New York’s Luhring Augustine Transforms Paris’s Galerie Patrick Seguin

Each October, Galerie Patrick Seguin mounts its annual “Carte Blanche” exhibition series, in which the Parisian design mainstay turns over its space to a contemporary art gallery. This year the opportunity was granted to New York’s Luhring Augustine, which in turn assembled a dynamic selection of recent paintings and sculpture by a group of contemporary artists from the gallery’s stable, including Janine Antoni, Jeff Elrod, Glenn Ligon, Josh Smith, Philip Taaffe, Roger Hiorns, Rachel Whiteread, and Christopher Wool, among several others.

Patrick Seguin, a gallery specializing in modern and contemporary design—renowned for its presentations of Jean Prouvé’s demountable architecture—began the “Carte Blanche” series in 2002 and has since invited nine galleries to participate. With this project, the gallery underscores the important link between design and art, and the increasing interest in cross-disciplinary work by artists, designers, architects, and others, while also exposing Parisians to gallery programs from abroad. 

The artists represented in the show are all well established in their careers—masters and innovators of their various respective mediums. Each entrancing piece is individual in its own aesthetic and conceptual vision, yet the underlying thread in many of the works speaks about the idea of transformation, of changing or moving through time or space, or of shedding one’s skin.

In the entryway, the luminous and layered Spiral Painting II (2015), by the New York-based Philip Taaffe, filled with interlocking blue, orange, and black spirals, hangs across from Jeff Elrod’s Untitled (echo painting) (2015), a black-and-white blur painting created through a meticulous process of digital manipulation, scanning, printing, and painting.