Guogu Zheng is a graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Yangjiang where he was born. A founding member of the Yangjiang Group, an art collective focused on experimental Chinese calligraphy, Guogu is a central figure in Chinese art of the post-revolutionary Chinese cultural era. Like many artists, he has been confronted with tensions between tradition and modernity due to globalization. Since the early 1990s, Guogu has been critically examining the impact of Western culture and digital technologies on contemporary Chinese life. Guogu often combines aspects of Chinese tradition and consumer culture in works that treat each with a mixture of respect and irreverence. The search for transcendence in everyday life is also recurrent in his practice, which encompasses photography and sculpture as well as architecture and landscaping. He has participated in many important international exhibitions, including Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2017, the 10th Shanghai Biennale, the Walker Art Center in 2007 and the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 (among others). He received the Best Artist Award at the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2006

Lee Ufan is a South Korean artist and writer born in 1936 in Haman-gun on the southern Korean peninsula, then part of the Japanese empire. He moved to Japan when he was 20 years old, and developed a practice anchored in an Eastern understanding of the nature of materials together with an appreciation of modern European phenomenology. In 1969 and 1973 Lee represented Korea in the São Paulo Bienal. In 2009, the Japanese government honored Lee by conferring the Order of the Rising Sun for "contributing to the development of contemporary art in Japan.”  In 2010 the Lee Ufan Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, opened at Benesse Art Site, Naoshima, Japan. Lee has had major exhibitions worldwide, including a retrospective at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2011. In 2014, he was selected for the contemporary art program of the Palais de Versailles, and in 2019 the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC commissioned a site-specific installation for the museum’s plaza.  Lee divides his time between Kamakura, Japan and Paris

Holzer sees her benches as places of memory, as one of the media harnessed to present her texts. Made of engraved solid stone, granite or marble, they are not dissimilar to tombstones. They comment on violence, mother-daughter relations, amorous interactions. The survival series alludes to the possibility of moments of tension. Holzer has frequently collaborated with poets, and written continuously since the 1970s.

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist, born in Gallipolis, Ohio on July 29, 1950. She attended Duke University from 1968 to 1970, and then studied painting, printmaking and drawing at the at the University of Chicago. She completed her BFA at Ohio University in 1972. She entered the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975 and in 1976 joined the Whitney Museum’s independent study program, where she began her first work with text-based public art, for which she is best known. Throughout her career, Holzer has used many different media, especially large-scale projections, LED displays and signage., exploring how language is used both as a form of communication and as a means of control and concealment. Holzer began her influential series Truisms in 1977. These one-line statements, including “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” and “Protect me from what I want,” were printed as broadsheets, posters, T-shirts and stickers, and carved into stone benches. Holzer was the second woman chosen to represent the United States for the 1989 Venice Biennale, and in 1990, her LED signboards and carved marble benches were exhibited in the American Pavilion, winning Holzer the Leone d’Oro for best pavilion. Solo exhibitions of Holzer’s work have been mounted at the Fondation Beyeler, the Whitney Museum, the Dia Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among many others, the latest of which were In 2018, at the Tate Modern in London and in 2019 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has received several prestigious awards, including the Berlin Prize fellowship in 2000, the Distinguished Women in the Arts Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2010, and the Barnard Medal of Distinction in 2011. She was honored by the French government as Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 20002. In 2018 she was selected as amember of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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In the piece Birdcalls, Louise Lawler sounds out the names of various well-known male artists – including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre and Donald Judd – in the style of birdcalls. The humor and wit are balanced by the knowledge that these white male artists are continually recognized as being at the forefront of art, its discourses and its histories with no attention paid the to the significant contributions of women artists and artists of color in the discussion of advanced aesthetics.

Louise Lawler is an American photographer who has been exploring the relationship between the work of art and its exhibition space since the late 1970s. Her postmodern conceptual art production is linked to Simulationism, an American art movement born in the 1980s that consists of producing "reproductions of reproductions" or using manufactured objects. She is one of its major figures, along with Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger (among others). Her practice generally consists of photographing works of art in their environment: in museums, private collections, galleries, or exhibitions, and elaborating a reflection on their location and status. Lawler is primarily interested in the conditions and procedures for exhibiting, offering for sale and circulating works. This reflection on their location and their status is materialized by large-format photographs, mainly in color, presenting fragmented works of art, cohabiting with each other, irremediably attached to their original setting. Desacralized by the effect of fragmentation and their proximity to other masterpieces, they nevertheless remain systematically identifiable. Lawler’s work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Modern Museet in Stockholm, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. Lawler lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

« La couleur est le signe de l’existence de la vie. […] J’existe parce que je vois la couleur. » Etel Adnan

Adnan’s is equally renowned for her paintings as she is for her delicate poetry.  In Dejeuner Au Soleil , a large scale vivid tapestry:, she call upon her impressionist forefathers.  This lyrical work uses natural pigment color to convey emotion and movement.  Adnan first started making textile works in the late sixties; when as she says, whilst teaching philosophy in California, she missed the Persian rugs all over her childhood home. The title alludes to the sun, the valleys of Lebanon, her home country, and the poetry of France her country of adoption.

A witness to the influence of comics and pop culture, LOVE is playful, in its text and its composition.  Mike Kelley never ceases to deconstruct our paradigms by calling upon California’s beloved surf culture.  Like a skin tattoo ; LOVE resonates in our memories, attractive and humorous, concealing flaws like repressed Freudian memories.

Mike Kelley was born in Detroit in 1954 and died in Los Angeles in 2012. He received his B.A. in 1976 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his M.F.A. in 1978 from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, where he studied with John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler.

Irreverent but deeply informed, topical yet visionary, Kelley’s practice is wide-ranging, and includes installations, sculpture, drawings, paintings, videos, performance, photography, sound works, and text.. He also organized  curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing.  Important solo exhibitions include the retrospective, "Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993 which traveled to Los Angeles and Munich; a second retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 1997; and a third at the Tate Liverpool in 2004. In 2006, his show "Profondeurs Vertes" was presented at the Musée du Louvre.  In 2012, a posthumous retrospective "Mike Kelley: Themes and Variations from 35 Years" was held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, traveling to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, MoMA PS1 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Today, Kelley's works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Goetz Collection in Munich, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.

Lawrence Weiner is an American artist who founded the conceptual art movement of the 1960s, with Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry. He was born on February 10, 1942 in the Bronx, New York. He studied briefly at Hunter College in New York before dropping out and travelling the country. He creates subversive installations that modify an existing space or environment. His first work, Declaration of Intent (1968), created at the height of Abstract Expressionism, provides an ironic critique of the nature of art by creating a list of simplistic written terminology, and addresses the question of the imagined gesture or actual creation of a work. Weiner was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007-2008. Today, his works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. Weiner lives and works in New York, NY.

Daniel Gustav Cramer was born in 1975 in Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. A multidisciplinary artist, his range of work includes film, sculpture, installations and photography. He also creates artist’s books. He is interested in the sculptural qualities of images, sounds and texts, and the relationships we have with nature. He has said that his photographs are “taken with the hope that a possible narrative will unfold.” Cramer uses analogue photography, each picture capturing a meaningful scene, or a mood that can be perceived differently by each viewer.  Daniel Gustav Cramer received a BA Visual Communication in Printmaking/Photography in 2001 from FH Münster, one of the largest public universities of applied sciences in Germany, and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2003. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including RWE Stiftung grant in 2010, and the Kunstiftung NRW Grant in 2009. He was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Award in 2008 and shortlisted for the Man Group Prize and the Förderpreis Westfälischer Kunstverein, Germany, in 2007.

Für Ossip Mandelstam Das Rauchen Der Zeit, or For Ossip Mandelstam The Sound Of Time, inscribes itself in Kiefer’s continued work with poetry.  This large-scale work alludes to Russian poet Mandlstam, and his untimely death in the in 1938.   A led-covered helix from the Cologne cathedral spearheads this demanding work and marks the passage of time.  This was included in Kiefer’s 2015 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou.

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist who, throughout his career, has explored the identity, history and mythology of his country after the war. Born on 8 March 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Kiefer grew up in the aftermath of the bombing of his hometown, which left a deep impression on him. Kiefer studied with the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. During this stay he became interested in the neo-expressionist painters Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorf. In recent years, Anselm Kiefer’s solo exhibitions have included the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2001); Fondazione Pirelli, Milan (2004); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2005; an exhibition that traveled to Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, through 2007); Grand Palais, Paris (2007); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2007); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebkæk, Denmark (2001 and 2010); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2011); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2013); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (2015); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015); “Musée Rodin, Paris (2017, traveled to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, through 2018); State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2017); and The Met Breuer, New York (2017).

His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others. Kiefer currently lives and works in Paris. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale prize.

This work by Burroughs underlines the precious relationship he had with Gysin a fellow poet and reformer.    It is also the evidence of this captivating music that is the very essence of the beat generation and the ghost of Paul Bowles is not far, celebrating the ritual of the Pan God.

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist, born February 5^th, 1914. He studied English and anthropology at Harvard University, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After having been turned down by the US Army, he worked a variety of jobs in New York and became increasingly addicted to drugs. In New York, around 1943, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and other poets of the Beat Generation, as well as performers and musicians of the era. He became a foundational influence on the 1960s counterculture. After living in Mexico City, Paris and London, Burroughs returned to New York permanently in 1976, where he associated with Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, and other creatives.  As well as his literary output, Burroughs created a large body of paintings and other visual artworks, including his well known “cut-ups.” In 1978, Sylvere Lotriner, John Giorno and John Grauerholz organized the Nova Convention, a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work. In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. 

Ed Ruscha is an American artist whose skillfully executed conceptual works combine aspects of Pop art language and iconography. Working in the fields of painting, drawing, photography, film, engraving and publishing, Ruscha's experience as a graphic designer is evident in his vision of typography and layout. He is perhaps best known for his artists' books, such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), a pictorial study of gas stations he saw on a trip down Route 66. Born Edward Joseph Ruscha IV on December 16, 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, he moved to Los Angeles to study at the California Institute of the Arts. Perhaps the State of California had the greatest influence on him, as he blended views of the city and its moods into singular visual works that commented on modern American life. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

This artwork is not for sale