California
September 11 – October 14, 2025
Cahiers d’Art, 14–15 rue du Dragon, Paris
Cahiers d’Art is pleased to announce California, a group exhibition on view from September 11 to October 14, 2025, across both spaces at 14 and 15 rue du Dragon.
Bringing together works that span sculpture, drawing, and painting, the exhibition traces the distinctive energy of California’s art scene from the late 1950s to today.
California shows works by four seminal figures — John Baldessari, Ken Price, Raymond Pettibon, and Alex Israel — whose practices defined and reimagined contemporary art while remaining deeply rooted in the cultural landscape of the West Coast. Their influence extends far beyond Los Angeles, yet each engages, in different ways, with the myths and contradictions that California projects: a place of light and experimentation, but also of fracture, irony, and perpetual reinvention.
Ken Price
Ken Price was a relentlessly inventive artist who continually changed the forms, surfaces, colours, and shapes of his sculptures throughout his five-decade career. Six drawings and two sculptures spanning 1966 to 2006 demonstrate this unique approach.
Price broke with both functional craft and high modernist purity, developing biomorphic ceramics and hallucinatory works on paper whose acid colours and bodily tactility evoke counterculture as much as landscape. His practice carved out a new sculptural language that continues to shape the terms of contemporary art today.
John Baldessari
John Baldessari, a central figure in postmodern art, is represented here with four works from his Nose & Ears, Etc. from the Gemini Series. Each work speaks a language that is at once rigorous and playful, revealing a spatial intelligence that pulses through the rhythm of the images and the interplay of bodies, objects, and surfaces. In this series, the fragment becomes portrait, and irony becomes form.
Baldessari transformed the vernacular of Southern California — the language of advertising, cinema, and mass imagery — into a conceptual practice that redefined the relationship between word and image. His work destabilized hierarchies between high and low culture, and his influence, while rooted in Los Angeles, became foundational to contemporary art globally.
Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon brings yet another voice: lyrical, raw, and uncompromising. His drawing No Pickle Games (2008) connects the everyday vernacular of baseball to a broader visual poetry that has absorbed surf culture, punk music, literature, and political unrest.
At once intensely personal and culturally resonant, Pettibon’s work has defined an alternative current in contemporary art, fusing image and text in ways that resist closure and complicate meaning.
Alex Israel
Alex Israel, with his series Flats (2012), explores Los Angeles through Hollywood’s studio facades — surface and myth collapsing into one another, image as both mask and truth.
Flats are intended to evoke the experience of “Hollywooding,” a term used by the artist to describe the unique character of the city. His practice reflects a contemporary mode of self-mythology, updating the legacy of West Coast image-making for a media-saturated era.
