Antony Gormley: Critical Mass at the Musée Rodin

Titled Critical Mass, the exhibition at the Musée Rodin activates all areas of the museum. Featuring key works from Gormley’s career in dialogue with Rodin’s own sculptures, the show invites visitors to reflect on both sculptors and their shared commitment to questioning what the body offers to sculpture as subject, object, and reflective tool.

At the center of the exhibition is Critical Mass II (1995), an installation composed of sixty life-size sculptures that punctuate both the temporary exhibition spaces and the museum’s garden. In this major work, the artist isolates twelve fundamental positions of the human body, casts each one five times, and then arranges them in different configurations, sometimes with contradictory or absurd effects. Crawling, crouching, kneeling, and standing, the installation unfolds in the garden with a line of the twelve positions that culminates at Rodin’s Gates of Hell.

Quer que eu também adapte os títulos das obras (As Portas do Inferno, por exemplo) para o inglês padrão usado em catálogos internacionais, ou prefere manter em português com tradução entre colchetes?

Giuseppe Penone: Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière at Gagosian Paris

The exhibition focuses on an entirely new body of paintings, unprecedented in the artist’s more than fifty-year career. Inspired by Penone’s experience at Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Éveux, France, these canvases are shown alongside the prints used in their making; an artist’s book, Le Bois Sacré du Couvent de La Tourette (2022), which gathers imprints taken from the concrete walls with wood grain of the building; and other graphic and sculptural works.

Penone’s complex and long-standing relationship with the convent—he visited it repeatedly and exhibited there in 2022—sparked a dialogue that led to these new paintings. Working with paint—a medium relatively unfamiliar to him—and drawing on Le Corbusier’s palette of sixty-three colors for “architectural polychromy,” the artist once again employed a process of imprinting and tracing. First stamping sections of his hands in ink onto paper to generate forms suggesting human or animal figures, he then projected the drawings onto canvases, reproducing them on a larger scale in oil paint.