Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation view of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, New York, Venus Over Manhattan, 2017
Installation video of Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, 2015
Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing
June 2 - July 26, 2017
Opening: Friday, June 2nd, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
VENUS
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
(New York, NY) – Beginning June 2nd, 2017, VENUS is pleased to present French Bashing, an exhibition of photographs, photomontages and related work by best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq, one of Europe’s most controversial cultural figures. Comprising two distinct environments conceived specifically by Houellebecq for VENUS, the show is his first in the United States. It will remain on view through August 4th.
Although Michel Houellebecq (b. 1958, La Réunion, France) has taken pictures for decades, he began exhibiting these images only a few years ago. Houellebecq’s photography is intimately linked to his writing practice, and he often composes scenes in his books while looking at a photograph he shot. At the invitation of Jean de Loisy, the President of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Houellebecq conceived and mounted his first exhibition in 2016 – an ambitious multipart presentation called Rester Vivant (To Stay Alive), foregrounding his photography against a dense multimedia narrative that unfolded through a sequence of galleries. For French Bashing at VENUS, Houellebecq has re-conceptualized and tailored two portions of Rester Vivant, completely transforming the gallery’s New York space with darkened walls, engineered lighting, floor coverings, and immersive soundscapes composed in collaboration with Raphaël Sohier.
French Bashing provides two visions of Western Europe as expressed by Michel Houellebecq. On view in the first room at VENUS is a set of photographs that variously depict train stations, tollbooths, apartment buildings, and movie theaters. Hung on darkly painted walls and individually lit with framing projectors, these images assemble a dystopian vision of France familiar from Houellebecq’s novels. Bleakly desaturated, the photographs capture the atmosphere of what Houellebecq calls “peri-urban” zones: despondent suburban areas surrounding larger cities where homes are valued according to their proximity to arteries of public transportation. Houellebecq superimposes lines from his novels and poetry onto some of these photographs. The first image visitors encounter in the exhibition bears the sentence, “It’s time to place your bets,” a quotation from Houellebecq’s poem “The Memory of the Sea;” the right panel of a large triptych bears a phrase from Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, Submission: “I had no more reason to kill myself than most of these people did.” In concert with Sohier’s ambient soundtrack, these enigmatic and provocative bits of language contribute to an ominous feeling throughout the space. Houellebecq’s point is driven home by the image of a crumbling concrete sign of the word “EUROPE,” suggesting a vision of a continent on the verge of decomposition.
In the next room, Houellebecq has produced an environment of a distinctly different nature. Here the floor is covered with garish laminated placemats advertising such tourist destinations as St. Tropez and Port-la-Nouvelle. Hung on bright white walls with fluorescent lighting, a group of photographs converge around visions of tourism. Heavily saturated images depict kitschy tour buses, coastal views, and beachside condos in France and Spain. One of these offers an aerial view of a Leader Price discount store that appears wedged into the side of a mountain. Like the images in the first room, the scenes Houellebecq shows here are eerily uninhabited. But in this well-lit space, elements of the natural world seem to encroach upon disused manmade structures. A brighter soundtrack, also composed by Sohier, fills the space with the sounds of vacation towns: children playing, people laughing, and the audio evidence of merriment in the distance.
ABOUT MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
Michel Houellebecq’s reputation as one of France’s most provocative cultural figures has grown over the course of his nearly three-decade career, through a series of novels that address subjects as varied as Islam, sexual tourism, and contemporary art. Widely discussed and often hotly contested, Houellebecq is also one of France’s most critically acclaimed novelists. In 2010, his book about the contemporary art world, La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory), was awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor. In 2015, Houellebecq published Soumission (Submission), a novel about the democratic election of a Muslim president who unexpectedly decides to govern the French state according to strict Islamic law. In a macabre turn of events, Houellebecq’s novel was published on the same day as the tragic Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris; in a dark coincidence, that week’s issue of the magazine featured a cartoon of Houellebecq on the cover, alongside the caption “The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq.” Houellebecq’s production, however, has never been limited to writing, and in 2016, he mounted a widely discussed and extremely well attended exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo called Rester Vivant (To Stay Alive), which featured a sweeping multimedia installation of Houellebecq’s photography, filmmaking, and writing.
For further information about the exhibition and availability, please contact the gallery at info@venusovermanhattan.com
For all press inquiries related to the exhibition, please email press@venusovermanhattan.com
IN HIS 2016 BOOK Mémoires d’outre-France, Gavin Bowd, a lifelong Marxist and close friend of Michel Houellebecq, reminisced about a night spent drinking with the novelist in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement.
On June 3, 2017, the day after writer Michel Houellebecq’s exhibition, French Bashing, opened at Venus Over Manhattan, three Islamist terrorists killed eight people, and wounded 48 more, on London Bridge and in the nearby Borough Market.
On a return trip to a five-star hotel that served as a location in his novel “The Map and the Territory” (2010), Michel Houellebecq took advantage of the escapades amoureuses on offer and signed up for a recommended balloon ride to survey the sprawl of hospital complexes, hypermarkets, and parking lots amid the rolling hills of otherwise bucolic Bourgogne.
Prolific French writer Michel Houellebecq is not one to shy away from controversy.
“We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters."
JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 color photographic works (30 single images and 1 triptych), unframed and mounted on aluminum, and alternately hung spotlit against black walls in the main gallery space/entry area and against white walls in the side room (with laminated tourist placemats covering the floor).
Michel Houellebecq is a wielder of blunt instruments.
The French writer was present in New York for the inauguration of his very first exhibition in the American city within the Venus gallery.
French novelist Michel Houellebecq is also a photographer.
Michel Houellebecq is undoubtedly the most talked about French writer.
Michel Houellebecq appreciates an aerial view — but a low one, slightly askew, not too far off the ground.
Michel Houellebecq was at home the other afternoon. He lives in an apartment in a nineteen-seventies high-rise in the Thirteenth Arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood of efficiency hotels and Asian grocery stores.
There’s a description in the French writer Michel Houellebecq’s best novel, The Map and the Territory, that recurs to me often.
About an hour into my conversation with Michel Houellebecq at VENUS over Manhattan, Adam Lindemann's Upper East Side gallery where Houellebecq photography exhibition "French Bashing" will be on display until August 4, Houellebecq wanted to go outside and have a cigarette.
I know (and I love) Michel Houellebecq books. But I didn’t know he is an artist.
Two years ago, the French author Michel Houellebecq again found himself at the center of controversy with his novel “Submission,” in which an Islamic political party wins the French election in 2022.
The French scandal author Michel Houellebecq has presented a selection of his works of art in the USA for the first time.
Scandalous author Michel Houellebecq has presented a selection of his works of art in the USA for the first time.
Author, poet, filmmaker in his spare time, Michel Houellebecq is also a photographer.
Acclaimed author Michel Houellebecq is an “aging enfant terrible”[1] of French literature.
Time goes by and Michel Houellebecq does not come.
Michel Houellebecq était vendredi à New York pour inaugurer sa première exposition dans la métropole américaine, mais il a été peu disert et a même annulé au dernier moment une intervention, étant un peu souffrant.
Dozens of photos and photomontages have been on display since Friday at Galerie Venus on the Upper East Side in New York.
Michel Houellebecq shows for the first time his photographic skills in New York.
Last Friday, LSP met French lit star Michel Houellebecq in New York City at the opening of his first US art show "Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing," a miniature adaptation of his Paris 2016 exhibit "Rester Vivant" (To Stay Alive).
The French writer Michel Houellebecq lands overseas and does so in a visual artist shoes.
Exhibition: Venus Over Manhattan - Michel Houellebecq: French Bashing
VENUS (980 Madison Avenue) opens the first US exhibition of photos and photomontages by French novelist Michael Houellebecq.
After Staying Alive, at the Palais de Tokyo in 2016, a shrewd, obsessive and banal film director, the famous French writer, comes to the United States with a new version mixing photomontages and immersive soundscapes.
France's bad boy of literature, Michel Houellebecq, is about to open his first exhibition in the US, a multimedia work titled French Bashing that takes a mournful look at the country's “peri-urban” wastelands whose inhabitants vote largely for far-Right leader Marine Le Pen.
He is not only a successful writer Michel Houellebecq: he has also been a filmmaker, actor, singer and photographer.
Michel Houellebecq launches a new exhibition in the United States
Houellebecq back to take care of the visual arts with a new project between paranoia and obsessions that exhibited for the first time in New York.
Following the author’s participation in Europe’s roving Manifesta 11 biennale and his major show at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo last June, American fans will finally get a chance to see the French novelist’s artworks at Adam Lindemann’s Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York this summer.
Michel Houellebecq—the controversial, award-winning French author of novels including Atomised and Platform—is showing his photographs, photomontages and installations at Venus gallery in New York next month (2 June-4 August), marking his exhibition debut in the US.
