James Cohan in Paris

James Cohan is coming to Paris this fall! To coincide with the fair week in the French capital in October, the gallery will stage two special solo exhibitions with artists Kelly Sinnapah Mary and Elias Sime, activating the art historically significant neighborhood of the Marais with international contemporary art. Alongside these focused presentations, James Cohan will exhibit a selection of highlights from across the gallery program. These exhibitions will be on view from Monday, October 20 through Sunday, October 26 at 43 Rue de Montmorency.

Tout germe encore dans la nuit des terres, an exhibition of new paintings by Kelly Sinnapah Mary, will be on view. Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s ongoing series The Book of Violette is an evolving visual notebook within which remembrance and imagination intertwine. Under her gaze, memory becomes a vibrant terrain—one where ancestral stories, ecological harmony, and intimate ties are inscribed side by side. Sinnapah Mary’s work is rooted both materially and narratively in the artist’s immediate environment of the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas department, and her own evolving understanding of her ancestral origins. This landscape, with its verdant forests and mangroves, consistently serves as both character and metaphor: as Sinnapah Mary transfigures her personal history into fantastical narratives, she underscores issues of colonialism, and the Anthropocene.

Sinnapah Mary finds resonance in the work of intellectuals, such as Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and La Lézarde, in which identity is imagined as a fluid archipelago of enmeshed lives and histories. The exhibition title, which takes inspiration from Glissant, conveys a quiet form of political and cultural resistance, in which new identities continue to emerge and flourish beneath the surface. Many of the characters in her paintings inhabit this relational space, tethered to plants, ancestors, and Caribbean narratives. They emerge not as isolated figures, but as one voice among many, a vibration woven into the living fabric of the world. 

Elias Sime (b.1968 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) transforms carefully selected everyday materials into lyrical abstract compositions. Working with electronic components such as circuit boards, computer keys, and telecommunications wires, he creates intricate works that evoke topographies, color fields, and urban grids. The works in this presentation mark a new chapter in Sime’s ongoing Tightrope series, which he began in 2009. By working within a restrained palette, he explores subtle, undulating shifts in tone across braided wire panels, rendered in shades of grey, white, green, and blue. They reveal an extraordinary attention to detail that challenges viewers to reconsider the value, beauty, and boundless potential of human ingenuity.

For Sime, the histories embedded in these materials are central. His practice explores transformation—both in physical form and in how we understand the shifting relationship between technology and humanity. Reflecting the dynamic interplay between technological progress and human experience, his works capture the ways our lives are bound to the devices that surround us. They invite viewers to consider not only what is visible, but also the unseen systems, extractions, and exchanges that shape contemporary life.