Two Paris addresses belonging to the same gallery are currently telling one shared story in two very different materials. At 38 avenue Matignon, German painter Magnus Plessen is showing twenty canvases made between 2024 and 2026 under the title Theatre imaginaire, while a short walk away at 13 rue de Teheran, American sculptor Arlene Shechet is presenting recent ceramic works grouped as Kind of Blue. Both exhibitions opened on 19 October and run through 14 November 2026.

The Plessen hang is also a professional milestone: it inaugurates the gallery's representation of the Hamburg-born, Berlin-based artist. His pictures refuse fixed identities. Faces slide, multiply and melt into one another, and hands do much of the emotional work, reaching, touching and gesturing where faces stay ambiguous. Almost every scene is invented rather than observed, with one exception, a painting about his dying father that brings a private note into an otherwise fictional world. A closing group, Le Baiser, uses gold leaf to give embraces an almost devotional glow.

Shechet approaches the same interest in change from the opposite direction, letting her material misbehave. Fingerprints, cracks, drips and firing marks stay visible on her sculptures instead of being polished away, so each piece records the accidents and decisions of its making. Colour does similar work: soft blues, yellows and oranges make heavy forms look light or fluid. Her Touching Ground series sets modelled clay inside irregular rectangular frames, some jutting from the wall on steel supports, while a large painted work, Magic Mountain, unfolds like a walkable landscape.

Seen together, the pair makes a neat argument about touch. Plessen paints hands as carriers of closeness and vulnerability; Shechet leaves the literal imprint of her own hands in clay. For visitors, the contrast is the point: one artist imagines bodies that will not stay still, the other builds objects that seem to have only just stopped moving.