Paris 2024

Fitzpatrick Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of the year, Paris 2024, which layers three recent series by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Reba Maybury, and Sam Pulitzer, with a video intervention by Sturtevant.

The exhibition takes as its starting point Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff ’s ‘Eiffel Tower’ series (2023). Riffing on Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph ‘Piss Christ’, a series of monumental photographs of the Eiffel Tower taken through a lens of piss. Heavily symbolic, the Eiffel Tower is a poster in a dorm room. It is a paperweight; heavy with French nationalism, of promises of modernity, and recently of bohemian fantasy repackaged for the resurgence of Paris as an art capital. The images are crass but laden with sepia-toned sentimentality. Presented at different vantage points and times of day, the Eiffel Tower’s representation is multiplied, and its repetition becomes cinematic, searching for the iconic image that never arrives – an impressionist failure in the mode of Monet’s 28 paintings of the Rouen Cathedral.

Alongside the ‘Eiffel Tower’ prints, Reba Maybury — an artist, writer, and political dominatrix — presents a continuation of her painting series, ‘From Paris with Love’ (2023): a repetition of Toulouse Lautrec’s ‘The Medical Inspection’ (1894) made with paint by number kits by her submissives. Lautrec’s oeuvre has been highly commodified through Paris’ tourism industry, so much that, more than a century later, they still generate a nostalgic desirability for the French capital’s opulent and decadent history. These women are sex workers, waiting in line for a weekly medical inspection in a Parisian brothel that the painter frequented, at a time when it was made mandatory for sex workers to have medical examinations for venereal diseases. If the results were positive, they would be sent to prison. At the turn of the century, syphilis was considered the destroyer of the bourgeois status quo. Sex workers were punished for this outbreak. Lautrec’s painting exemplifies this friction between its period’s desire for abundance and the banality that modernist capitalism enforces on its workers. Paint-by-number kits are products of leisure, to Maybury, this act of leisure is not that dissimilar to visiting a sex worker.

A third series of photographic prints from Sam Pulitzer’s recent publication ‘the premise of a better life’, punctuate the space with pedestrian motifs that serve as backdrops for conditional questions posed by the artist, often as contradictions; printed as allegorical subtitles to satirical images taken by the artist of the model city, New York City: a center of attraction and place for longing, that has become increasingly inhospitable for those without access to capital.

Sturtevant’s ‘Final Articulation of Origins’ runs on a haunted loop, whose implications of fatigue, labor, angst, commodification, and hyper-accelerationism personify the condition of the lost promise of modernity that both the ‘city’ and its emblematic symbols have come to represent, at the start of this Olympic year in which Paris plays host.

Contemporary Art Daily