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Hours: Open most weekends, 2PM - 8PM.
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Address :
43 rue Saint-Georges
75009 Paris
France
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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.
du 14-02-25 au
22-03-25
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