Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel — La Sève et la Vase — Loevenbruck Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 8 days: October 18 → November 22, 2025

There are those who go for order, love neat boxes, practice budgeted conventional morality and cultivate institutional tedium. And there are Dewar and Gicquel, for whom straying from the beaten track is a mark of respect for the viewer’s intelligence and sensibility, and humour is the ultimate form of politeness — all this hand in hand with love for the material, the tradition of technique and the magic of language. True heirs of surrealism, for a quarter of a century now these two artists have been ploughing the furrow of the relation between words and the images associated with them, continuing to marvel at the composite flowers that shoot forth from their hybrid inseminations.

For the autumn season of 2025, the duo are presenting two seemingly very different artistic ambiences in Galerie Loevenbruck’s spaces on Rue Jacques-Callot, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés: at number 6, the gallery opened in 2010, and at number 12, the space inaugurated in 2024, former home of the Galerie Surréaliste (1926-1928). But this diversity of ambience is only apparent: since their early days, Dewar and Gicquel have always explored the same themes and the same subjects, tirelessly reworking their art or, more exactly, their artworks.

At number 6, its metal floor reflecting the light from the glass roof and its large view window giving onto the street, Dewar and Gicquel are transforming a contemporary loft space into a poetic aquarium in which strips of shimmering silk that shift with the slightest breath of wind make water lilies and aquatic ranunculi sway over a strange rock in pink Portuguese marble that is half-mollusc and half-mammal. Invited to come in through the glass façade, passers-by enter the aquarium, becoming its incongruous lodger, following in the wake of a fugacious carp. In this luxurious world of marble and painted silk, art for art’s sake swims freestyle.

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Oak Cabinet with giant Flanders rabbit and feet, 2022 — Chêne, 103 x 120 x 60,5 cm © Photo Benjamin Baltus

At number 12, with the curtains of the façade hiding a parqueted space, Dewar and Gicquel present an interior comprising pieces of furniture, wall panels in sculpted wood and a hanging made up of assembled embroideries. Visitors who venture into what is once again the “intimate boudoir” that was the Galerie Surréaliste (the expression was coined by one of the architects behind its recent renovation) will soon realise that the ordinary decoys the duo has placed there are uncommon game: the knife-carved wall panels exalt mundane items such as apple tarts, flutes and a homely hand-knitted sweater. The sideboard is already cluttered and the benches are invaded by snails; the millefleurs hanging is an excerpt from a catalogue of common or even harmful plants and insects, majestically displayed. In this joyous strangeness, decorative art is rattling its chains.

Véronique Wiesinger, “Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel: Sculpture as an art of living?”, in The Journal, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, La Sève et la Vase (The Sap and the Silt), Paris: Éditions Loevenbruck, to be published on October 21, 2025.