PARIS.- Two artists with distinctly different approaches to making art are taking over Galerie Lelong's Paris spaces this autumn. Beginning October 19, 2026, the gallery presents Thtre imaginaire, an exhibition of paintings by German artist Magnus Plessen, alongside Kind of Blue, a selection of recent sculptures by American artist Arlene Shechet. Together, the exhibitions offer contrasting yet complementary perspectives on the human experience, exploring how memory, physical gestures, imagination, and materials can shape artistic expression.
Running through November 14, the exhibitions also mark important moments in the gallery's relationships with both artists. Galerie Lelong is inaugurating its representation of Plessen with a presentation of twenty paintings created between 2024 and 2026, while Shechet, whose work has helped reshape contemporary understandings of ceramics, is making her debut at the Paris gallery.
At 38 avenue Matignon, Plessen invites visitors into a world where recognizable figures and abstract forms exist in a state of constant transformation. Born in Hamburg in 1967 and now based in Berlin, the self-taught artist initially explored painting before experimenting with photography and filmmaking. He returned his attention entirely to painting in 1999, developing a visual language in which bodies, gestures, and fragmented identities become vehicles for psychological exploration.
The title Thtre imaginaire, or Imaginary Theatre, offers a clue to the atmosphere of the exhibition. Rather than presenting a conventional theatrical setting, Plessen constructs a mental stage where memories, desires, and imagined encounters unfold without following a fixed narrative.
Nearly all the paintings emerge from the artist's imagination. The exception is My Dying Father, a work that introduces a more explicitly personal dimension to a presentation otherwise shaped by fictional scenes and elusive relationships.
Within these compositions, figures appear to assume different roles, sometimes blending into one another or becoming difficult to distinguish. Faces shift, multiply, and merge, while hands emerge as particularly expressive elements. Their gestures create a sense of physical closeness, suggesting intimacy, vulnerability, or connection even when the broader scene remains ambiguous.
There is something deliberately unresolved about these paintings. Instead of offering viewers a story with a beginning and an end, Plessen creates encounters that seem to be taking place somewhere between memory and imagination. The resulting images encourage visitors to develop their own interpretations of the relationships and emotions unfolding on the canvas.
In the final gallery, the series Le Baiser (The Kiss) brings this exploration of human closeness into sharper focus. Plessen incorporates gold leaf into the paintings, lending the compositions an almost iconic quality. The works evoke tenderness and complicity, suggesting moments of connection that remain recognizable despite the paintings' shifting visual language.
Plessen's career has included participation in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, along with exhibitions at major international institutions. His work is represented in collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Since 2019, he has also served as Professor of Painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.
A short distance away, at Galerie Lelong's space at 13 rue de Thran, Arlene Shechet approaches questions of transformation through an entirely different medium.
Her exhibition, Kind of Blue, brings together recent sculptures that challenge conventional distinctions between ceramics, painting, and constructed objects. Over the past two decades, Shechet has become an influential figure in expanding the possibilities of ceramic sculpture, treating clay not simply as a material to be shaped into a finished object but as something whose unpredictable behavior can become an essential part of the artwork.
Fingerprints, cracks, drips, joins, and traces left by the firing process are not concealed in her sculptures. Instead, they remain visible, revealing the physical decisions and accidents involved in their creation. The surfaces often carry the evidence of repeated experimentation, giving the impression that each work has developed through an ongoing conversation between the artist and her materials.
Color plays an equally important role. Soft blues, yellows, and oranges alter the perception of the sculptures' forms, sometimes emphasizing their weight and structure and at other moments making them appear unexpectedly light or fluid.
The exhibition's title, Kind of Blue, references both the importance of color and the celebrated Miles Davis album. The connection to jazz is particularly meaningful for Shechet, whose creative process embraces spontaneity and unexpected developments.
"For me, improvisation is a method," the artist explains.
That philosophy is evident in the recent series Touching Ground, in which irregular rectangular structures frame clay forms that have been modeled, cut, and assembled. Some of the sculptures extend outward from the walls on steel supports, suggesting windows or computer screens while also challenging the viewer's expectations of how a sculpture should occupy space.
Other works seem to exist in a state of precarious balance. They lean, bend, hang, or appear to have just settled into position after moving. Sometimes A Bird (2025), which welcomes visitors at the entrance, embodies this sense of suspended motion.
The gallery's architecture also becomes part of the experience. When Shechet first visited the Paris space, she was struck by its natural light and the way it changed the appearance of objects. Large windows allow daylight and shadows from nearby trees to move across the sculptures, subtly transforming their surfaces throughout the day.
This interaction is particularly apparent in Magic Mountain (2026), a large painted sculpture that unfolds like a landscape. Rather than presenting a single privileged viewpoint, the work invites visitors to walk around it, discovering different relationships between its forms, colors, and surfaces.
Shechet's practice has received considerable institutional recognition in the United States. Her twenty-year retrospective, All At Once, was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2015, while Girl Group at Storm King Art Center in 2024 offered another major examination of her work. She has also undertaken projects at the Frick Collection, the Phillips Collection, and Madison Square Park.
In 2023, she was elected a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her sculptures are held in more than fifty public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Centre Pompidou, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Paris presentation coincides with another exhibition of Shechet's work in New York. Pace Gallery is presenting Arlene Shechet: She Said She Said from September through October 2026, accompanied by a publication featuring conversations between the artist and Arthur Jafa, as well as curator Lauren Cornell.
Although Plessen and Shechet work in different media, the two exhibitions share an interest in the moments when an artwork resists becoming completely fixed or resolved.
In Plessen's paintings, identities and relationships remain open to interpretation, with figures appearing to transform before the viewer's eyes. In Shechet's sculptures, materials seem caught between stability and movement, preserving the gestures and unpredictable processes that brought them into being.
Both artists also place considerable importance on the human touch. Plessen's recurring hands suggest physical and emotional connections, while Shechet allows the literal traces of her hands to remain embedded in the surfaces of her objects. In each case, the presence of the artist is felt not only through the finished composition but also through the gestures that helped create it.
Presented simultaneously across Galerie Lelong's two Paris addresses, Thtre imaginaire and Kind of Blue invite visitors to consider how different artistic languages can address similar questions about perception, transformation, and the fragile boundaries between what is imagined and what is physically experienced.
Magnus Plessen: Thtre imaginaire is on view at Galerie Lelong, 38 avenue Matignon, Paris, and Arlene Shechet: Kind of Blue is presented at 13 rue de Thran. Both exhibitions run from October 19 through November 14, 2026.
