Hugo Galerie is pleased to present Winter Collective I, the first of this season’s two group exhibitions. And for one artist, this exhibition will be her debut with the gallery. HUGO welcomes friends new and old to join us for this exciting start to a new decade. Bonne année!
Elizabeth Allison creates dreamy, drippy watercolors that come into clarity upon realizing they are not mere scenes but feelings. François Anton’s mixed-media paintings delight with their central character’s awkward relatability—down to the chewing gum on the sole of his shoe. Jesús Curiá crafts archetypal forms from elemental materials to profess a fundamental unity that grounds the experience of being human. Fabienne Delacroix’s fanciful paintings delicately capture Paris’s belle époque past and twinkle with a joie de vivre as vivid as today. Philippe H. Dequesne composes sweeping vistas that captivate with their enthusiastic and edited attention to color and perspective. Ġoxwa employs an encaustic technique to lend her canvases a dimensionality and historicity reminiscent of frescos, yet the intimacy with which she engages her subjects replicates real-time encounters.
The bucolic and immersive landscapes of Albert Hadjiganev engulf viewers as if they’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole into a pastoral memory of perfection. Philippe Charles Jacquet is an architectural painter; he plans his landscapes and their structures with geometric accuracy, building them in a layered variety of media and methods until they are as real as they are imagined. The incredible depth and detail of Chizuru Morii Kaplan’s watercolors flicker like shadows across city sidewalk puddles. The heavily textured sculptures of Joseph Paxton are so stylized yet alive, so substantial yet nimble, so personal yet conceptual, it is impossible to say whether they are individual animals or primal totems. Patrick Pietropoli’s paintings are studies in precision; from their architectural tenacity to their concise color palettes, no detail is taken for granted. The harbors and seascapes of Xavier Rodés are nearly devotional in their ability to inspire tranquility and bring to life the serenity of an industrial space at peace.