Boesky in Paris

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present a pop-up exhibition in Paris coinciding with Art Basel Paris. Located on Rue de Penthièvre in the 8th arrondissement, the exhibition will feature selections from across the gallery’s program while highlighting artists with rich artistic and personal connections to the French capital. Boesky in Paris will be on view October 15–23 at 24 Rue de Penthiévre, Paris, 75008, France. 

Throughout her practice, Ghada Amer (b. 1963; Cairo, Egypt) pulls at the threads of cultural dualities—feminine and masculine, craft and art, abstraction and figuration, East and West—with sensitivity and specificity. Appropriating sexualized imagery—often sourced from pornographic magazines—Amer subverts the masculinist tropes that permeate them, reimagining women in moments of ecstasy, pleasure, and tenderness. Born in Egypt, Amer emigrated to France when she was 11 years old. Now based in New York, Amer’s practice is nevertheless deeply influenced by her time in France—and by the histories of French painting. Alongside her work featured in Boesky in Paris, Amer’s Paravent Girls—a series of monumental bronze sculptures—are on view October 15–26 at the Domaine national du Palais-Royal as part of the public programming for Art Basel Paris. Work by Amer is featured in The Infinite Woman—on view at the Fondation Carmignac through November 2—and in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Amer was also the subject of a sprawling survey across three institutions in Marseille, France in 2022 and 2023. 

A leading figure in the postwar Arte Povera movement, Pier Paolo Calzolari (b. 1943; Bologna, Italy) works with equal fluency in painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. Renowned for the material inventiveness and formal originality of his expansive, genre-defying practice, Calzolari continues to develop a fascination with the alchemical while examining the potential of light, the essence of memory, and the poetic character of the natural world and the urban environment. Throughout his career, Calzolari has worked and exhibited extensively in Paris. Notably, Calzolari debuted his famed performance work, Mangiafuoco, at the Centre Pompidou in 1979. He was also the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in 1994. Coinciding with Boesky in Paris, Calzolari’s work is on view in Arte Povera, an expansive exhibition of the post-war Italian art movement at the nearby Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection.

A dynamic force in American painting since the 1960s, Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942; Jackson, MS) has developed a singular visual language that is acutely personal and profoundly political. Drawing on a broad range of influences, from Minimalism to Abstract Expressionism, Lovelace O’Neal’s practice is at once worldly, parsing social themes of race and gender, and philosophical, fully immersed in conceptual and metaphysical investigations of joy, exuberance, nature, and the sublime. In 1993, the French Government and Moët & Chandon presented Lovelace O’Neal with the Artiste en France award, allowing her to participate in a six month residency at the Cité International des Arts in Paris. The work she made during the residency was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Cité International des Arts—and later at the French Embassy in New York. A selection from Lovelace O’Neal’s newest body of work—the Mexico Works—is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work was also featured in the most recent Whitney Biennial and is included in Edges of Ailey, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

French-American artist Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, New York, NY) considers the production of value, the nature of exchange, and the romantic resonance of the sublime in a practice that seeks to reveal the systems—both innate and manufactured—that govern contemporary society. Continuing her ongoing exploration of optics and perception—very much in the legacy of the Impressionists—Meyohas created a custom plotter machine that works with pastels. With her pastel plotter, Meyohas essentially mechanizes the artist’s hand, creating drawings from datasets fed into the machine. The resulting images—made using up to 130 individual pastel hues—take on an impressionistic quality and a mythical character. Work by Meyohas was also recently acquired by the Centre Pompidou. 

Boesky in Paris will also feature selected works from across the gallery’s program, representing the formal, conceptual, and generational diversity of the gallery’s program. With their new Accretion paintings, the Haas Brothers (b. 1984; Austin, TX) produce intriguing, indecipherable-patterns on canvas. In her vibrant, kaleidoscopic paintings, new-to-the-program artist Thalita Hamaoui (b. 1981; São Paulo, Brazil) imagines lush, fantastical landscapes. Embellishing antique fencing masks with delicate wooden flowers, Allison Janae Hamilton(b. 1984; Lexington, KY) assigns the found armor a new, mythic character. With the sensual, undulating forms of her ceramic vessels, ceramicist Nathalie Khayat (b. 1966; Beirut, Lebanon) evokes the dualities of the natural world—violence and calm, growth and decay, life and death. In recent paintings, Suzanne McClelland (b. 1959; Jacksonville, FL) examines the visual, semantic, and acoustic dimensions of language, parsing the limitations and malleability of communication, the impact of technology on interpreting information, and the mechanics of translation. In pensive, cinematic portraits, Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981; Montgomery, AL) captures solitary female protagonists in moments of leisure and respite. Throughout the intimate, atmospheric paintings of Hannah van Bart (b. 1963; Oud-Zuilen, Maarssen, the Netherlands), haunting landscapes emerge from painterly fogs while imagined figures—often donning quaint, old-world fashions—penetrate viewers with hypnotic, longing gazes. With the fluid forms of her painterly ceramic vessels, Michaela Yearwood-Dan (b. 1994; London, UK) makes reference to the female form, their unapologetic femininity directly linking them to her painting practice.