Three Women Artists In Conversation At Perrotin New York Invite An Infinite Dialogue Exploring Place And Space

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Installation view of Sophie Calle “Behind the Curtain” at Perrotin New York, 2025. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. ©Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York, 2025 L: The Swimmer 2023 Digital colour photograph, silkscreen embroidered on veil, wooden frame 63 7/8 x 73 11/16 x 2 3/4 inches; R: Man with Pipe

Guillaume Ziccarelli

“It’s the title that informs us that we’re looking at a human form and that it’s swimming. No tension, no element that jeopardizes the harmony of the composition; I see a yielding, a surrender to nature, water and sky,” observes an employee at the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

An image of a blue eye internationally renowned artist Sophie Calle says Picasso used to stamp letters and postcards separates the next observation by a museum employee who gazed at The Swimmer (1929): “A woman-like figure swims, her forms rounded, the undulations of her limbs making the picture unusual and sensual. It’s a difficult question, pleasure, and it gives me pleasure. An organic feel, curves, an astonishing representation of the body, a totally improbable position, even for Picasso. It is often presented alone, its power enabling it to fit a whole wall.”

The thoughtful musings of eleven museum workers (curators, guards, and other staff) are woven together by Calle to create a fluid narrative on silkscreen embroidered on veil. The delicate curtain slightly obscures a digital color photograph of a drawing by a museum employee reimagining Picasso’s painting.

For the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death in 2023, the Parisian museum invited Calle to create a show in dialogue with the Spanish master.

“I would be crushed by him,” Calle told a group last Sunday morning during a walkthrough of her exhibition, Behind The Curtain, at Perrotin New York, articulating her trepidation. “I found out by chance, because of Covid, because when I arrived at the museum, every single work of Picasso was covered (for protection) … and I realized I could face his ghost. I could face its absence. And that was what pushed me to finally accept the show. So the whole show was built around him without him, but it was out of fear, not out of rejection. So I played with the memory of the painting.”

On view through October 18, the exhibition subverts traditional notions of perception, born from Calle’s bold takeover of the museum. The French conceptual artist, photographer, and writer concurrently presents an exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York titled Sophie Calle: On the Hunt.

Calle’s Phantom Picassos (2023) feature re-imaginings of Paul Drawing, Man with a Pipe, Swimming Woman, The Death of Casagemas, and Bather with a Book, because those works were on loan at the time. Another series on display, Picassos in lockdown (2022) showcases Calle’s large-scale digital color photographs of the works covered in paper or cloth. Displayed in the same first-floor gallery, Because (2018) comprises artworks composed of photographs in wooden frames under a curtain embroidered with a phrase explaining what triggered her photographic act. While Phantom Picassos cannot be touched, viewers are invited to lift the curtains to interact with the Because series. Finally, In Memory of Frank Gehry’s Flowers (2014) gathers photographs of ephemeral gifts the celebrated Canadian-American architect sent her after they met in Los Angeles in 1984 and offered to be her impresario.

The ambitious co-existence of this curation of Calle’s diverse works is magnified by the simultaneous placement of Leslie Hewitt’s exhibition Soft Tremulous Light on the second floor, and Monira Al Qadiri’s solo show Cosmic Machine on the light-filled third floor. Three women artists working in distinctive disciplines are flawlessly in conversation, inviting an infinite dialogue exploring place and space in unique ways.

“I’m in love with the trio of exhibitions at Perrotin this season,” Hewitt told viewers on Sunday.

Soft Tremulous Light is accompanied by the text Angles of a Landscape by Elleza Kelley, an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. as a joint inquiry and response to French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of “supermodernity” to describe contemporary societies characterized by excesses of time, space, and information. The exhibition includes representative works from the following: Riffs on Real Time, Birthmark, Rough Cuts and a new collaborative work titled Rhombus or Humming Song (1 – 4 – 5) with Hewitt’s fellow artist and life-partner Jamal Cyrus; minimally installed as a constellation.

“I’m in the relationship between photography and sculpture. I kind of live in that liminal space. And also found a lot of beauty, I think, in poetics, in that space,” Hewitt explained. “What really interests me was thinking about quiver, which is tremulous, the meaning of it, and thinking about light kind of not necessarily being something that’s static. You know, light travels from such long distances and hits (a) surface, and then it hits another surface, and then hits another surface and it hits water, anything that’s kind of moving, even just subtly, it responds to. And that became a really nice metaphor for me to think about how memory and echo and all of these maybe subtle qualities that we attribute to a photograph can be disrupted.”

Perrotin’s debut exhibition with Al Qadiri and the artist’s first show in New York, explores the intersections of global history, ecology, and the evolving relationship between natural and manufactured environments. The Kuwait-born artist who studied in Tokyo, Beirut, Amsterdam, and Berlin, reveals the myriad influences of these places on her dazzling new sculptures that explore the impacts of natural resource extraction, which both fuels political narratives and links us to the natural history of the planet. Al Qadiri’s monumental installation First Sun is concurrently presented by the Public Art Fund in Central Park.

“The main industry (in Kuwait) was pearl diving for about 2,000 years,” Al Qadiri said during the walkthrough. “My grandfather was a singer* on a pearl diving boat, and being a post-oil baby myself, I never could imagine any kind of relationship with this time, because I feel like oil really landed like an alien from outer space and invaded everything and caused a huge rupture and kind of historical narrative of the place.”

* The singer on a traditional Arabian Gulf pearl diving boat is known as a nahham. The captain would hire a nahham to lead the crew in songs to provide motivation and a rhythmic structure for the ardous labor of pearl diving.