The Bourse de Commerce in Paris is currently hosting "Minimal," a comprehensive exhibition that transforms the historic circular space into a showcase of reduced aesthetic expression. The show features works spanning from the 1950s to the 2010s, presenting pieces by artists from the Americas, Europe, and Asia in a building that originally served as an 18th-century wheat silo and exchange before becoming the Paris Commodities Exchange.
American artist Meg Webster's sculptures serve as a striking introduction to the exhibition. Her round installations are strategically placed throughout the circular space beneath the building's distinctive glass and iron roof. Visitors encounter a perfect cone of white salt that towers above human height, a low circular mound of fine granular soil that rises like an ocean swell, and an almost hemispherical dome of smooth compacted clay whose surface shows cracks from its original mold. A wall of beeswax curves through the space, emanating a slightly peppery honey scent, leading to what resembles a stockade of tangled branches, foliage, and autumn berries.
The exhibition is housed in a building that now serves as home to French billionaire François Pinault's art collection, which comprises more than 10,000 works. Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, has curated this ambitious show, working with Pinault's vast collection and loans from other institutions. However, the curatorial challenge extends beyond art selection to wrestling with the massive architectural space itself, which Morgan describes as resembling a Tower of Babel.
The show combines solo displays, like Webster's installation, with thematic rooms where individual works by different artists are grouped under categories including Light, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome, and Materialism. Dedicated spaces showcase the work of On Kawara, Robert Ryman, Brazilian neo-concretist Lygia Pape, and the Japanese Mono-ha group, though some sections feel somewhat rushed and perfunctory in their presentation.
Visitors begin their journey in a room filled with a remarkable group of small, late paintings by Robert Ryman. His white aggregated fields of pigment create dynamic relationships with the edges of their colored canvas supports, with white singing against rust-red, dirty khaki, and muted green. Ryman's mastery lies in achieving profound impact through minimal means, focusing entirely on surface, volume, nuance, and touch. Below these paintings sits a low rectangular pile of wrapped white sweets, their cellophane catching the light. This piece represents an iteration of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' 1991 "Untitled (Portrait of Dad)," where the quantity of sweets - approximately 175 pounds or 79 kilograms - corresponds to the weight of the artist's father. Visitors are encouraged to take the mints, fulfilling Gonzalez-Torres' intention that his art would leave a sweet taste in viewers' mouths, lingering like a memory.
Around the perimeter of the central space, antique cabinets originally installed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle hang in the corridor. Each contains a single On Kawara Date Painting, featuring white lettering and numbers denoting the date of the painting's creation. The Japanese artist maintained a strict rule of discarding any work not completed by midnight. Below each painting, a box contains a newspaper page from the day and city where On Kawara created the work. Beneath the painting dated October 5, 1982, a newspaper reports on Israeli planes attacking Syrian missile sites. The box beneath the June 20, 1975 painting contains a full-page advertisement for the movie "Jaws," which opened in US cinemas that day.
The exhibition's scope extends from sparse and somewhat dispiriting light works in the basement, where installations flash and glow with a wan appearance, to the first floor featuring Susumu Koshimizu's hewn granite lump sitting alone within a wonky, open-topped cube of hemp paper. His bronze tetrahedrons slant across the floor as part of a display devoted to the Mono-ha or "School of Things" movement, demonstrating the exhibition's journey across not just continents but entire worlds of thought.
Industrial elements appear throughout the show, including galvanized steel air-conditioning ducts on the landing that are actually sculptures by Charlotte Posenenske, who worked almost entirely with ready-made industrial sections. The upper floor features a room devoted to Agnes Martin's quietly humming, repetitively worked paintings. This space also includes a relief where heavy-duty boat spikes have been drilled into wood sections, with the hexagonal heads roughly painted in dark red and white, creating a stark contrast to the delicacy of her hand-drawn lines and grids.
The grid theme continues with various interpretations: an Eva Hesse panel of grommets, a Sol LeWitt gridded drawing of arcs and circles, and a striking 1966 Bridget Riley painting featuring a grid of small black ovoids that create optical illusions, seeming to blink and tilt as they overwhelm the viewer's visual processing. British-Pakistani sculptor Rasheed Araeen contributes 16 large open wooden cubes in red, yellow, blue, and green, inviting visitors to re-stack, balance, tilt, and configure them in any arrangement they choose.
Lygia Pape's comprehensive display stands out as covering all bases of minimal art and beyond. Her career in Brazil encompassed a huge variety of materials, approaches, and successive movements in Brazilian art, making her section feel like a complete exhibition within the larger show. The display demonstrates the breadth of her innovative work across different media and concepts.
Other notable works include a glum early 1970s diptych by New York artist Brice Marden with its smoothed-out waxy surface, contrasted with bright panels of sewn-together, shop-bought cotton fabrics by the late German artist Blinky Palermo. Various suspended elements hang throughout the space: stones used in Korean weaving practices that reference shamanic beliefs, bundled wood lengths suspended from rope, and a Richard Serra piece that leans against the wall with insouciant immobility.
Barbed wire lengths connected to chains by Melvin Edwards hang from walls, while Senga Nengudi's bulbous and pointed transparent vinyl bags, partially filled with dyed water, flop and bulge from heavy ropes, suggesting bodies that sprout, leak, and resist control. Maren Hassinger's "River" features ropes and chains snaking across the floor, intended to evoke both the despoliation of nature and the forced journeys that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas.
Ryman reappears in the exhibition with works more casual and eccentric than those on the ground floor, though notable absences include Cady Noland, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Morris. The exhibition challenges viewers to consider what links these diverse objects and images, and what divides them, questioning whether they can all be viewed through the same lens or require different approaches.
The "Minimal" exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce runs until January 19, presenting visitors with the paradox of minimal art displayed to maximal effect. The show ultimately demonstrates that the minimal aesthetic remains a constant presence in contemporary art, though the experience can feel overwhelming as visitors navigate the vast space, checking off works while pursuing a conclusion that remains endlessly deferred.
