Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to welcome Artfact' Paris to the Brussels gallery.
ArtfactʼParis, publisher of pieces of art promotes, through its website and the organization of exhibitions by international emerging artists and by the production and distribution of limited editions, multiples of artists and unique pieces.
Galerie Nathalie Obadia will present a selection of the most recent works during three weeks.
Best Of : Adel Abidin, Bianca Argimon, AVAF, Carles Déau & Marc Johnson, Mounir Fatmi, Alexander Kosolapov, Youssef Nabil, Yazid Oulab, Enoc Perez, Thi-Thanh, Janaina Tschäpe, Joana Vasconcelos,...
The artists
Adel Abidin
Born in 1973 in Baghdad, Iraq.
Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, since 2001.
Video and multimedia
An expatriate in Finland for the past 8 years, Adel Abidinʼs work mockingly addresses a paradox generated by American politics in his country of origin, Iraq.
Wielding sarcasm as a corrosive weapon against marginalization, he brings a critical eye to the artifices of the information society by hijacking its own codes.
A monographic exhibition will be dedicated to him at the Finnish Contemporary Art Museum KIASMA in Helsinki in 2010.
Bianca Argimon
Born in 1988.
Lives and works in Paris, France.
Drawing
Trained at Central Saint Martins, the art university in London, and currently at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Bianca Argimon composes through drawing, painting and animation, a universe inspired by real facts. Her approach literally takes the opposite path of what her drawing implies. The line is lively, the drawing is clear without superficial touches that would disturb the subject the artist is dealing with, which provides a reading without confusion. The portrayal of his characters evokes the ambivalent temperament of contemporary society and tirelessly questions established values such as good morals, politics, social order or even artistic merits.
AVAF, Assume Vivid astro focus
Wallpaper, photography, installation, object
A group of inseparable and complementary artists the AVAF claim a unique work without historical referent, not belonging to any artistic movement or family. Their works, vivid, colorful, joyful, sometimes trashy or provocative, invade spaces and restructure them. Each of their pieces is a piece of the psychedelic puzzle painting a shifted universe where the widely used fluorescent colors lead the spectator into a carnivalesque rave.
Philippe Chancel
Born in 1959 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.
Lives and works in Paris.
Photography
After numerous collaborations in the French and foreign press and various commissions for large institutions such as the Centre Pompidou or the Fondation Cartier, he now works for art magazines, such as Connaissance des Arts, while at the same time carrying out a completely personal artistic work.
His photographs are frontal visions of everyday life, whose neutrality represents the bias of a photographer in search of the right picture.
Marc Johnson & Carles Déau
Carles Déau (1983), lives and works in Reims, France.
Marc Johnson (1986), lives and works in Chatenay Malabry, France.
Architecture, sculpture, photography, graphic design
Combining fine arts and industrial design training, Marc Johnson and Carles Déau navigate between history, science, experimentation and innovation.
The environment is at the heart of their creations. The notions of scale, relationship to the human being and interaction are constantly rethought, reworked, adapted in their practice of ethical design, and a desire to contribute to sustainable development.
Mounir Fatmi
Born in 1970 in Tangier, Morocco.
Lives and works between Paris and Tangier.
Video, painting, sculpture, installation, drawing.
Addressing in a direct way the oriental culture in general and the Muslim religion in particular, his work as a visual artist shows how, put in relation with the daily life in the West, the tradition, where modesty sometimes meets ignorance, separates people rather than bringing them together.
Mounir Fatmi encourages the audience to project themselves into a transcultural network where those who know and those who do not know are treated as equals. His work engages in overcoming established cultural divides, questioning systems of thought and challenging tradition and its prejudices. To do this, he uses the tools of popular and media culture to draw to him an audience largely drunk with moving images that have become banal, bereft of meaning, by hijacking them.
Daniel Firman
Born in 1966 in Bron, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.
Sculpture, light installation
In 2004, Daniel Firman realized with the collaboration of Christian Lacroix, a sculpture that takes the signature of the designer. He continued this type of project with the realization of a work produced with a bronze and crystal chandelier of the EPI brand identical to those that currently adorn the luxurious Crillon Hotel in Paris.
His projects are based on the idea that forms and their memories telescope in time, and that in order to find one's way through the pile of objects, identification is necessary.
His intervention as an artist is not simply to recover signed objects but to move them in a re-reading that could be similar to a memory or a sensitive memorization.
In 2007, the MAC/VAL devoted an exhibition to him and in 2008 he invested the Palais de Tokyo space in Paris for three months.
Alexander Kosolapov
Born in 1943 in Moscow.
Lives and works in New York since 1975.
Sculpture, photography
He is part of the sots art movement, born in Moscow in 1972, this movement is considered the Soviet pop art.
The whole of his work has for only goal to desecrate the religious, state and consumerist symbols. The term iconoclast would be reductive to describe the work of this artist. Gathering in each of his pieces radically opposed and contradictory elements, Alexander Kosolapov highlights the fundamental contradictions that structure our contemporary society and more particularly that of the former USSR which saw the Soviet ideology swept away by that of ultra-consumerism.
These works are present in many museums : the MOMA in New York, the Kupferstift Kabinet in Berlin, Albertina in Vienna, the New York Public Library,...
Youssef Nabil
Born in 1972 in Cairo, Egypt.
Lives and works in New York.
Photography
Very early aware of the aesthetics of Egyptian films from the 1940s, Youssef Nabil applies by hand the colors that will breathe eternal life into his photographs originally taken in black and white.
His work, like life, is animated by powerful feelings such as love, desire and death and delivers a painted diary that has been exhibited both at the British Museum (London) and the Architecture Foundation (New York) or more recently at the Villa Medici (Rome), Arles (France) and the MACBA in Barcelona (Spain).
Yazid Oulab
Born in 1958 in Constantine, Algeria.
Lives and works in Marseille since 1988.
Video, sculpture, installation and drawing
After having participated in numerous prestigious exhibitions such as Traces du Sacré at the Centre
Pompidou Center, Yazid Oulab joined the residence of the famous Calder Foundation in 2009.
His work is a biography sublimated by poetry, inspired by a spirituality of here and elsewhere.
He tirelessly explores through his works the theme of connection and transmission that materializes through the objects he borrows from religious imagery as well as the prosaic world of the worker.
Enoc Perez
Born in 1967 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Lives and works in New York, USA.
Painting
Noticed during the exhibition "Dear Painter... Figurative paintings since the late Picabia" at the Centre Pompidou in 2002, Enoc Perezʼs approach fits into what critics named the revival of figurative painting. The artist draws from his everyday environment as the subjects of his canvases for the realization of series: modern buildings, rum bottles, portraits of family members and friends are all lasting captures of the instantaneous. Here, Obadia Gallery will present a work (edition) that is a highlight of the iconic American acronym, California, which Enoc Perez has similarly depicted on his architectures.
Pier Stockholm
Born in 1977 in Lima, Peru.
Lives and works in Paris.
Drawing
Through his complex drawings with clean lines, which give them an intriguing strength, Pier Stockholm can be considered a storyteller, a contemporary poet whose verses have been changed into Indian ink. When carefully observed, these new fables reveal some of the artist's obsessions, where the architectures of Le Corbusier create a hypnotic urban setting and where the shadows of religion and death await the walker on an initiatory journey.
Thi-Thanh
Born in 1961 in Paris.
Lives and works in Paris.
Design
Creator of atmospheres, she makes light vibrate in the service of a state of soul to create without sʼen giving the air. Thi-Thanhʼs art defines an attitude, an art of living that the artist sows in her path, according to the encounters, to personalize to the infinite grandiose events (such as the millennium party for Cartier or the Christmas event at the Drugstore Publicis) as symbolic and personal.
Janaina Tschäpe
Born in Munich, Germany in 1973, she lived in Sao Paolo until she was 17.
Lives and works in New York.
Photography, video, watercolor, sculpture
Her work has been exhibited in many museums and exhibitions around the world, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, London and Berlin.
She was also awarded by the jury of collectors at the Art Brussels fair in 2003.
The work of this German-Brazilian artist, explores the various manifestations of a generative force that reveals itself in the representation of the constantly metamorphosed body.
Interpreter of her stagings, the artist works from work to work on her own mutation within a fictional and dreamlike universe that resonates with fin de siècle imagery.
Masks, wings and various latex prostheses are the accessories she creates and uses to accomplish her multiple transformations. The body and the sculpture seem to become one new living being.
All of Janaina Tschäpe's work is a celebration of the creative energy of nature, an evocation of its wonderful and dangerous power.
Joana Vasconcelos
Born in 1971 in Paris to a family exiled from the Salazar culture.
Lives and works in Lisbon.
Sculpture, installation
Revelation of the Venice Biennale 2005 with her work "A Noiva", a chandelier composed of 20,000 sanitary tampons, the Portuguese Joana Vasconcelos has made a name for herself thanks to her crochet work with which she takes care to dress each of her works.
The main characteristics of Joana Vasconcelosʼ work are the appropriation, citation and subversion of objects and elements from popular culture and mass production, most often from Portugal.
Cʼis also a critique of consumer society always in a poetic sense (fado music, sensual forms given to hijacked objects).
Joana Vasconcelos incites us to a complicity with her works, towards the consciousness of a collective identity that concerns more particularly the status of women, the difference of social classes and the national identity.
