Fear and Anxiety Transfigured: Thaddaeus Ropac’s Urgent Exhibition

Anxiety lodges itself in the body before the mind can name it. The Latin root ‘angere’ speaks of constriction, a tightness in the throat or chest, an invisible alarm triggered by threats we sense but cannot fully grasp. Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin’s new exhibition, FEAR, Art in the Age of Anxiety, gathers thirteen artists whose practices refuse to leave such intangible dread unexamined. Instead, they transmute it, making the formless visible through material exploration, expressive gesture and the deliberate staging of symbol and icon.

The gallery’s soaring white interiors, flooded with daylight from the industrial roof structure, provide an austere stage for work that confronts our contemporary moment of internal and external conflict. Georg Baselitz and Joseph Beuys return alongside figures who shaped late twentieth century practice: VALIE EXPORT, Günther Uecker and Niki de Saint Phalle. They are joined by Daniel Richter, Arnulf Rainer and Harun Farocki, artists equally attuned to the political and psychological dimensions of fear, alongside Ron Mueck’s hyperrealist sculpture and the urgent, graphically charged works of Banks Violette. Mandy El Sayegh, Oksana Shachko and Minh Lan Tran bring contemporary voices to this conversation, their practices rooted in lived experience of displacement, protest and displacement.

What emerges is not catharsis but recognition: that anxiety, when held and shaped by artistic intelligence, becomes a language through which we might begin to understand ourselves and our time. FEAR remains on view until 6 February 2027 at the Pantin location, in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris.

Imagery courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac (@thaddaeusropac).