Max Wechsler — Chemins croisés — Dutko / Quai Voltaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 6 days: October 9 → November 15, 2025

On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Max Wechsler (1925–2020), Galerie Dutko is presenting from October 9 to November 15, 2025: Max Wechsler, Chemins croisés, a group exhibition paying tribute both to his work and to the artists who exchanged with, accompanied, and supported him throughout his career.

Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, Max Wechsler left Germany in 1939 for Paris and found refuge in various shelters across France. After the Liberation, he settled permanently in Paris, where he pursued an intense and singular artistic practice for more than fifty years.

His early works were marked by the influence of Paul Klee, before giving way to a profuse body of paintings with organic and floral motifs, at the crossroads of Art Brut and Surrealism. These works were shown by Pierre Gaudibert at the first exhibition of the A.R.C. in 1968. He then abandoned painting in favor of large surfaces of crumpled and kneaded paper, worked into a dense material. Finally, at the dawn of the 1990s, came the fragments of photocopied texts, cut and mounted on all supports and in all formats, where the letter alone—subjected to an endless process of transformation—became the “essential, primordial” material of a “textual texture” (Xavier Bougine), probing the very essence of matter and language, on the threshold between the legible and the unspeakable.

Max Wechsler associated with many artists, while remaining on the margins of schools and movements. This exhibition brings together, alongside major works by the artist, those of others who shared in his long journey: René Moreu (1920–2020), Georges Jeanclos (1933–1997), Michel Parmentier (1938–2000), Eberhard Blum (1940–2013), Côme Mosta-Heirt, René Guiffrey, Claude Chaussard, Béatrice Casadesus, and Rütjer Rühle.

Max Wechsler and these “chemins croisés” form a portrait in negative: that of an artist in resonance with others, steadfast in his demanding fidelity to his own research and to the silent power of his work.