En Grisaille


En Grisaille at Galerie Devals

The exhibition “In Grisaille” is devoted to the visual, sensory, and conceptual powers of grisaille, and to the regimes of opacity it entails. Bringing together works by Susanna Fritscher, James Howell, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the exhibition examines the persistence and contemporary reinventions of this singular chromatic language—from its role as a tool of modulation and structure in medieval painting to its analytical and conceptual developments from the 1960s onward.

Straddling serial rigor and perceptive meditation, “In Grisaille” juxtaposes practices that renew the question of the visible: Sol LeWitt’s drawings, exploring variations of gray as a compositional system; Ed Ruscha’s lexicon, where grisaille becomes a critical support for language; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, where it functions as a threshold between time and light; Susanna Fritscher’s immaterial environments, working with transparency and perception; and James Howell’s dense, vibrant surfaces, for whom gray constitutes an autonomous field of matter and energy. The exhibition thus probes the enduring fecundity of a color without color—a space of thought where the tension between form, perception, and mind is continuously replayed.
— Galerie Devals
 

Read press release here.


Location

Galerie Devals

37 Gal de Montpensier, 75001 Paris, France

exhibition dates

Sun, October 19 – Wed, November 22, 2025


En Grisaille was made possible by Galerie Bigaignon in collaboration with Galerie Devals and the James Howell Foundation.

James howell foundation advisory board

D. Joy Howell, President
Deborah Berke
Robert Rosen
Jason Mesiarik
Susan Kempin
Sandorf Kempin
Victoria Sanbunaris
Lilly Wei

James howell foundation team

Laura Bardier, Executive Director
Asia Szczepanowska, Office Manager
Lisette Morris, Curatorial Assistant