis of such a proposal, boldly welcomed by the gallery, is worth seeing.

In her new exhibition at Galerie Mitterrand, age is a matter of mood, and the gallery resembles the walls of a teenager’s bedroom. But here, My-Lan isn’t playing the young girl. On the contrary, she exhibits her great erudition, which lingers on the art of mural composition, reviving the feverish spirit of fan-art hangings and 19th-century reproduction collectors2. Better still, the erudition turns to the artist, who no longer encumbers herself with tutelary figures. She is the star. Framed tightly around her upturned face, she proudly gazes out at us in one of her inkjet-on-acrylic self-portraits. In this work, My-Lan leaves aside the representation of her own body to focus on her face and the corporeality of her painting, which makes a case for the image «tattooing» the material. The artist fully inhabits her painting, just as she inhabits and modulates her light, starting with that of her Montmartre studio, which it flooded in 2023. (text by Julia Marchand)

Solo show of My-Lan Hoang-Thuy

From May 22nd to July 27th, 2024

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Galerie Mitterrand is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by French artist Raphaël Zarka, from May 23 to July 27, 2024. Entitled Tautochrone, this exhibition brings together two sculptures, alluding to the artist’s current projects, and a new ensemble of paintings entitled Bois Gnomoniques, whose forms derive from the artist’s interest in 17th-century Scottish sundials.

In this exhibition, Raphaël Zarka explores the concept of tautochronism, which means “arriving in equal time”. The problem of the tautochronous curve was first studied in the 15th century. Two heavy bodies falling along a cycloidal curve will always arrive at the lowest point at the same time, whatever their starting point. The instruments with which physicists studied these principles are reminiscent of skateboard ramps. It is from this formal analogy that the artist has been developing, for over 10 years now, works in which forms and ideas from the history of art, the history of science and the practice of skateboarding intersect.

The meaning given here to tautochrone is as metaphorical as it is conceptual: it concerns the time of the exhibition, comprised of works from several series produced over different periods, both in terms of their date of creation and in terms of their historical reference, be it Galileo’s experiments, Schöner’s gnomonics or 16th-century Tudor fireplaces, to name but a few. Tautochrone is both the long term and the continuous present, of forms and ways of thinking that endure and merge over time

Solo show of Raphaël Zarka

From May 22nd to July 27th, 2024