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43 rue Saint-Georges
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About
DNL gallery is a new gallery based in Paris, opening in March 2024. It is positioned as an exhibition, exploration and prospecting space dedicated to architecture in all its components.
The gallery aims to highlight the close links between the visual arts, media, contemporary culture and architecture, promoting their encounter and presenting their interactions. This is neither a confrontation between disciplines nor an eclectic selection, but a synthesis, a perspective that raises many questions. How do we select the pieces to be exhibited? Should the creative process be broken down? And what about references? Above all, how can architecture be collected?
To achieve its mission of encouraging these questions and fostering a better understanding of the built environment, the gallery will produce original works solicited from a new generation of architects, as well as selecting older works. While the most contemporary initiatives are exhibited, heritage and the history of architecture are by no means neglected.
The gallery is located in an apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, offering an unusual setting for presenting architecture. An office, a living room and a storeroom will now be transformed into exhibition spaces to share architecture, its details, fragments and concepts with a specialised public, while seeking to reach as wide an audience as possible.
DNL stands for Double Neon Light, the leitmotif of exhibition spaces.
03 September – 11 October 2026
It is said that Ormek foretells storms, But nothing appears alone.
Things carry traces of what they have passed through, even when these can no longer be recognised. Over time, these traces accumulate. Each becomes part of something else, forming relations that cannot be taken apart without producing something new. Nothing here begins. Nothing here ends. Things simply become distinguishable for a while.
An image by Arnaud Bostelmann shows a small sculpture, itself made from images of earlier sculptures. Reimagined and enlarged, the image detaches itself from its original meaning. It no longer functions as a representation, but becomes a sculpture: assembled, suspended, unfinished. At the same time, it remains composed of 84 individual images. Each can be separated again, becoming the possible beginning of another uncertain evolution.
Through this continuous accumulation and transformation, another reality begins to take form. Its logic is not predetermined. It emerges through encounters between materials, images, machines, hands and histories. None takes precedence over another. Each alters what it encounters and is altered in return. From this uncertainty, a set of creatures begins to emerge, forming a mythology without origin.
Forms appear for a while. Some acquire names. Others recall things seen elsewhere, without revealing exactly where they came from. What appears here is not a final state, but a temporary constellation within a landscape that continues to change.
Every translation invents the thing it claims to preserve.
Truwant + Rodet + is an architectural practice founded in Basel in 2015 by Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet. Their practice operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urbanism, scenography, installation, furniture and research.
Attentive to territorial dynamics and the transformation of existing structures, they approach time, uncertainty and environmental conditions as materials in their own right within the design process.
Rather than seeking to fix architecture in a permanent state, their work aims to create structures capable of evolving, altering over time and engaging with their context. This approach runs through their buildings as well as their research, exhibitions and objects.
Recipients of the Swiss Art Award in 2017 for A Pavilion, they have since developed several large-scale transformation projects, including the renovation of the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris with ASBR, the conversion of the Nauentor postal distribution centre in Basel with Bruther and Jan Kinsbergen, and the transformation of the IWAZ site in Wetzikon. Since 2023, Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet have taught together at EPFL, where their Atelier for Uncertain Conditions extends their research into architecture as an open-ended and evolving process, in dialogue with landscape, climate and patterns of use.
IMI is an entity that grew independently out of the practice of Dries Rodet. It serves as a container for an ongoing research into new realities, where the physical, digital, natural and artificial coexist without clear boundaries.
Its work begins with environments, understood as entanglements rather than settings, and with the forms that emerge from the processes through which they are produced. These processes, whether digital or physical, bring their own logics and limitations, acting upon one another and becoming part of what is produced. The work never reaches a final state but unfolds through a continuous process of transformation, where each new production cannibalises what came before.
Photographie par Aurélien Mole.
14 February – 22 March 2026
A collection of bas-reliefs documents stories of walls, encountered here and there in the course of different projects.
Building transformations reveal traces. When these cannot be preserved, they are recorded before being covered or destroyed. Mould, wallpaper, chips and abrasions observed on construction sites draw our attention. The magnifying effect applied to an overlooked detail, an anecdotal or ordinary pattern, grants it the intensity of something that, through its transfer, suddenly attains a new visibility.
This is not a matter of preservation or melancholy, but rather of registering an uncertain and fragile memory. These successive surfaces of the built environment, in the process of disappearing, persist on a new support.
A structure of metal rails—conventionally destined to be concealed behind 13-millimetre plasterboard—remains exposed. It is suspended between a completed partition and the moment of its fabrication. Despite everything, this surface-less support acts.
To heighten these vanities, massive yet provisional wax vases are added. They diminish over the course of the exhibition. The wax melts; the vessel disappears as the flowers fade. Displaced, latent, forms transform—things become other things.
MBL architectes is an architecture studio founded by Sébastien Martinez-Barat and Benjamin Lafore, later joined by Florian Jomain. Their practice conceives architecture as a field of investigation, where each project unfolds through process, experimentation, and research.
Rejecting a strictly formal approach, MBL develops an architecture attentive to real-world conditions, favoring methods and devices over stylistic expressions. This position as architect-researchers informs an eclectic body of work spanning construction, publishing, teaching, contemporary art, object design, and exhibition curating.
Their work has received broad international recognition. In 2014, they designed Interiors, Notes and Figures, the Belgian Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Their residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto (2016) led to the Miscellaneous Follies project, presented notably at KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels in 2019. Awarded the Albums des Jeunes Architectes et Paysagistes in 2016, several of their projects have been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award (2014, 2016, 2024). In 2022, arc en rêve centre d’architecture (Bordeaux) dedicated their first retrospective exhibition to the studio.
Photographie par Aurélien Mole
24 May – 22 June 2025
DNL Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by UHO, the group’s first with the gallery.
On view are three projects: a series of furniture pieces, a book and a film.
SCHIRCH is a collection of furniture pieces designed by UHO that escape the category of architecture. As such, they are not subject to the same standards as buildings.
A sofa, bench and stools are all built from aluminum profiles and fitness bags. Their visual and tactile qualities maintain a certain equivalence. At first, their visual appearance can be overwhelming; their tactility performs surprisingly well.
Their appearance gives them their name: a word derived from Franz West's Wiener Dialekt.
This show is both a continuation and a contradiction of the hypothesis developed in The Use of Space, Max Turnheim’s first book. On the occasion of this show, the book has been reissued in a second edition – co-published by éditions HKP and DNL Gallery.
As with the first edition of The Use of Space, mlav.land was invited to produce a companion film.
This new work is a commentary on the book’s content while presenting an artificially-generated aquarium – a hyper-constrained space, a simulated simulation of existence – set to a soundtrack by Erosion (fka Cléry).
The public programme includes a presentation by Jack Self on June 11. This responds to the work and articulates a theory of the readymade.
UHO Architects is a Paris-based studio led by Max Turnheim and Max Utech. The practice is dedicated to built work and academic research.
mlav.land is an autonomous spatial research practice.
Jack Self
We have moved from a materialist to a symbolic paradigm. In the 20th century, technological progress underpinned rising living standards and wealth. In turn, this advanced social welfare (education, culture, equality). The driver for this “progress” was “innovation”, which appeared to the consumer as “newness”. The ethics and aesthetics of newness were central to modernity.
Today, technological progress has been peeled away from its humanist origins. In the West, newness no longer improves society, while its extractive logic destroys the planet. We do not need anything new. We have everything we need to create a just and equal world.
The barrier to this other world is now political and cultural, not material. Symbolism and relevance are now more important than novelty and newness. There is both a social and ethical imperative to repurpose the tools and products of modernity.
Jack Self is a London-based architect and strategist.
He is Editor-in-Chief of Real Review.
Photo by Nicole Maria Winkler
14 October – 21 November 2024
The exhibition at DNL gallery takes its cue from the Grand Tour, seeking to redirect our gaze towards a Paris that spills beyond itself. Through his itinerant, personal travels, the artist does more than depict buildings emptied of human presence: he draws us into the quiet dialogue he sustains with the architectures he encounters and before which he chooses to pause. What emerges is a painting of passage — of the fleeting glance cast at a building site or at a familiar, iconic structure — where the transient, the singular and solitude become subjects of study.
An architect by training, Boulben draws on the codes of his profession to re-enchant the urban landscape through painting. His works, made on timber panels salvaged from construction sites — OSB offcuts, samples of melamine-faced board and chipboard — are like fragments stolen from the city. Architecture acts as the site manager of the composition: through its format, its colours, its rhythms, its textures, it directs the building of the picture and the staging of its narrative.
Between Paris, Bobigny, Villejuif, Cergy and elsewhere, these urban situations, come upon in the course of a walk, are transfigured across seventeen small-format paintings. Architectural forms play with limits here, flirting with the frame without ever fully submitting to it. Like the Axe Majeur, these monumental constructions appear contained, yet the eye is always invited beyond the edges, towards what escapes direct vision.
From one painting to the next, we shift from the ordinary to the singular: a building site caught within the setting of the Bourse du Commerce, a building awaiting its métro, a church draped in scaffolding, twin towers turned into near-fetishised figures. These architectures become emblems of the hidden double the artist tracks across the city. What matters is not only what is revealed but what lies buried — an underlying duality in every painting: the built and the living, the intimate and the oneiric, the fixed and the fugitive, concealed beneath layers of paint, in the shadows, in details barely perceptible.
The paintings are shown on adjustable steel props, invoking construction — of the city, and of the work itself. Within this arrangement each painting becomes a window onto a fragment of space, suspended between the real and the imagined. Gridding the entire gallery, the props transcend the status of the picture: what is painting becomes almost sculpture, what is subject returns to volume.
Moving from painting to painting, the visitor retraces a route in the image of the Grand Tour, discovering a mosaic of urban scenes in which each work becomes a fragment of a larger whole, much like the city itself. In this wandering, it is our own solitude we meet. To play the game of the Grand Tour is to accept the idea of losing oneself, and of seeking in these architectures a fragment of the self.
Text written in close collaboration with Servane Martin, Marlène Simonessa and Charlotte Lourme
Alongside this career, Boulben has continued to paint and draw, taking his cues from everyday moments and from the incongruities of urban space. His works focus on scenes empty of human presence yet deeply rooted in the living and the emotional. He began with monotype, capturing interior scenes charged with meaning and memory — the bedroom, the bunch of flowers, the tube of toothpaste — before extending his practice to painting, drawing on the window as the privileged frame of the everyday, where architecture and nature intertwine, tending towards abstraction within figurative compositions.
Since then, his painting has been an attempt to build up layers with care, preserving the spontaneity of the first gesture and the trace left by the brush.
In December 2023, he exhibited a painting titled Panneau solaire n°1 in Montreuil and was awarded an acquisition prize.
16 March – 19 May 2024
Barely visible, buried beneath ornaments, the fireplace is a recurring subject in the series of interiors fixed by Eugène Atget's lens at the turn of the twentieth century. The mantelpiece is the heightened embodiment of the comfort made possible by the mechanics of the Haussmannian building's flues, and of the necessary delimitation of the hearth: the intimacy of the apartment.
Heating systems have evolved to the point of rendering fireplaces obsolete, yet they remain a guarantor of Haussmannian character — and therefore of a property's market value. With that same market in view, it is not uncommon for them to be removed along with their flues in order to "reclaim" half a square metre to a square metre of floor area. Such frequent alterations feed a thriving second-hand market, one that reflects how few models and dimensions these ready-to-fit elements ever came in. Nineteenth-century marble workers flooded France with these kit surrounds by the wagonload, standardising catalogues around a limited set of stock models — utilitarian syntheses of historical styles, among them the modillion type.
The ambivalent status of these standardised ornaments — architectural archetype or decorative product, indispensable figure of the domestic landscape or cumbersome antique — is inevitably up for debate in interior renovation projects. What position should architects take when faced with these situations? What is the value of this ornamented interface once the flues are sealed and it is stripped of all function? What place should be given to the many pieces removed?
Among these sheet-stone facings, the corbels and modillions stand apart: more heavily worked and more massive, as their projecting load-bearing function requires.
The generic character of the collected fragments allows us to work them into a series of prototype three-dimensional assemblies that temporarily occupy the domestic space of the gallery: stone reduced to ornamental motif is used here for its structural capacity, and the contoured form becomes a piece of framing, abstracted from its original orientation.
Since 2020, Amor Immeuble has explored the potential of building elements brought to light across a variety of territories. This approach has been carried out through several projects and residencies. From May to July 2022, a residency at the Centre international d'art et du paysage de Vassivière gave the practice the opportunity to explore the constructive history of Aldo Rossi and Xavier Fabre's building. In October 2022, an invitation from DRAC Franche-Comté enabled work on a former gravel pit in the Val de Saône. In April 2023, for Milan Design Week, Amor Immeuble was invited by studio (ab)Normal to present a research project on Hainaut bluestone in the group exhibition Europelago. In December 2023, its research project on the ground of the city, Pavés dormants, developed with designer Anna Saint Pierre, won the Faire Paris open call organised by the Pavillon de l'Arsenal.