Shows: Chloé Quenum
Galerie Joseph Tang Sculpture inhabits a precarious position in the genre-bending inclusiveness of contemporary art, which, encouraged by the digital turn of culture at large, lately prizes ephemerality at the expense of monumentality and a cartoonish or kitsch grotesque in lieu of ‘process’: Carsten Höller’s groovy tube slides descending from Richard Serra’s massive rolls of steel via Dan Graham’s playfully reflexive pavilions. The need for statuary or commemoration in the 21st century feels equally superfluous amongst artists of the younger generation, after Jeff Koons, so sculpture slips into a liminal space somewhere between image and environment, drifting far from figurative aesthetic notions of representation and beauty toward the anti-humanist installation, complete with a post-Duchampian fetish for the consumer object despite any art historian’s theories of dematerialization. The young French artist Chloé Quenum’s recent work addresses a less sensational, still somewhat tongue-in-cheek legacy of Modernism; that of post-Minimalism.

