NEW YORK, NY.- Bienvenu Steinberg & C will present Fates of Works, Rapha雔 Denis’s first exhibition in the United States. Bringing together works and series from 2018 to the present. An artist-researcher, Denis has spent more than ten years examining the looting of Jewish property during World War II. His conceptual practice takes the form of objects and installations. addressing questions of provenance and the future of artworks as political, historical, and civilizational issues.
Fleeing Nazism before moving to New York during World War II, Paul Rosenberg was a Parisian art dealer of the interwar period. Hundreds of works from his personal collection and gallery inventory—including paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, L間er, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Renoir, Degas, C閦anne, and Bonnard—were looted by the German occupiers. After the war, Rosenberg recovered most of his artworks.
Presented on a console in front of wallpaper featuring Denis’s five-volume artist’s book, Fonds Paul Rosenberg, les ann閑s parisiennes (The Paul Rosenberg Fund, the Parisian Years), brings together more than 4,000 artworks in Rosenberg’s possession. A copy is now in MoMA’s collection. Facing it are 14 recent works from La Loi normale des erreurs (The Normal Law of Errors), derived from the looting of the Rosenberg collection. Paintings by Picasso, Degas, and Matisse hang facing backward.
The second part of the exhibition shifts to themes of censorship and destruction. A scale model reconstructs Denis’s 2024 exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, centered on provenance research into a painting in the museum’s collection. Thanks to his research and intervention, the painting, tentatively identified as a Modigliani, is currently restituted to the descendants of the Jewish owner from whom it was stolen more than 80 years ago in France.
Fahrenheit, Shelf, a scorched wooden bookshelf in the shape of books, pays tribute to Alfred Kantorowicz, who founded the German Freedom Library (Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek) in Paris. Inseparable from Fahrenheit, Index Librorum Prohibitorum evokes the Vatican’s prohibition. Finally, La Loi normale des erreurs : KR 229 (The Normal Law of Errors: KR 229), a sculpture depicting Marie Antoinette evokes the fate of Jewish artists and collectors under the Occupation while recalling war and armed conflict.
Rapha雔 Denis (b. 1979) lives and works between Brussels and Paris. His work considers the art market, museums, and collecting, with particular attention to the destruction, displacement, and restitution of artworks. His work is held in collections including Fondation Franc鑣, FRAC Alsace, the Reiner Speck Foundation, and the Biblioth鑡ue Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou. Select exhibitions include Galerie Sator, Paris, France (2026); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2025); Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany (2024); Mus閑 d’Art et d’Histoire du Juda飐me, Paris, France (2024); Kunsthaus Z黵ich, Zurich, Switzerland (2023, 2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2020, 2019); Museum Berggruen, Berlin, Germany (2018); Mus閑 National Picasso-Paris, Paris, France (2015); and Mus閑 du Louvre, Paris, France (2014).
