Body Double: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, Passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris
Overview
Paris Reid, Spinsters, 2023
Paris Reid, Spinsters, 2023

Galerie Ketabi Bourdet is delighted to invite Penske Projects to present Body Double, a group exhibition dedicated to figurative painting by emerging American and European artists.

The works presented offer glimpses of the personal through the harmonious mingling of mundane physical presence and ethereal abstractions. From surface level to deeper fathoms, each featured piece seamlessly connects with this theme in intimate threads, drawn from the artists’ experiences. Interpretations stem from the intrapersonal, and the attempt to wrangle the metaphysical onto a plane where human understanding of these concepts is not as elusive.

 

Ideas of identity and subjectivity come to life in exquisite portraits. Moving beyond binary thinking, the exhibition strives to emphasize the diversity of subjects, complexities of biography, and array of individual characters that artists have been able to capture through various modes of figurative paintings. Meanings for «Body Double» vary just as much as the featured works—a substitute to protect an original, someone who matches perfectly with another, or merely a depiction of the multifaceted nature of human beings.

 

The title of the show comes from the eponymous movie directed by Brian de Palma in 1984 and set in Los Angeles, hometown of Penske Projects. In the cinema industry, a body double is used to replace the actor for stunts or nude scenes. As this exhibition focuses on figurative painting and representation of the body, the idea of a “body double” is an interesting illustration of the relationship between the painter and his painting, the projection of his own body on the canvas, realistic or fantasized, conscious or unconscious.

 

Max Xeno Karnig (LA-based, born in 1990) will be presenting two portraits of a young man on copper panel. His work explores a self-reflexive world of satirical masculinity, in which contemporary figures such as here Rupert Everett or Jude Law painted in the manner of historical painters such as Albrecht Dürer or Antonello da Messina.

 

Mie Olise Kjærgaard (Copenhagen-based, born in 1974) works on strong references to history by painting suffragettes, women who tore off the corset to play tennis, to sail, being wild, fierce and adventurous.

 

Inès Longevial (Paris-based, born in 1990) will be presenting two self portraits as a diptych, dotted with the shadows of branches and foliage, as an homage to Italo Calvino’s Perched Baron, a philosophical tale of a boy fleeing the basic rules of society to live his life perched in trees. Her work speaks of freedom, womanhood, and the artist’s condition – always observing society and being part of it but with a certain distance which is imposed by the secrecy of the artist’s studio.

 

With Cecilia de Nisco (Italian, based in Vienna, born in 1997), the vision of the image is rarefied, as if filtered by an opaque film that softens the grain of the main subject or part of it. The artist re-elaborates an archive of personal, analog and digital images, from which she isolates details and alters colors, trying to distance herself from naturalistic or autobiographical references.

 

The two works shown by Paris Reid explore the humility behind status and societal decoration by garnishing idealized icons with exaggerated embellishment. The artist exhibits her passion for quantum physics through the void series, a body of work depicting studies of the fabric of reality, concentrating on the vastness of space, relevant to nothing material, all things potential. In Spinsters, the artist talks about the societal pressure on women to have children, the horse represents a prince and the three women are spinsters who left their bodies, dreaming a new dream in the void.

 

Sissòn (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is a self-taught artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. They were raised in Arizona, where at the age of seven they began their creative curriculum under the tutelage of their mother Kimberlin. Following her sudden passing in 2006, Sissón– seduced by thug ambitions, hard-living and street life– abandoned their practice for almost a decade before returning in 2015.

 

Laura Watters, 34, also based in Los Angeles, will show two works. “Entertain a Clown and Become Part of the Circus” and “Ironclad Prenup” delve into the intricate web of artifice, split personalities, and false illusions that shape the human experience. These pieces seek to uncover the hidden layers specifically of the female experience, revealing the complex emotions, challenges, and societal expectations we face and the dissociation that can occur when we feel we fall short. We are invited to peer behind the seemingly perfect façade, to witness the dualities and inner conflicts that often remain concealed and the more sinister nature of what lurks out of frame.

 

Kayla Witt (born in 1994, lives and works in LA) uses the childhood board game Operation as a springboard to reflect on some of her struggles with health, grappling with discomfort, searching for wellness, healing, self-improvement. The piece is wavering between the gravity of feeling unwell with a humoristic tone. The objects chosen are personal to herself and her story. In a way, this piece is a self-portrait, and also contextualizes her larger body of work and its ties to wellness, illness, anxieties about the present and the future.

 

 

Penske Projects, founded in 2019 by Sophia Penske, has evolved into a world-wide, project-based company highlighting emerging artists and collaborating with global creatives. Penske Projects specializes in pop-up shows, highlighting groundbreaking artists. Recently, Penske Projects had a group show co-hosted with Philips Auction House celebrating established and emerging female artists in Los Angeles.

 

Ketabi Bourdet was founded in 2020 by Charlotte Ketabi and Paul Bourdet as a contemporary art and design gallery in Paris, focusing on the gallerists’ generation of European artists as well as historical designers from the 1980s. This partnership takes place in a context where art and design are considered more and more complementary, involving the same museums, critics, journalists and collectors. Both passionate about contemporary art and design, Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard and Paul Bourdet bring together their respective specialties, experience and individual reputations, defining a program of personal and group exhibitions of artists and designers, which will highlight the creation of their era as a whole.

At a time when many major international galleries are opening a Parisian branch, when a whole new generation of galleries is emerging, and the most prestigious contemporary art and design fairs are being held in Paris, Ketabi Bourdet’s aim is to contribute to the influence of France, whose place within the international art market continues to grow, in a Paris that is more dynamic than ever.

 

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