Almine Rech

Youngju Joung’s ‘Spring series’ from 2023, is featured in ‘X Collection 404: When Landscapes Draw Near’, which is currently on view through August 16, 2026 at the X Museum in Beijing, China! As the fifth collection exhibition, it focuses on the idea of landscape as a subject continuously revisited throughout art history, bringing together more than 40 Chinese and international contemporary artists. The exhibition aims to expand the notion of landscape beyond nature, encompassing imagination, inner experience, constructed space, and contemporary realities.



•

South Korean artist Youngju Joung paints unique cityscapes inspired by her native country. Softly lit at twilight, her works capture sprawling urban scenes that stretch beyond view, speckled with flickering lights that hint at a dense yet unseen human presence.

The artist creates these images by crumpling and unfolding traditional Korean paper upon which she paints her work. By creasing, scratching and wrinkling the paper, the artist evokes a way of life that feels authentically dilapidated, used and reused; and yet it retains a distinctly warm and peaceful atmosphere. The medium itself has endured a wearing process, just as the buildings it presents. These paintings do not beautify or exaggerate, they are honest representations of exposed bricks, slate rooftops and rusted gates. These homes are reflections of their humble occupants, dimly lit and ageing, we are absorbed into this world at a fleeting moment of natural beauty before darkness descends. At the centre of this peaceful transition lies a sacred domestic routine, where each light represents a life, faintly glowing amongst the hum of the living city.

•

Installation views
Courtsey of X Museum

•

Wishing Leelee Kimmel () a wonderful birthday! To celebrate, we begin we spotlight her work ‘Midnight Duel’ (2022–2024), before revisiting her solo exhibitions with the gallery: ‘The Wilds and the Shore’ at Almine Rech New York in 2024 and ‘Night Ride’ at Almine Rech Shanghai in 2022! Finally, we look at her most recent group exhibition, ‘The Living Room’, presented earlier this year at Reiffers Initiatives in Paris, France.

•

‘Kimmel reframes the ongoing question of abstraction as a severely controlled discipline—the art is abstract so it has to be extra tough formally, you know—and the regressive and infantile pleasures in just letting go . . . just. But such regression should never be underestimated; it is a generative and profound force. Kimmel’s paintings traffic in mess and spillage, and there is more than a hint of the nursery room. It’s all very antic and a little bit scary, this loud Kimmel world.’

— David Rimanelli, ‘Leelee Kimmel’, Artforum, 2018

•

Leelee Kimmel’s paintings aren’t specifically referential, though there are references to be had: from Miró and Masson to Twombly, Basquiat, Jonathan Lasker. And there’s a strange connection to Philip Guston, too—Kimmel’s abstractions have Guston’s nervous line recrudescences; think of the textures of his forlorn shoes. Kimmel deals in a kind of electrocuted biomorphism that’s descended from Surrealism, but the life’s been polluted by the morph: incandescent amoebas, skittering deep-sea/outer-space/inner-voyage paramecia, flagella, the world of Ernst Haeckel pumped up with unreal colors. Even the pastels are harsh, bright.

•

1.Artist portrait, 2022
photo: Charles Roussel

2.Detail of ‘Midnight Duel’, 2022-2024
Acrylic, oil, and oil stick on canvas

3-5. ‘The Wilds and the Shore’, Almine Rech New York, 2024
Photos: Thomas Barratt

6-8.’Night Ride’, Almine Rech Shanghai, 2022
Photos: Rebecca Fanuele

9.Installation of ‘The Living Room’, on view at Reiffers Initiatives, Paris, France from February 26 to March 28, 2026
Photo: Louis Paquin
•

Chloe Wise’s solo exhibition in Switzerland ‘Extrasensory’ is opening this Friday, June 12 at The Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G. The exhibition marks the artist’s first major presentation in the country and introduces her most expansive film project to date, set within a large-scale immersive installation.



•

The exhibition understands perception not as a neutral reception of reality, but as an active, mediating process shaped by language, history, and cultural expectations. Wise introduces figures that evoke angels, supernatural beings, or technological apparitions, yet present themselves as unstable constructs. The curator Samuel Leuenberger notes: “This exhibition is less about defining phenomena than about how they are experienced. Chloe Wise stays with moments where perception and language begin to falter, allowing uncertainty to remain active rather than resolved. The figures that appear function as cultural tools, ways of thinking through encounters with the unknown. In an era of forced clarity, ‘Extrasensory’ insists on ambiguity as a form of resistance.”

At the heart of ‘Extrasensory’ is a multichannel video installation in which moving images unfold across a constellation of large screens, enveloping the viewer in a shifting, cinematic environment. Across these screens, seven archetypes emerge as embodiments of mystical or metaphysical phenomena. The protagonists inhabit exaggerated roles that blur belief systems, cultural archetypes, and ideological projections. The films visually echo the iconography of Wise’s paintings while drawing on the aesthetics of late 20th century film and television, a seductive, uncanny register that underscores the exhibition’s critique of persuasion, fantasy, and mass imagery.

•

The exhibition is curated by Samuel Leuenberger.

•

Filmshots ‘EXTRASENSORY’
Chloe Wise, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G, 2026 - Photo: ©️ Logan White

•

AlmineRech

These are the last days to visit ‘ARACHNE,’ Alejandro Cardenas’ seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, on view at Almine Rech New York until this Saturday, June 13, 2026.
cardenas

•

After nearly eight years of continuous painting, with his cast of anthropomorphic characters evolving across various fictional domestic and environmental realms, his new body of work—the first made completely analog, by purely drawing and painting, without any digital engagement—places his humanoid figures living life to the fullest in an abandoned futuristic world. His post-human creatures make love in a stylish room overlooking modernist, geometric towers in an overgrown city reclaimed by nature, playfully dance in a circle while holding hands and delighting in their folly, and bring a guitar to a stylish terrace with a commanding view of a peaceful, carefree domain, dressed to the nines.

— Paul Laster, writer, editor, and curator

•

Photos by Dan Bradica
©️ Alejandro Cardenas - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

•

Discover ‘Piene, Mack, Uecker – Light, Space and Time’, a group show highlighting the three founding members of group ZERO: Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, and Günther Uecker, on view at Almine Rech Paris, Matignon until July 25, 2026!
foundation

•

The context in which ZERO was born remains worth remembering: a world in ruins laid waste by war, on the threshold of a new era marked at once by major technological advances and social transformation, and haunted by the threat of nuclear annihilation and the onset of runaway globalization, a world in which humanity would methodically accelerate the destruction of its own resources. Far from the lyricism of Expressionism or the dogmatism of preceding movements, Piene, Mack, and Uecker embraced a clean break with a striking freedom of form. Like any good cosmogony, their work would start from nothing, finding in destruction the welcome promise of a new beginning. Burned or nailed, the canvas sometimes became a battlefield — its ash and ruins the very substrate of a fresh cycle.

— Matthieu Jacquet, writer and journalist

•

Photos by Ana Drittanti
©️ Heinz Mack - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
©️ Archive Otto Piene - Courtesy Archive Otto Piene and Almine Rech
©️ Günther Uecker

•

Happy birthday to Jess Valice ()! In celebration, we’re looking back at her recent presentation at her gallery exhibitions ‘Home is Not a Place’ in 2025 at Almine Rech Paris and ‘Mara’ in 2024 at Almine Rech New York! We also look at her most recent solo presentation at Saint Laurent Rive Droite Los Angeles and curated by Anthony Vaccarello, which closed last month.

•

“Home has never felt like a fixed place,” Valice confesses. “I’ve always carried a sense of displacement with me.”

‘Driven by her lifelong fascination with psychology and neuroscience, she passionately explores the multifaceted nature of home, bringing us into her deeply personal doubts and existential inquiries. Recalling Rilke’s concept of “world-innerspace” or “the house that stands inside me” transcends physicality, representing a sense of belonging rooted in culture, religion, or personal experience.’

— Lisa Boudet, writer and curator
(‘Home is Not a Place’ Almine Rech Paris 2025!)

•

Jess Valice is a Los Angeles-based figurative painter recognized for her melancholic, big-eared, doe-eyed figures. Focussing on the human condition, Valice’s oil paintings and charcoal or oil stick drawings explore the parables of the animalistic gaze. Her figurative works combine within one framework the romantic and the forlorn, the recognizable and mysterious, the religious and irreverent, and the extreme subjectivity of content with sternly objective forms. The artist’s interest stems from her childhood negligence of religious involvement, yet instant attraction to the liturgical artwork adorned in places of worship. Valice’s figures share similar features to the face and body of the artist with seemingly uncomfortable or exhausted bearings in sometimes congenial environments.

•

1.Portrait, 2023 / ©️ Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech - Photo: Dan Streit

2.Snippet studio visit video

3-5. ’Home is Not a Place’, Almine Rech Paris, Turenne, 2025

6-8.’Mara’ , Almine Rech New York, 2024

9-10.Solo exhibition Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Los Angeles, CA, US, 2026
Photos: Matthew Kroening

•

Discover ‘CURIOUSLY’, Javier Calleja’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view at Almine Rech Paris, Turenne until July 25, 2026!



•

“I tried to do something new and I did the same, so now I do the same and it seems really new,” Calleja tells me — his works invariably described as featuring “characters with big eyes.” It is strange, because there is so much more, it seems to me, beyond those big eyes; yet they have come to stand in for the elusive strangeness of his work. Intimate, simple, immediate on the surface, his works are in truth extraordinarily complex and disorienting, never fully resolved. What they assert is less a univocal statement than a vehicle for reaching something less legible, deeper, perhaps inaccessible. They illuminate — even as they preserve their shadows — something seminal within us, something we reach for, ceaselessly, without ever quite arriving.

— Éric Troncy, art critic, curator, and co-director of Consortium Museum in Dijon, France

•

Photos by Nicolas Brasseur
©️ Javier Calleja - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

•

Almine Rech is pleased to announce that Thu-Van Tran’s work ‘Colors of Grey’, from 2024, is now part of the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, US.



•

A major figure on the French art scene, Thu-Van Tran now enjoys international recognition. In 2017, she gained widespread attention with a remarkable installation at the Venice Biennale. The following year, she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2022 she completed a major site-specific commission for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. More recently, her work was exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection. Over the past two decades, she has developed a wide-ranging body of work, whose cosmic dimension is evident in her sculptural installations, monumental frescoes, and film-based narratives.

•

‘Colors of Grey’, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
195 x 140 cm
77 x 55 in
Photo by Nicolas Brasseur
©️ Thu-Van Tran - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

•

Almine Rech is pleased to announce the representation of Keita Morimoto in New York and Paris, alongside a series of recent institutional acquisitions of the artist’s work. Following his inaugural solo exhibition with Almine Rech New York in 2025, Morimoto’s work will be presented by the gallery at Art Basel in Switzerland this June, ahead of a solo exhibition at Almine Rech Paris in 2027.



•

“I have long been intrigued by the scenes depicted in Keita’s paintings, which are invariably set at night. Illuminated by the glow of the contemporary city, his figures belong to a generation born in the 1990s. They are part of an urban youth that discovers a sense of freedom after dark. Light has been a central subject for several artists from earlier generations represented by the gallery, and Keita brings a singular vision to it, one deeply rooted in the realities of the present day and conveyed through an exceptional command of painting.”

-Almine Rech

•

Keita Morimoto (born 1990, Osaka, Japan) engages deeply with the techniques and themes of Baroque lighting, early 20th-century American Realism, and pre-modern Genre Painting. By referencing these historical movements, he reimagines contemporary urban life, transforming ordinary streets into extraordinary narratives.

•

1.Portrait of Keita Morimoto, 2024 / ©️ Keita Morimoto - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo: Haruta

2.National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada
‘Vermilion Night’, 2025
Acrylic and oil on linen
Photo: Shin Inaba

3.Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
‘Unseen Passage’, 2025
Acrylic and oil on linen
Photo: Osamu Sakamoto

4.Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, US
‘Last Call’, 2025
Acrylic and oil on linen
Photo: Shin Inaba

5.Dallas Museum of Art, TX, US
‘The Way Back’, 2025
Acrylic and oil on linen
Photo: Shin Inaba

©️ Keita Morimoto
Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

•