A Variety of Forms: The Celine Art Project

The algarrobo tree, a fixture of the Argentinian high desert, is capable of weathering powerful winds and prolonged drought. According to Kim Yun Shin, it also possesses “the strength of stone.” When chisels proved inadequate, the artist turned toward more unorthodox methods. “The chainsaw became the tool of choice to better define and reveal the pith of the wood,” she says. “It’s the perfect tool to see inside these trees.”

Renowned for her rugged wood and stone sculptures, Kim has pursued her singular vision with verve and curiosity over a prolific six-decade career. Never one to follow art-world trends, she decided to study abroad in Paris – an “unusual” path at the time. Upon returning home, her dissatisfaction with the lack of support available to women artists led her to cofound the Korea Sculptress Association. More than half a century later, the intergenerational organization continues to present its annual member exhibition.

A fateful visit to her niece in Argentina, in 1983, altered Kim’s trajectory. “What started as a summer vacation changed to living in Argentina for three years,” the artist says in an interview translated by her gallery. Intoxicated by the “wave of freedom” following Raúl Alfonsín’s election as president, she quickly established a studio and, in collaboration with the Korean Embassy, staged an invitational exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. Several years later she resigned from her professorship in South Korea and became an Argentinian citizen. Today she lives and works between Buenos Aires and Yanggu, South Korea.

This peripatetic lifestyle has expanded Kim’s repertoire of cultural references and materials. “I am affected by not only the culture of the country that I am staying in but also the natural environment,” she says, reflecting on the geographic specificity of her palette. Art resources were scarce during her childhood in Japanese-occupied Korea, but the natural world served as significant inspiration. “All matter in the universe has an order,” she says, “and my work resembles the order I found in nature.”

Her sculpture at Celine’s Osaka Midosuji location is a remarkable totem carved from algarrobo, craggy yet harmonious. Part of her ongoing series “Add Two Add One Divide Two Divide One” (1978-present), it succinctly articulates one of the artist’s most persistent themes – “the combination of two conflicting concepts becoming a more complete one.”

Dialectical models fuel Kim’s work, particularly the philosophical concept of yin and yang. Yin, associated with softness and femininity, suggests fragmentation, subtraction and division; yang, meanwhile, is hard and masculine, representing ideals of convergence and addition. “Both yin and yang must be present to form the whole of nature and the universe,” she says. “There is a fusion of yin and yang in everything – in heaven and earth, day and night, summer and winter.”

Syncretism is a guiding principle of Kim’s practice. After Paris, she viewed Korean architectural styles with fresh eyes. Her “Stacking Wishes” series (1970s-present), for example, draws on traditional hanok joinery and references the religious practice of jangseung, the erection of totem poles at village entrances. Across Latin America, she began to notice a similar stacking instinct – a slant rhyme that stimulated her thinking around “Add Two.” Kim’s search for common ground has allowed the work to travel fluidly across cultural contexts while accruing layers of unexpected meaning.

This year, Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa selected Kim for inclusion in Foreigners Everywhere, the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. It’s a late-career triumph for the artist, whose eight wooden and stone sculptures – positioned commandingly on a central plinth – anchor a gallery in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion.

The wooden works are vertical and spare, appearing like notched spires in a skyline. A dazzling spectrum of grains is revealed in the heartwood, with shades ranging from warm honeyed browns to cooler grays. Some pieces retain their bark, a flourish that lends textural sophistication while honoring their source material’s distinctive patterning.

By contrast the stone works are lower to the ground, more compact and horizontal. Surfaces on a single block of stone are refined and polished to different degrees; some are richly marbled and veined, others subtly striated. Arranged in rows of four on opposite ends of the platform, the sets are satisfyingly asymmetrical but complementary: like a miracle of nature, the entire display achieves a sense of perfect equilibrium.

“Archaic forms are very natural to me,” Simone Fattal says. Ancient literature and mythology were her earliest sources of inspiration, kindling in the young artist an intense desire to write – but after studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and falling in with a bohemian set, she turned instead to painting. The driving questions of epic poetry, however, have remained central to her practice. Traceable across the Paris-based artist’s oeuvre is a sincere and urgent search for origins.

Fattal’s paintings in Celine’s collection, on display in Munich and Miami, are from her “State of the Sky” series, which was completed during a shockingly prolific two-month window in 2013. Abstract compositions rendered in black and white, they are stark, geometric representations of the night sky – the first serious paintings she’d made since abandoning the medium in 1980 after fleeing the Lebanese Civil War with her partner, the artist and writer Etel Adnan, for Sausalito, CA. There, Fattal founded her legendary independent publishing house, Post-Apollo Press, named in the hopeful afterglow of NASA’s Apollo program.

The series, a powerful distillation of Fattal’s lifelong fascination with the cosmos, began without prelude or warning. “I made one black line on a canvas,” Fattal says of the first image, and while she’d never bothered enforcing arbitrary formal constraints – strict dichromatic palette, line and edge – the paintings obeyed this austere logic of their own accord. Their production was mysterious, propulsive; some days she finished up to three canvases. “They were like celestial bodies that go through the night,” she says. Several weeks later, the impulse vanished. “They stopped as they came – suddenly.”

Fattal’s yen for experimentation has resulted in a multidisciplinary body of work that defies categorization. Life and art flow together, yet biographical information is disclosed sparingly, in a gentle refutation of any demand for straightforward confessionalism. Her short film Autoportrait (1972/2012) is a entrancingly oblique audiovisual collage of monologues, family photographs and conversations with friends – a “cinematic self-portrait” of the artist as a cautious but curious young woman, eager to encounter the self through a camera lens.

Following Works and Days (2019), her first North American survey, Fattal received widespread acclaim for her ceramics. She initially engaged the medium in 1988, finding that it satisfied her desire for contact with the primordial elements. (Her earliest sculpture was a modest, gray-glazed man: crudely elegant and stolid, a forceful presence.) These earthen figures “come more from literature than from any history of art,” and they often embody recurring archetypes – warriors, gods, prophets, kings – or specific characters from epic poetry or myth, like Gilgamesh and Ulysses.

The forms seem both ancient and modern, as if they’ve lain dormant in the earth for thousands of years. Yet they also bear unmistakable traces of the artist’s hand, their rugged surfaces pleasingly manipulated, worked over with great care and attention. At the Louvre, a favorite haunt from Fattal’s student days, 18 of her sculptures are currently installed among the galleries of Mesopotamian, Phoenician and Cypriot antiquities.

The heady anachronism of Fattal’s exhibition at the Louvre finds its analogue in her majestic collages. She considers them transcriptions of her enduring preoccupations – archaeology, landscape, modern art: “They explain exactly what I’m trying to say.” Their titles insinuate through wry description; They Found Weapons of Mass Destruction (2016) constellates imagery from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq with illuminated manuscripts, old maps, photography of the moon landing and Pope John XIII: a kaleidoscopic frenzy of associations that exposes the perverse and ongoing entanglements of empire.

In these densely allusive tableaux, it’s possible to discern the grain of Fattal’s intelligence – how she orchestrates these fragmentary records of life on earth in all their humor, horror and absurdity. They are, Fattal says, “meant to be read like Persian miniatures – together, and one after the other.”

Whenever Mimosa Echard arrives in a new city, her countdown begins. “I have this short window, maybe two days, when I’m so excited and my eyes work differently,” the Paris-based artist says, before briskly disappearing offscreen. She returns moments later with a pixelated pink tray that resembles a bouquet of anemones or fingers. “These are my pussy straws,” she laughs – souvenirs from a sex shop in Brooklyn, retrieved on her last trip to New York.

Travel allows Echard to indulge in the euphoria of visual overstimulation – when the hierarchies of attention are thrown into flux and certain details pop with sudden, vivid clarity. It’s an almost-childlike state of wonder, yet Echard has spent most of her career refusing to sentimentalize childhood or fetishize purity. For her, a desire for purity in the age of the internet and hyperglobalization is worse than foolish: it belies a more insidious and ultimately sinister desire for control.

Nothing could be further from the animating spirit of her playful, rigorously layered mixed-media artworks. After receiving the 2022 Prix Marcel Duchamp, Echard has quickly established herself as one of the most unpredictable and protean young artists working in Europe. Her winning entry was a cryptic “liquid tableau” called Escape more (2022), a deceptively straightforward fountain-like installation of photographs, advertisements, commercial products and looped videos slightly obscured under a steady stream of yellowish fluid meant to invoke the mares’ urine used in hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women.

“Transformation is always at the center of my practice,” she says. While the works possess a talismanic charge, they might also be read as time capsules: distillations or encapsulations of specific moments in time, memories of friends and lovers. In her “A/B” series (2016-present), she carefully arranges spreads of natural and synthetic elements on plexiglass sheets before dousing them in fluids: epoxy resin, Coca-Cola, depilatory wax. Once the flotsam settles after the deluge, a pattern emerges, pleasingly choreographed by chance and entropy. “I try to recreate this very specific moment in between,” she says, although the final composition must always have a sense of “balance.”

Underlying any fantasy of control is a thread of erotic paranoia that Echard finds amusing but generative – a fear of permeability that structures broader geopolitical arguments, including the obsessive policing of national borders and mounting concerns over “penetration” by 5G radio waves. “There is this contradiction about the relation between what is polluted and what is pure,” Echard says, reflecting on the artificial distinctions, including human versus nature, devised to exploit natural resources.

This general anxiety around contamination is a recurring theme across Echard’s oeuvre. In her “Mostly Cloudy” (2023) series, one of which is on view at Celine’s Wulin Square shop in Hangzhou, Echard stretches antiradiation fabric and aluminum foil across her canvas and overlays a grid of oxidized green. Each panel appears like a window into some desperate near-future: a gray, postapocalyptic landscape after the end of nature.

Most recently, Echard’s fascination with invisible electromagnetic waves has culminated in Lady’s Glove (2024), an “anti-monument” affixed to a 5G mast on top of a parking garage in Toulouse. The sculptural assemblage is composed of close-up images of foxglove flowers that sheath the tower, an aluminum heart installed like a bracelet charm, and a narrow transparent LED screen where a constant stream of the artist’s personal videos is played at nightfall.

The pollution of water supplies and airspace can make it feel impossible to opt out of our hyperconnected reality. “You want to be part of society,” she says, “but also you’re scared – you want your body to be protected.” The quandary reminds Echard of two films: Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995), about a suburban housewife beset by a mysterious environmentally triggered illness, and The Swimmer (1968), based on John Cheever’s famous short story of existential angst.

In the latter, Burt Lancaster plays a handsome, seemingly ordinary man who decides one afternoon to swim across the backyard pools of his suburban neighborhood. “I almost feel like him,” Echard says, contemplating how to navigate the profusion of content available on the internet. “I thought about all the information that we have going inside and outside, all this data, and I got overwhelmed.” She pauses. “I wanted to work with that.”

Ma Qiusha’s work is all about the street. To make the works in her “Wonderland” series (2016-present) the Beijing-based artist shatters panels of cement, wraps the fragments in nylon stockings and reassembles the pieces, which evoke aerial photographs of undulating sand dunes or charred, volcanic terrain. While it might be tempting to read them as statements on the privatization of femininity under capitalism or the encroachment of Western individualism on socialist China, the artist gently refuses such easy interpretations.

“At first glance, ‘Wonderland’ presents contradictory yet ambiguous symbols in relationship,” Ma says. “Stockings and cement, soft and hard, yin and yang, male and female.” While she is interested in the strange, sometimes sinister magic of these “binary obsessions,” the works are ultimately rooted in personal memories, sparked by a dreamlike vision of women bicyclists stopped at a traffic intersection, their legs clad in nylon stockings.

Despite their beguiling tactility and serene surfaces, the works remain entrancingly opaque. “Art is a spiritual medium to bridge the gaps between different eras, classes and people,” Ma says. The cement shards recall the streets of a grittier Beijing, while the stockings serve as a powerful signifier among women across generations. Their color palettes, determined by manufacturers, evolved over decades “from the flesh-colored nylon stockings of the ’70s and ’80s to the black and colored stockings that became popular starting in the 2000s” and so on. Nowadays, Ma notes, they trend transparent.

A shifting constellation of social mores and market forces subtly manipulates these collective preferences. For women of her mother’s generation, a pair of stockings was not considered discardable; it was part of a woman’s wardrobe, as valued as a pair of trousers. Ma’s mother repaired her own with clear nail polish, a practice the artist has incorporated as a nod to the painstaking, often-overlooked work of maternal care.

Ma’s own preference for black stockings was partly attributable to her generation’s access to Western media. Her mother disapproved; in a different era, they were associated with streetwalkers. “From that moment,” Ma says, “I decided to make another piece with the black stockings.”

More recently, Ma revisited her childhood in No. 52 Liulichang East Street, an ode to the famous corridor in Beijing’s old city lined with antique shops. Frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary demands of the white cube – its refusal of extraneous information, including social and historical context – Ma wanted to incorporate the dynamism and disorder of life without taming it for voyeuristic consumption. The result is a sculptural installation that brings the street into the space of the gallery.

Many of the storefronts on Liulichang East Street are packed with curiosities, apocrypha and forgeries. Small statues of deities sit beside jade tea cups and hand-colored photographs, arranged in the manner of overstuffed museum vitrines. Over the pandemic, Ma grew keen to experiment with this mode of display, conceiving of individual elements in the storefront as “pigments on a canvas.”

The final display is a three-dimensional collage of densely populated still lifes, each composed intuitively within the larger whole. Ma trawled online shops for items of dubious provenance – the stranger and more unlikely, the better. The project became a “container” for her imagination, a space “where reality and fiction intertwined or superimposed, layer by layer.” Scattered throughout the display, among other alleged artifacts, are self-portraits of Ma cosplaying a Manchu princess.

Every object – real or fake, extraordinary or commonplace – charts its own trajectory through the world. Tchotchkes made for the tourist trade might travel on similar paths as ceramic bowls of the highest caliber. For Ma, this contingency endows history with a thrilling sense of novelistic absurdity.

One of Ma’s online purchases was a pair of unassuming wooden figures apparently once owned by a family who fled China but died during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The narrative seemed unlikely, but when they arrived, she was surprised to discover that they were stuffed with old newspapers from the period. Perhaps the story was true, after all.

For Kim Dacres, few consumer products are as fraught with meaning as the humble tire. She reads the material as a powerful metaphor for the mistreatment and perceived replaceability of Black people in the United States, and traces its ubiquity today to longer histories of colonial extractivism, such as Belgium’s brutal rubber trade in the Congo. Even the double meaning of the word tire suggests a profound existential exhaustion with the vast systems of waste, disposal and exploitation that govern modern life.

Dacres’ sculptures are commanding and startlingly animate. The Bronx-born artist braids and twists strips of black rubber and miscellaneous bicycle parts into intricate, abstracted busts of fictional characters, celebrities and significant individuals from her life: “My mom, my dad, my best friends,” she says. “People who encouraged me to show up as myself.”

Each is marked with a distinct hairstyle and facial expression. Some rest on plinths; others seem to meld with their supports, creating a fluid whole. Wrought from a limited range of materials in a nearly monochrome palette, their formal austerity belies a deeper, subtler power. Consider them totems, gods, sentinels.

Dacres spent almost a decade as an educator and administrator in the New York City public schools, becoming principal of a middle school in Harlem at the age of 26. Both works acquired by Celine allude to Dacres’ experience in the classroom, where matters of self-presentation plague student and teacher alike.

Sky (2023), on view at Celine’s Munich location on Maximilianstrasse, is based on a garrulous fourth-grade student whose 6-foot frame perfectly matched her exuberant personality. Alex (2023), at their Taipei 101 store, is an oblique self-portrait of the artist’s androgynous, motorcycle-riding alter ego: a reminder of her former self, a fledgling teacher whose freshly shaved head prompted student questions about her dating life.

During her weekly ritual of “Tire Tuesdays,” Dacres visits her favorite bike shops in New York to inspect and select damaged goods. Over years of collecting she’s amassed an impressive studio inventory and fostered an unmistakable connoisseurship: “It’s like being a librarian,” she says. Now she can quickly identify rare tread patterns, which are desirable for their contrast with more typical designs, and has even mapped broader social trends. The rising popularity of Citibikes, for example, led to the homogenization of her stock.

Lately, she’s been thinking about delivery gig workers, mostly Black and Brown people whose livelihood depends on ratings and tips. “There is a flippancy toward how we treat labor that I find very jarring,” she says, reflecting on the market forces that transform individuals into vehicles of ease and convenience for customers.

For Dacres, tires symbolize literal and social mobility. In her 2021 installation Black Moves First, she populated a life-size chessboard with eight elaborate, towering figures, providing an eloquent framework for the question: What might reality look like if the traditional rules of the game were reversed and Black people set the terms and conditions of play?

As Dacres’ own installations grow more ambitious and richly realized – including an immersive, speculative environment collaboratively staged with April Bey in their two-person exhibition at UTA Artist Space in Atlanta – scale is increasingly a consideration. At one gallery opening, an older woman propped her elbow on Dacres’ sculpture while chatting with the artist, seemingly unaware of her transgression. “What is that personal space, that personal bubble, that the works need in order to be fully seen and fully respected?”

Monuments and the construction of historical memory have been lightning-rod topics in the national conversation, and Dacres has particularly admired interventions by Simone Leigh, Kara Walker and Alison Saar. Recently she’s been thinking about commemorating Seneca Village, the predominantly Black settlement cleared to make way for Central Park. How might large-scale sculpture, rather than celebrating and inscribing triumphalist narratives of social progress, disclose more complicated and layered stories – and honor those omitted from the record?