FRANCE / PARIS: THE DEVIL'S FIDELITY

until Wed. February 08 2012
Mardi - Samedi, 11h - 19h
Galerie Marian Goodman
T : +33 (0)1 48 04 70 52
79 Rue Du Temple
75003 Paris
France

parisgallery@mariangoodman.com
www.mariangoodman.com

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is presenting a group exhibition titled “The devil’s fidelity”, which includes an international group of artists that have never before shown with the gallery, many of whom are making their Paris debuts. The title of the exhibition is appropriated from a poem by Emily Dickinson (“THE DEVIL, had he fidelity…”) which describes the hopeless duality and pliability of truth, and the pitfalls of faith in appearances.

While Nina Canell, Matias Faldbakken, Cyprien Gaillard, Tim Lee, Mai-Thu Perret and Mark Soo represent a full range of distinct work in video, photography, sculpture and painting, they nevertheless occasionally unite and collide around certain common threads. Inherent in each artist’s practice is an exploitation of a tension between ‘high’ and ‘low’ - using ostensibly low, crude materials and techniques in the service of formally elegant and restrained results, or just the opposite, constructing a superficial elegance to hide a subversively radical gesture. Indicative of each artist’s open-ended practice, the works in this show self-reflexively question their own making, taking their process as subject, while pursuing a layered social and cultural critique.