carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by French artist Vincent Gicquel. This will be his first exhibition with the gallery. Gicquel constructs an autonomous, tragi-comic world in his works. He considers each painting that he makes to be a fragment of an internal monologue, describing them as “both x-rays of our world and cross sections of my own brain.” For Gicquel, painting and living occupy the same continuum. Both activities exist in the same relationship to the world — existence, like painting, has no goal.1 The only goal is to live.

In Brothers in Arms, Gicquel presents a series of new oil paintings in which he further develops the androgynous, humanoid figures that have populated his canvases in recent years. While earlier works captured these figures engrossed in banal, pointless routines or oddly dispassionate sexual configurations within candy-colored landscapes, Gicquel’s newest works primarily present these characters in isolation.