Jochen Gerz — Abraham & Wolff, Paris
The Abraham & Wolff gallery presents an intimate and all the more poignant exhibition dedicated to Jochen Gerz. A selection of rare works reveals a plastic trajectory where the invention of form is never a stylistic effect but always a vector of thought. For Gerz, the image is not merely something offered to the gaze: it becomes a critical device, whose displacements invent the very movement it withholds from reality. The event becomes narrative, carving an alternative history through the viewer’s own gaze.
A conceptual artist trained notably in philology, Jochen Gerz (b. 1940) embraced from early on an approach where text, image, and public participation formed the basis of a new visual language. From the 1970s onward, he emerged as a major figure of European conceptual art, and, like many of his most illustrious contemporaries, reimagined the very conditions through which memory could be transmitted, no longer as immutable legacy, but as open and collective construction.
This “small” yet profoundly refined exhibition offers a striking moment in the history of photography—one that, from its inception, always overflowed its own medium. Echoes of the avant-garde are perceptible, but so too is a clear conti- nuity with contemporary practices that question the performative nature of the image.
As much proposals for action as for contemplation, the photo-texts and editioned objects shown here establish bridges between artistic forms, while interrogating the very conditions of their display. The image—often fragmented, reassembled, or embedded in manipulable devices—becomes a tool, a compositional element whose arrangement betrays its dual nature as something inherently “manipulable,” both physically and semantically. Never static, it carries within it a perpetual instability, echoed poignantly in the piece spelling the word Revolut with dice—three of which (R, E, and D in this agencement) lie toppled, leaving interpretation deliberately open. Here, a multitude of potential meanings embraces the tragedy of history and its abandoned revolutions, as well as the vanity of a time destined to pass—unless it gestures toward a fu- ture reconstruction yet to come.
As a prelude to his later participatory works that invited passers-by to inscribe their own messages, Gerz already explores here the tension between vision and responsibility, between personal memory and collective narrative.
Through these sober yet powerfully evocative arrangements, the exhibition calls forth a reflective awareness of looking—without losing sight of the spatial configuration of a work whose visual force feels perhaps even more acute to- day, in its distilled account of a fragmented everyday. Seeing, here, is already a critical act.
Never more resonant than when shown in its barest form, reality reclaims a poetic and political strength born of uncertainty—of the rift between what is shown and what is said, between what is exposed and what is truly seen. In this economy of effects, and through a judicious reduction of a prolific body of work to a select few examples, the hanging achieves a necessary synthesis, transforming the visit into a discreet manifesto—a gaze turned wholly toward thought.
Jochen Gerz, Revolut… Abraham & Wolff, 12, rue des Saints-Pères, 75007, Paris — 06.06 — 07.24.2025 Read more
