“Up Against the Walls!", The Page Gallery, Seoul
26 August – 23 October 2026
With Jean-Marie Appriou, John Armleder, Isabella Ducrot, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Ángela Ferrari, Sylvie Fleury, John Giorno & Ugo Rondinone, M/M (Paris) and Vivien Zhang
The Page Gallery presents “Up Against the Walls!” from August 26 through October 23, in collaboration with Consortium Museum in Dijon, France. Curated by Consortium Museum Co-Directors Seungduk Kim and Franck Gautherot, the exhibition is the first page of a global project linking the museum's past 50 years with its next 50 years as it approaches its 50th anniversary in 2027.
Founded in 1977, Consortium Museum has built a distinctive history over the past half-century by identifying and presenting innovative artists at an early stage and sustaining long-term relationships with them. In the 1980s, it introduced artists including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and John Armleder to audiences in France. In the 1990s, it continued to collaborate with artists including Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Maurizio Cattelan, and Ugo Rondinone. It has curated international exhibitions and public art projects including the French Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, the 7th Lyon Biennale in 2003, and the Korean Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, as well as Lille European Capital of Culture, the Valencia Biennial, and the Anyang Public Art Project (APAP). Its activities later expanded beyond the museum through projects including an urban regeneration project in Doha and site-specific commissions for the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju. Consortium Museum also operates the publishing house “Les presses du reel” and the film production company “Anna Sanders Films,” extending its activities across publishing and film production.
Rather than marking its 50th anniversary with a single retrospective that looks back over the past, Consortium Museum has chosen to collaborate with galleries and institutions around the world, unfolding its history in new places and forms. The three years running through the exhibition, “1977-2027-2077,” place the museum's founding, its 50th anniversary, and its still-to-come centenary side by side along a single century-long timeline. Rather than presenting historical archives and records in sequence, the exhibition at The Page Gallery brings the current work of artists who have worked with Consortium Museum into a new setting, Seoul, and considers the institution's past and future together. This resonates with Consortium Museum’s practice of developing projects beyond the physical site of the museum, across different cities and institutions, as well as with its trajectory of responding to “what is in the air now,” the zeitgeist of the present.
The starting point for this collaboration is the “wall.” The project took shape when The Page Gallery proposed an exhibition focusing on works that engage directly with walls, a form relatively difficult to encounter in a commercial gallery context. This naturally overlaps with Consortium Museum’s long history of experimenting with the relationships between artwork, space, and exhibition format. In 1993, for example, Consortium Museum presented “Pièces au sol (Pieces on the Floor)”, centered on works placed on or leaning against the floor. In 1998, it followed with its counterpart, “Tableaux aux murs (Paintings on the Walls)”. Seungduk Kim and Franck Gautherot describe “Up Against the Walls!” as another stage in the continuing process that began with the questions raised by these two exhibitions.
In this exhibition, the wall does not remain a background on which artworks are installed. From wall paintings and wallpaper to posters, paintings, and moving images, works actively occupy the wall and become part of it, or at times take it over entirely, transforming the space itself. In this process, the wall becomes a crucial element through which relationships between artwork and architecture, painting and decoration, image and space are brought into view.
The title “Up Against the Walls!” also intersects with the radical counterculture of late-1960s New York. Seungduk Kim and Franck Gautherot cite as historical points of reference Black Mask, an art-political group that rejected boundaries between art and politics, institutions and everyday life, and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (UAW/MF), a countercultural formation that emerged from it. The title also carries the tension and provocative force of the imperative phrase “up against the wall,” a coercive command that forces someone against a wall. For them, the wall is never a neutral or friendly surface. It is both an “enemy” that limits and obstructs the artwork and an active “collaborative partner” that allows the work to expand into space and, further, becomes part of the work itself. The title therefore contains both the defensive sense of being driven “up against the wall” and the active attitude of confronting and using the wall, transforming it into part of the artwork.
The exhibition brings together nine artists who have worked with Consortium Museum at different moments and in different ways. Each interprets the wall through their own language and draws it into their practice. John Armleder and Sylvie Fleury bring their long-standing investigations of wall-based work into this space. Nathalie Du Pasquier connects geometric wall paintings with small-scale paintings placed upon them as a single composition. Vivien Zhang installs paintings over wallpaper created for the exhibition, while M/M (Paris) fills the corridor linking two exhibition spaces with posters, transforming the passage itself into an image-space. Ugo Rondinone projects moving images of his late partner and fellow artist John Giorno reciting the poem “thanx 4 nothing” onto two facing walls, allowing one voice and two images to structure the entire space. Isabella Ducrot's large-scale paper works, Ángela Ferrari’s monumental triptych, and Jean-Marie Appriou’s sculptures likewise intervene in and enter into dialogue with the walls and space in their own distinct ways, dynamically completing the landscape of the exhibition.
Seungduk Kim and Franck Gautherot say, “Up Against the Walls! brings to Korea some of the best artists we have been working with throughout our history. It is a journey down memory lane, carrying fresh images of the past and bright pictures from today.” From John Armleder, who has participated in more than 20 Consortium Museum exhibitions since 1983, to Ángela Ferrari, who joined Consortium Museum’s program in 2026 and is currently presenting a Consortium project at Académie Conti, the artists differ widely in generation, nationality, and working method. What connects them is not a particular style or aesthetic, but Consortium Museum’s way of developing relationships with artists into new works and exhibitions. Seungduk Kim and Franck Gautherot describe this not as a “family” or “community,” but as a “free association of free minds.” Rather than a group gathered under a single declaration or set of rules, it is a flexible and sustained association in which each artist retains their independence while meeting again and collaborating in response to new ideas and situations. Through the artists’ work, the exhibition reveals Consortium Museum’s 50 years as a history of relationships that remains ongoing.
— Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim
The Page Gallery
32-14 Seoul Forest 2-gil,
Seongdong-gu, Seoul
info@thepage-gallery.com
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