Galerie Eric Mouchet

Ulrich Baehr (born in 1938), working from his studio above Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing point between East and West Berlin, painted in the 1960s the major events of recent history, taking his inspiration from famous press photographs. His images, including the portrait of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta conference, are obviously immediately identifiable. Reworking them with large brush strokes and bright colours and sometimes leaving them unfinished lends the paintings a cathartic dimension, compromised somewhat when the portrait of Hitler features. To show how the figure of Hitler was hyper-publicized, in 1970-72 Baehr produced painting-sculptures of details from the photographic portraits of the dictator, which although fragmentary are immediately recognisable, giving food for thought on the immense capacity of the human brain to fill in gaps. These painting-sculptures are now almost all kept in German museums, including the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, and the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin. In the years that followed and up to the present day, Baehr continued his career as an excellent colourist painter, a witness to key world events. He created a whole series of landscapes of a Berlin bristling with cranes even as following the fall of the Wall, his Checkpoint Charlie district was thoroughly revamped. Even his more recent landscapes testify to the melancholy caused by the threat that hovered over his city for so long.

Ella Bergmann-Michel (1895-1971) and her husband Robert Michel (1897-1983) were among the most important and original artists of the 20th-century German avant-garde. Very close friends of Kurt Schwitters , they were, with him, among the precursors of abstract collage. Members of the group “das neue Frankfurt”, they saw all the big names of the European avant-garde pass through their mill in Vockenhausen. In addition to their abundant graphic, artistic and advertising output, Ella’s modernist contribution extended to photography and film, and Robert’s to architecture.

Kubra Khademi is a Hazara artist and performer from Afghanistan born in 1989. Through her practice, Kubra Khademi explores her life as a refugee and a woman. She studied fine arts at Kabul University, before joining Beaconhouse University in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore she began creating public performances, a practice she continued on her return to Kabul, in response to a male-dominated society with extreme patriarchal politics. After the execution of her performance known as Armor in 2015, she was forced to flee the country. Taking refuge in France, she obtained French citizenship in 2020.
Today, she lives and works in Paris. In 2016, she received the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Nominated for the Emerige Revelations in 2019 and laureate of the 1% art market of the city of Paris in 2020, Kubra Khademi is in residence at the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville until 2021 and then at the ISCP thanks to the Salomon Foundation.
Her work has been presented in numerous venues, including the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Kunsthalle Thun, Void Contemporary Art Centre (Derry Londonderry), Pablo’s birthday (New York), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Bangkok Biennial, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), El Rastro (Madrid), Signal (Brussels), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), MuCEM (Marseilles), Fondation Fiminco (Romainville). In 2022, she will design the poster for the Avignon Festival in addition to her solo exhibition at the Collection Lambert. At the same time, she is presenting a major solo exhibition at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern in Germany.
Since 2016, Latitudes Productions has accompanied the development of her artistic and performative projects, while her plastic work is represented by the Eric Mouchet Gallery.

The Middle East, non-internationally recognised countries, radioactive or forbidden zones considered as “involuntary nature parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has travelled through or inhabit-ed. The artist, born in Paris in 1981, uses video, photography and sculptural installations to present a silent, sometimes mystical image of these areas marked by past violence or shaken by major conflicts. His moving pictures, made up of still shots that are often long and devoid of human presence, tell of the impossibility of capturing these spaces that have been abandoned, transformed, imbued with beliefs and strewn with stigmata.
In 2004, he moved to Tokyo for several years, then to Berlin and Brussels. In 2010 and 2011 he spent long months travelling alone by motorbike to Chernobyl, then to Iraqi Kurdistan and the Republic of Na-gorno-Karabakh. In 2014, he spent several months in residence in Bahrain, then in Russia at the NCCA Kronstadt. He then spent several months in northern Iraq, where he shot his video, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin and documented the abandoned villages on the Islamic State front line and the refugee camps between Kirkuk and Mosul, before being selected for the Emerige Revelation grant in 2015 and present-ing his first solo exhibition at the Dohyang Lee gallery in 2016, with the support of the CNAP.
In 2017, he was resident for several months in Lebanon, then at Hestia Belgrade – travelling to all the republics of the former Yugoslavia – and organised an exhibition there with Gaël Charbau, before winning the SAM prize for contemporary art. After spending seven months in East Africa, from the ghettos of Kampala in Uganda to Rwanda and Ethiopia, then to Mogadishu in Somalia, he will present a trilogy of exhibitions in spring 2019 at the Palais de Tokyo (curator: Adélaïde Blanc) and in the Eric Mouchet and Dohyang Lee galleries in Paris (curator: Aurélie Faure). In 2020 he was awarded the 1% artistic prize by the city of Paris and exhibited his project “Droptank” at the Musée d’art Moderne de la ville de Paris.
Between July 2021 and August 2023 he will be living in Iraq, between Kerbala, Babylon, Baghdad and Mosul, where he will be continuing to work on his projects and organising introductory workshops in conceptual photography and video art with the Iraqi NGO “The Station” for people taken hostage by the Islamic State.
In September 2023, he organised two solo exhibitions curated by Léo Marin at the Galerie Eric Mouchet in Paris and Brussels, and is preparing two other exhibitions at the Institut Français in Baghdad and the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris in 2024.
In parallel with his peregrinations, he has been collecting and scrutinising stones since 2007, drawing on a body of work inherited from the preoccupations of Pliny the Elder and the Medici quattrocento, ques-tioning the perception of landscape, the concreteisation of the world and the mineralisation of hearts, while often defining the scope of his investigations and research as ranging from the “lithic to the political”.