When Sonia Eram reopens her much-loved destination-boutique Mameg in a new spot in Beverly Hills in May, she will have a new neighbour: the first-ever Los Angeles branch of Michael Werner Gallery. The two will occupy the same building at 415 North Camden Drive, sharing a courtyard on the same block as Gagosian.
Werner’s first show in Los Angeles will, admittedly, be a weird one. The gallery is pairing the 82-year-old German painter Markus Lüpertz, known for mining images from art history as well as mythology, with the 19th-century French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a proto-symbolist who pursued a hazy sort of realism. While some of Lüpertz’s works directly respond to Puvis de Chavannes, with a fisherman’s boat placed here or there, others belong to what you might call a feverish dialogue. “The show is just as odd as could be, but artists know and love Puvis de Chavannes,” says Gordon VeneKlasen, the gallery’s co-owner, who has collected the French artist’s work for years.
