Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 1
Booth: D05
Perrotin is pleased to participate in the 2024 edition of Art Taipei with a thoughtfully curated selection, yielding works that are not mere figurative forms or abstract landscapes, but vivid chronicles of time in flux. The 36 works by nine artists share elements of improvisation and risk-taking, each in their own way probing the dynamics of stasis, friction, equilibrium, and vitality. These are works that do not simply occupy space but carve out a dialogue between absence and presence, actively engaging with the void as much as with matter itself.
The centerpiece of the presentation is a series of seven bronze sculptures by Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003), an artist who, alongside Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Louise Bourgeois, defined the trajectory of twentieth-century sculpture. Each piece is structured as a pair: two figures composed from interlocking geometric shapes, at once futuristic and primordial. These angular duos—often read as male and female counterparts—are magnificent, but even more magnificent, to borrow from Rilke, is the tension between them. They appear caught mid-conversation or locked in wordless interplay, conveying a sense of drama that shifts between the furtive and the tender. This marks Perrotin’s first opportunity to present Chadwick in Asia since announcing representation of the estate in April of this year.
Similarly, Sigrid Sandström’s abstractions evoke a sense of unresolved tension. Even long after the paint has set, a frenzied beauty lingers in the spaces between her pours of color and fossilized imprints. The surfaces call to mind the rugged Arctic terrain of her native Sweden—layers of sediment that have solidified over time, their apparent stillness betraying an underlying fecundity that hints at the flux beneath.
Lee Bae’s charcoal-infused Brushstrokes, too, are meditations on time’s transformative power. The charcoal—formed under tremendous heat and pressure—is all that endures of the original tree. Delighting in texture and irregularity, his brushstrokes are inseparable from the arduous process of the charcoal’s creation, becoming as much about nature’s rhythms as about mark-making itself.
Georges Mathieu’s iconoclastic paintings are, in many ways, the antithesis of Lee’s meditative approach or Sandström’s layered topographies. Yet all three grapple with the volatility of creation and the struggle to impose form on formlessness. A leading figure in the Lyrical Abstraction movement of the 1950s, Mathieu approached painting as an event—a performance. His gestures, executed with electrifying speed, stress a deft balancing of chance and intuitive precision beneath the frenetic execution.
The presentation also includes notable works by Bernard Frize, Takashi Murakami and Gérard Schneider. Together, these pieces traverse a wide arc—from the monolithic to the ethereal, from the meditative to the explosive—each contributing to a broader conversation about form, space, and the elusive nature of time.
