En Grisaille

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Woodland Chapel (2001) and James Howell's 48.17 - 57.04 Four-Part Progression 07/05/04 (2004).

Photos courtesy of Galerie Devals

James Howell, 48.17 - 57.04 Four-Part Progression 07/05/04 (2004)

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Woodland Chapel (2001) and James Howell's 48.17 - 57.04 Four-Part Progression 07/05/04 (2004).

Photos courtesy of Galerie Devals

En Grisaille
Sun, October 19 – Wed, November 22, 2025

Galerie Devals
37 Gal de Montpensier
75001 Paris, France

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.

Read press release here.

About Galerie Bigaignon
Bigaignon is a Paris-based contemporary art gallery. The line of the gallery finds its roots in the avant-garde movements of minimalism, conceptual art, light & space, abstract art, and in the fields of experimental & conceptual photography for which it has been playing a leading role for almost 10 years.

About Galerie Devals
Located in the historic Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris, Galerie Devals is dedicated to presenting rigorous contemporary practices that engage material, perception, and conceptual inquiry. The gallery’s program brings together established and emerging international artists whose work explores formal restraint, spatial awareness, and intellectual depth across media. Through thoughtfully curated exhibitions and collaborations, Galerie Devals situates contemporary art within a broader dialogue on light, structure, and visual language, fostering meaningful connections between artists, collectors, and institutions.