Galerie Nelson - Freeman - Paris - France

Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present new works by the American artist David Adamo, his second solo exhibition at the gallery. David Adamo’s oeuvre incorporates sculpture, performance, (more...)

Galerie Nelson-Freeman is delighted to present the first European solo exhibition of American artist Alex Hay. The exhibition is comprised of recent paintings and drawings all created between (more...)

Galerie Nelson-Freeman is delighted to present its fifth exhibition of Canadian artist Ken Lum’s work. Lum is part of the Vancouver school of artists along with Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace (who (more...)

Galerie Nelson-Freeman is delighted to present its fifth exhibition of Canadian artist Ken Lum’s work. Lum is part of the Vancouver school of artists along with Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace (who (more...)

La Galerie Nelson-Freeman est heureuse de présenter une série inédite de gravures monumentales sur bois (2011) de Thomas Schütte. Seront également exposées dans leur intégralité, les dix-huit (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is proud to present its third solo exhibition of the work of Pedro Cabrita Reis, who was born in Lisbon and is considered to be one of the most influential Portuguese (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present the British artist Richard Wentworth’s first solo exhibition in Paris. Since the 1970s, Richard Wentworth has established himself as one of the (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Charlotte Posenenske (1930 – 1985). Charlotte Posenenske was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) in 1930. One of the (more...)

Gregor Schneider, born in Rheydt (Germany) in 1969, first made a name for himself in the early 1990s with subtle, barely perceptible doubled walls in galleries and art museums. Later whole sections (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present recent sculptures and new drawings by the English artist Rachel Whiteread. Over the past twenty years, through redefining traditions (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is proud to present its second solo exhibition of the American artist Mel Bochner.
Since the 60s, Bochner has been a pioneer of Conceptual Art and was one of the first artists to use written language within his work.
Since then, Bochner has continued his exploration into the nature of art and the mechanisms of pictural representation using a number of different media: photography, installation, film and painting. His work is enriched by philosophical thought, grammar and mathematical principals and features the use of both letters and numbers to illustrate the relationship between signifier and meaning. His art emphasises the disparity between words and our perception of their meaning, between the content and the container or between an idea and the reality of an object.
For this new exhibition, Mel Bochner has continued his work on his « Thesaurus Paintings », presented for the first time at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The series takes its name from Roget’s Thesaurus, a linguistic reference work, which has been Bochner’s constant companion since his first oeuvre concerning language in 1966. The works consist of lists of synonyms and words of similar meaning organised in parallel lines of text. Each section begins with a generic word and the list develops in crescendo through a number of synonyms to finish with the most familiar or even vulgar term, creating something of a surprise effect. Bochner considers that “the function of color is to divert the responsibility of a text concerning its meaning” and thus in this series colour is of prime importance. The background colour is chosen in advance but the colours of the different words are more spontaneous and improvised and are associated with each individual word.
In the earlier « Thesaurus Paintings », bright colours were used to reinforce the graphic impact of the words. The nine new paintings all dating from 2010, which form the exhibition, follow on from work begun on the dilution of outlines in 2006. These works consist of oil paint on black velvet applied using a hydraulic press, lending the paintings true materiality. During the process of application, runs have appeared, which blur the rounded outlines and alter the graphic quality of the letters on their sombre background. Taking on a true physical presence, the letters no longer simply fulfil a graphic function, they also become pictural elements and their meaning and message become blurred.
Alongside his « Thesaurus Paintings », Bochner presents to exhibit a series of paintings entitled “Blah, Blah, Blah” which were conceived using the same procedure. In this yet more radical series, words are reduced to onomatopoeia, the graphic transcription of a sound. Any meaning soon disappears in the constant repetition of these four letters describing a flood of words having no true importance.
With these series, shown in Europe for the first time, Mel Bochner depicts once again the impotence of words. “In the end, the interesting thing is the incongruity in all linguistic systems, not in what they say but rather in what they are incapable of saying.”
Mel Bochner was born in 1940 in Pittsburgh. He lives and works in New York. His work is in numerous public collections includings the Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), the Whitney Museum (New York), the Pompidou Centre and the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris). Recent solo museum exhibitions have included the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) and the MAMCO (Geneva) in 2003; and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in 2007. In 2011-2012, a major retrospective exhibition will be organised by the Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Museù Serralves (Porto) and the Haus der Kunst (Munich).

i “Mel Bochner, Frédéric Paul, Une Conversation: 3 décembre 2007 – 13 février 2008.” in Mel Bochner, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 2007
ii Interview between Mel Bochner and Claire Legrand in Mel Bochner, Measurements: works from the 1960s/1990s. Dijon, Bignan, Fonds regional d’art contemporain de Bourgogne, 2002.

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present Silvia Bächli’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. For 30 years, Silvia Bächli has explored every aspect of drawing, for its flexibility and (more...)

Reconstruction, renovation and rearrangement are recurrent themes in Sofia Hultén's work. The act of making, the materiality of the objects she chooses to work with, and their relationship with (more...)

The Galerie Nelson – Freeman is pleased to present a new exhibition of the Austrian artist Ernst Caramelle. Present on the international scene since the middle of the (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present a new exhibition of the American artist Matt Mullican. Since the 1970s Matt Mullican has worked on symbolic representation formalized by a (more...)

The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present a new exhibition of the American photographer James Welling. Since the end of the 1970s the artist has continually explored and questioned the (more...)

The Nelson-Freeman Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibtion of the Belgian artist Lili Dujourie. Through varied media such as video, collages, photography, sculpture, and installations, Lili (more...)

La Galerie Nelson – Freeman, avec le soutien de la Mondriaan Foundation et de l’Ambassade du Royaume des Pays-Bas à Paris, est heureuse de présenter l’exposition Breeze. Quatre artistes d’origines et (more...)

The Nelson-Freeman Gallery is pleased to present the American artist Fred Sandback for the first time. Born in Bronxville, New York in 1943, Fred Sandback earned a degree in philosophy and (more...)

The Unnamed Word #2 2005 steel, enamel on glass, fluorescent lights 218 x 280 x 277 cm

La Galerie Nelson-Freeman est heureuse de présenter la 4e exposition de l’artiste canadien Ken Lum. Le travail de Ken Lum a fait l’objet d’expositions sur la scène internationale depuis 1978. Son (more...)