Je t'aime... quand même

Paul Jenkins and Alice Baber, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal, Paul Gardère and Marcia Green, Huma Bhabha and Jason Fox, Lee Mary Manning and Francesca Wade, Florian Meisenberg and Anna K.E., Antonia Kuo and Douglas Rieger, Spencer Russell Lewis and Caitlin Lonegan, Lisu Vega and Juan Henriquez, Trevor Warren and Jeane Cohen, Rachel Eulena Williams and Walter Price, Chunghee Yun and Andy Van Dinh

Gladwell Projects is pleased to present Je t'aime... quand même, a group exhibition exploring artistic partnership from modernism to the present. Bringing together 12 partnerships whose lives and practices evolved through sustained dialogue, the exhibition traces the often-invisible conversations that unfold among artists who share a life.

Across painting, sculpture, photography, textile, writing, and installation, Je t'aime... quand même resists the notion that influence is linear or one-directional. Instead, it considers artistic partnership as an evolving exchange in which two distinct practices may continually encounter, challenge, and transform one another while remaining resolutely their own.

Rather than searching for stylistic similarity, Je t'aime... quand même considers what happens when two independent artistic practices develop in sustained proximity. Across generations, geographies, and mediums, the exhibition looks to the exchanges that are less readily visible: the ideas, observations, critiques, disagreements, and forms of attention that pass between artists over the course of a shared life. These practices remain fiercely autonomous, yet reveal how artistic thinking can be shaped through continual dialogue without requiring aesthetic convergence.

Moving between canonical figures and contemporary voices, the exhibition reframes the domestic sphere as an expanded studio: a place where ideas circulate long before they enter public view, where criticism is offered in passing, where exhibitions are imagined across dinner tables, where books are exchanged, and where failure is witnessed. Here, the studio does not end at its walls. It extends into shared libraries, long walks, quiet rituals, and the countless conversations through which artistic lives are built together. In these spaces, influence is rarely declared. It accumulates.

The history of art has long privileged the myth of the solitary artist, presenting the studio as a site of individual genius and artistic innovation as the product of singular imagination. Je t'aime... quand même proposes another way of looking: not to diminish individual authorship, but to consider the relationships, exchanges, and shared conditions that exist alongside it.

The exhibition's title, borrowed from the French expression meaning 'I love you... anyway,' acknowledges that intimacy does not require harmony. Quand même holds within it affection and contradiction, devotion and independence. Within an artistic partnership, proximity can encompass admiration as readily as disagreement; influence can coexist with resistance. The artists brought together here do not necessarily arrive at the same formal conclusions. It is precisely within the space between their practices that the exhibition locates its subject.

Presented in Paris's Marais neighborhood, the exhibition occupies a city with its own long history of artistic exchange. Generations of artists have encountered, challenged, and transformed one another in Paris, making the city a fitting setting to consider the intimate dialogues that have shaped modern and contemporary art.

If the history of modern art has often celebrated singular authorship, Je t'aime... quand même asks us to look also toward what exists around it: the conversations, criticisms, encouragements, disagreements, shared routines, and lives lived in creative proximity that may never appear on the surface of a finished work.

Perhaps no work is ever truly made alone?