Group show
From the Paper to the Wall
This summer, Galerie Templon is showcasing contemporary drawing in an original and celebratory show featuring Omar Ba, Abdelkader Benchamma, Norbert Bisky, Oda Jaune and Chiharu Shiota. The artists were invited to appropriate the gallery walls and create an array of unique wall installations. The ephemeral works will be accompanied by a new series of drawings produced specially for the exhibition.
The five artists, members of the same generation and hailing from three different continents, Africa, Asia and Europe, represent a globalised world where different cultures meet, mingle and merge. What their work has in common is the role given to drawing, elevated to the same rank as painting, sculpture and installations.
Their drawing practice is thus given free rein to explore a range of tools, materials and supports as they cover the walls and appropriate the space.
The From the Paper to the Wall exhibition invites visitors on a journey where they can experience the same feelings of playfulness and freedom. It can be visited in the gallery from 6 June to 26 July and online via a dedicated website.
Fandango, 2019
Les artistes
Born in 1979 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Oda Jaune lives and works in London. The artist uses her work to portray a tormented yet deeply poetical world. In it, images that are tender, naive and violent, occasionally erotic and funny, are mingled together as Jaune continues her frank exploration of a subconscious freed from convention. Her paintings are unsettling, putting the viewer in a position where abandon is the only option and inhibition is futile.
Norbert Bisky was born in 1970 in Leipzig, Germany. His treatment of landscapes and exploration of the portrait and narrative structure place him firmly in the tradition of great European painting. But Norbert Bisky's experiments with breaking down forms and with blocks of colour also place him on the borderline of abstract art. His figurative style of painting, conjuring up the socialist realism he experienced as a child in GDR, suggests both hedonism and chaos in its contemporary form.
Born in 1972 in the Japanese city of Osaka, Chiharu Shiota has been living and working in Berlin since 1997. Using woven yarn, the artist combines performance, body art and installations in a process that places at its center the body. Her protean artistic approach plays with the notions of temporality, movement and dreams, and demands a dual engagement from the viewer, both physical and emotional. In recent years, Chiharu Shiota has been widely exhibited around the world, including at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003), the New Museum of Jakarta and the SCAD Museum of Art, USA (2017), the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2014), the Smithsonian, Washington DC (2014) and Japan’s Kochi Museum of Art (2013). In 2015 Chiharu Shiota represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with her installation The Key in the Hand. In 2018, she is exhibiting at the Museum of Kyoto; and in 2019 she exhibited at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo throught a exhibition illuminating the artist's entire works.
Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message. Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. This combination of heterogeneous elements illustrates his desire to abolish boundaries and categories. His work, with its enigmatic nature and poetic intensity, rejects all forms of didactic narrative, seeking instead to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of the real
Born in 1975 in Mazamet (France), Abdelkader Benchamma lives and works in Paris and Montpellier. Benchamma chooses to work in a sole medium: drawings. He adopts different approaches to the drawing process, sometimes moving across a sheet of paper with the meticulous strokes of an engraver, sometimes spreading over a wall with lavish gestures that appropriate the space. The matter escapes from the frame in a form of organic growth. Inspired by literature, philosophy, astrophysics and esoteric reflections, his works create visual scenarios that question our relationship to reality as they probe the frontiers of the invisible.
