PARIS PHOTO | BOOTH B29

Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach’s booth at Paris Photo highlights three artists with innovative practices using collage. Gordon Matta-Clark (USA, 1943-1978), a seminal figure in the 1970s New York art scene, is renowned for his radical building cuts, interventions that transformed architectural spaces into sites of creative disruption. Matta-Clark’s works on view, including collages from his landmark series Splitting (1974) and Conical Intersect (1975), translate his architectural cuts into meticulous, layered photographic compositions, embodying his concept of “anarchitecture.” His photo-collages encapsulate his vision of exposing hidden layers within neglected urban environments, creating haunting, multidimensional perspectives that echo through contemporary art.

The presentation at Paris Photo is concurrent with the major exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark on view through December 21, 2024 at the gallery in Brussels. Matta-Clark has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Whitney Museum, New York, Jeu de Paume, Paris and the subject of countless other major exhibitions. Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, MoMA, and many others. 

Alongside Matta-Clark is Lebohang Kganye (South Africa, b. 1990) whose work with cut-outs and sculptural photography infuses her pieces with theatrical dimensionality. Kganye’s practice challenges and reclaims historically oppressive narratives, transforming memory through her unique use of collage and performance. Her layered compositions in Two Stories of (Hi)Stories (2023) draw viewers into complex histories, where Kganye herself steps into the roles of various historical figures, weaving new memories within a contested past. Through her art, Kganye reimagines postcolonial histories, bringing light, both metaphorically and literally, to  untold stories.

Kganye will hold a major solo exhibition at the gallery in Brussels in 2025. She is featured in the upcoming New Photography exhibition at MoMA, (2025) and was recently awarded the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize (2024). The artist has recently exhibited at TATE, The Barnes Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, The South African Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, and others. Kganye’s work is held in institutional collections including the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Victoria and Albert Museum, Verbund Collection, Walther Collection, and Carnegie Art Museum, among others.

Carmen Winant (USA, b. 1983) is a contemporary American artist whose feminist, research-based practice examines the representation of women in society. Working with found images, Winant crafts expansive collages and installations that probe themes of embodiment, feminine power, and collective memory. Her works at Paris Photo, inspired by mandala designs and informed by books on feminism and healing, construct intricate, cosmic models of interconnectedness, reflecting on physical communion and collective resilience. Winant’s compositions, formed from repeated imagery and diagrammatic forms, invoke a spiritual and political sense of togetherness, symbolizing wholeness through interwoven, parallel narratives.

A Guggenheim fellow in photography, Winant has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, Photo Elysée, Aperture Foundation, FOMU Antwerp, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, ICA Boston, Sculpture Center and many others. Her work is held in major collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city and others.

Lita Albuquerque, Stephen Gill and Rafael Y. Herman, meanwhile, take process-intensive approaches to make work about the relation between humans and the landscape. The Sol Star (1996/2014) series by feminist Land Artist Lita Albuquerque (USA, b. 1946) are photographs layered with drawings the artist made around her major installation at the Pyramids of Giza in 1996, when she created a map of the stars on the desert sands. The artist claims the relationship between earth and the cosmos as a central tenet of her practice, and the precise images evoke the subtlety, grandiosity and intimacy of the artist’s relationship with at once land and sky. Albuquerque was recently included in Groundswell Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, the Light & Space exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary and had a major solo exhibition, Early Works, at the gallery in 2024. 

In his series The Pillar (2015-2019), Stephen Gill uses a motion sensitive camera to capture birds in every shape and contortion, swooping and dipping around a pillar placed in the artist’s field.

The artist has long worked on in depth series that explore the settings that surround him, often with a tightly focused, obsessional quality. At times the artist takes experimental approaches to relinquish control of the image, such as using a plastic camera in his Hackney Wick (2004) series. in The Pillar, the artist stepped outside of the process completely to allow his subjects to speak for themselves. He created the setting: he placed two pillars in a vast open field near his home in Sweden - one held his digital camera, the other attracted the birds, which interacted independently with the perch and the machine. The resulting images are gestural, sculptural and active, at once specific and abstract.

The artist is known for his award winning artist books, including the book version of The Pillar, which won the Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award in 2019. 

Gill has exhibited at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, Foam Museum in Amsterdam, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Haus der Kunst in Munich among many others. The artist’s work is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, Moderna Museet and others.