Gordon Matta Clark (reflected) and Yvon Lambert, at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, 1975.
For Art-Agenda’s latest dispatch, Mara Hoberman eulogizes the long-running Yvon Lambert. The Parisian gallery closed with an exhibition by Adel Abdessemed.
She writes:
“Fifty-plus years spent working with contemporary artists puts Lambert in the rare position of being both an art historical footnote and a current art market player…In hindsight Lambert’s career resembles an art historical timeline marked with milestone moments from the second half of the twentieth century. Among them: the show in 1977 for which Gordon Matta-Clark dug a five-meter deep hole in the floor of Lambert’s Left Bank gallery titled Rendez-Vous, Sous-Sol (Descending Steps for Batan) (1977) (notably thirty years before Urs Fischer did the same at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York), and a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition in 1988, which would be the artist’s only solo show in Paris during his lifetime. More recently, in the 1990s, Lambert exhibited new talents who would become some of the most important artists of their time, namely: Nan Goldin, Anselm Kiefer, and Douglas Gordon. The youngest generation in Lambert’s stable—the up-and-comers who have helped bring the gallery into the new millennium—include Loris Gréaud, Mircea Cantor, and Jill Magid. Which brings us to the present and final exhibition. Though Lambert and Abdessemed have collaborated previously (on a book: Les Livres de AA, published earlier this year), the artist has not had a show at the gallery until now. Given Lambert’s perpetual forward motion, it seems fitting that his final exhibition also marks a first.”