3537 is the Arts and Culture center from Dover Street Market. It has already played host to an array of innovative art installations, exhibitions, concerts and pop-ups (Think Rone, Diane Pernet, Richie Hawtin, Marine Serre to name but a few) making its mark as one of Paris’s prime culture and arts destinations.

London based artist, Graham Hudson, who already has a long history working with Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market, is the latest to take over the space with his newest commission: ‘The Phantom Empire.’

As an artist, Hudson explores notions of the physical body, ideas about physical fitness and fitness culture, and the relationship it has with modern society, bio-tech, evolution, automation and the making of bodies and art.

His main mediums are installations, objects, audio-visual and performance and The Phantom Empire at 3537 features a series of objects, sounds, arrangements and encounters that riff on the ideas of Joseph Campbell The Journey, Eugen Sandow, fitness and crafted museology.

Hudson was interested in ‘The Eugen Sandow Sculpture’, which was considered to depict ‘a perfect type of European man.’ It was commissioned in 1901 and banished to the archives of London’s Natural History Museum after only three months on display. Sandow is a circus strongman, naked and covered in muscle, he immortalizes the ‘new body, new you’ message driven by the fitness industry.

Incorporating the ideas of Joseph Campbell and ‘The Hero’s Journey’ (1949) he toys around the notion of the consciousness and acceptance of physical death, and the constant and necessary the evolution of mankind.

“The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey (1949)

Hudson has worked with; The Henry Moore Foundation, London, Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Film and Video Umbrella, London, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, and Comme des Garcons / DSM, London, Tokyo, New York and Beijing.

GRAHAM HUDSON AT 35-37

December 9th to December 23rd; and January 3rd to January 16th.

Monday – Sunday 11am to 7pm

35-37 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75004 Paris

First floor / Free entry

Discover more about Graham Hudson here. 

@grahamhuds0n

IMAGES COURTESY OF 3537