Zerou, or everything from nothing, is the name of a new Parisian gallery exhibiting Japanese environmental art: installations, paintings, video-tapes, sound compositions and works of geological, spacial and literary inspiration, all intimately linked with their architectural and urban surroundings. The inaugural exhibition is devoted to Ko Nakajima, the best-known Japanese video-artist, inventor of a computer which performs spell-binding electronic tricks based on analogic images. For his first exhibition in the French capital, showing until 30 November, Ko Nakajima has arranged a number of monitors in a setting of green plants.
Yolande Fièvre, who died almost ten years ago, is now considered an artist in her own right, though still closely identified with the surrealist movement and with Art Brut. In the 1960s, she created a series of reliquary-boxes containing chance compositions of unrelated materials: fragments of bark, pebbles, traces of other forms of life. These are on show at the Di Meo gallery until mid-November, together with some disturbing, dream-like assemblages from the same period.
Until 25 October, the Galérie d’art et d’essai is displaying the most recent grid paintings and sculptures of Louis Crane. “Résistance de l’accélérateur vertical”, his homage to the cyclotron, was composed especially for the exhibition. The sculpture consists of components taken from scientific instruments and includes bakelite, rubber tubing and steel appurtenances. At the same gallery, Anne Deguelle is showing works in painted glass, creating effects of reflected light, where opaque and transparent overlap and supersede one another in the eye of the beholder.
Until November, the Zabriskie gallery is continuing to show photographs by Lee Friedlander: the nude studies which were exhibited at MOMA and Victoria and Albert Museum during the summer.
Yvon Lambert is still featuring Anselm Kiefer’s “Nachtschattengewächse”, until 29 October.
Frank Stella has remained faithful to abstraction. Four large-scale sculptures of his in stainless steel, aluminium, bronze and copper are on display at the new Daniel Templon gallery.
Donald Judd is having his latest sculptures exhibited by Daniel Lelong. In his “Ecrits d’artiste” collection, this gallery owner is also publishing some of the American artist’s writings, with a preface by Jean Frémon: moral, political and historical notes written in the years 1963 to 1990 as footnotes to a long series of “Specific objects”. At the same time, Lelong is giving a first Parisian airing to paintings by another American artist, Frederic Matys Thursz, whose particular interest is in the colour white and the infinite possibilities of monochrome.
The recent death of Jean Tinguely gives poignancy to “Collaboration”, running at the Galérie Beaubourg until 30 November. For the occasion, the Swiss artist had worked with his first wife, Eva Aeppli, to produce a series of kinetic sculptures.
At the Adrien Maeght gallery in rue du Bac, engravings and monotypes by François Fiedler are showing until 12 October, to be followed by drawings and paintings by Pierre Tal-Coat, a member of the so-called “Nouvelle Ecole de Paris”.
Meanwhile, until 9 November the Maeght gallery in rue Saint-Merri will be exhibiting paintings by Max Neumann. Drawings and watercolours by the same artist are also being featured by until 17 October at the Vidal-Saint Phalle gallery.
Until the 12 of the month, Claire Burrus invites us to participate in a special kind of safari, in which the beast to be observed, stalked and hunted is homo sapiens: eight “Behavioural Landscapes” by David Robbins depict the architecture of several European zoos, accompanied by fifty or so tape recordings documenting the stages of the artist’s varied activity while he was carrying out his observations. The aim is to establish a conceptual parallel between the object of his artistic endeavour and the habits and behaviour the thinking mind imposes daily on its “zoological garden”.
Claire Burrus’s next exhibition will be “Un cabinet d’amateur”, sponsored by that most extreme of conceptualists, Philippe Thomas, and his “Ready-mades belong to everyone” agency.
Farideh Cadot went in search of new talent behind the iron curtain before it became fashionable to do so. Until mid-October, her gallery is showing works by four Soviet artists: Igor Chelkovski, Komar & Melamid, Alexander Kosolopov, Michel Reginski and Leonid Sokov.
From as early as 1911, abstractionist purism and cubist construction alternated in the work of Gaston Duchamp, alias Jacques Villon. The forty or so paintings on show at the Louis Malle gallery were executed by the theoretician of the Section d’Or in the years 1940 to 1960 (he died in 1963). They include Normandy landscapes, country scenes, aeroplanes and portraits, each witness to a different facet of his life and sensibility.
Until 12 October, Gerhard Richter continues to be the subject of a one-man exhibition at the Liliane and Michel Durand-Dessert gallery, and Nathalie Taleo is similarly featured by Laage-Salomon until the 15th.
Finally, for those who would like the opportunity to review the main German artists of the last thirty years, an exhibition entitled “Paris-Bar/Berlin” at the Artcurial gallery includes all the leading lights of the German avant-garde, from Baselitz and Lüpertz to Middendorf and Kippenberger, not to mention Beuys. The exhibition takes its name from a café frequented and made famous by two generations of artists.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Tinguely’s farewell “Collaboration” at Galérie Beaubourg'