Bienvenu Steinberg & C presents Raphaël Denis's US debut exhibition
Raphaël Denis, Fonds Paul Rosenberg : les années parisiennes (The Paul Rosenberg Fund, the Parisian Years), 2019, 5 volumes, 4364 pages, Limited edition 30 ex. Photo by the artist.
NEW YORK, NY.—
Bienvenu Steinberg & C will present Fates of Works, Raphaël 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, Léger, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, 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 années 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 : KRÄ 229 (The Normal Law of Errors: KRÄ 229), a sculpture depicting Marie Antoinette evokes the fate of Jewish artists and collectors under the Occupation while recalling war and armed conflict.
Raphaël 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 Francès, FRAC Alsace, the Reiner Speck Foundation, and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou. Select exhibitions include Galerie Sator, Paris, France (2026); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2025); Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany (2024); Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, France (2024); Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2023, 2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2020, 2019); Museum Berggruen, Berlin, Germany (2018); Musée National Picasso-Paris, Paris, France (2015); and Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2014).
