7 rue Froissart

7 rue Froissart
75003 Paris

20 - 25 October, 2025
Vernissage: Sunday, 19 October, 5–8pm

 

Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce our participation in 7 rue Froissart, featuring works by Elizabeth Atterbury, Kemi Onabulé, and Robert Zehnder; on view at 7 rue Froissart, 75003 Paris, from 19–25 October 2025.

7 rue Froissart is a satellite event coinciding with Art Basel Paris, bringing together a group of international galleries in a collaborative, community-driven format. Initiated by Brigitte Mulholland and Sara Maria Salamone, the project reflects a shared commitment to creating an alternative to the traditional art fair model, one that prioritizes transparency, equity, and mutual support among participants.

Elizabeth Atterbury’s practice is immersed in contemplation, meditation, and evolution. Her sculptures explore the shifting legibility of objects; the ways forms can be reworked, recontextualized, and transformed through material, scale, and process. This is also evident in her mortar works, which embody her engagement with legibility, opacity, and improvisation as pathways to understanding history and personal heritage. Constructed from cut plywood and individually raked with tile mortar, these works are deconstructed and reassembled, rejoining their glyph-like forms into unified compositions. Through this process, ideas grow organically, reflecting both repetition and renewal. The resulting objects feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary, relics and catalysts, mirroring her ongoing exploration of transformation, memory, and her Chinese American heritage.

Kemi Onabulé draws on her rich Greek, English, and Nigerian heritage to create luminous paintings that explore humanity’s connection to the natural world. Traversing landscape as both subject and metaphor, her work merges human figures with trees, positioning the body within cyclical, symbolic environments that speak to resilience and transformation. Rooted in a painterly language developed through larger landscapes, her more intimate tree paintings isolate and refine her visual vocabulary, allowing each tree to become a character in its own right. Light refracts and absorbs across their surfaces, animating the compositions and creating portals into verdant canopies that feel at once romantic and perilous, familiar and otherworldly. Drawing on ancient depictions of the human form, Onabulé envisions people and souls as universal symbols rather than individuals, offering timeless reflections on our shared experience within the natural world.

American painter Robert Zehnder’s landscapes emerge from a deeply personal and psychological space, shaped by feelings of isolation, anxiety, and a critical engagement with art history. Stripping nature of its traditional complexity, he creates estranged, post-digital topographies where the earth itself becomes the protagonist. Drawing on influences from American Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, as well as the spiritual depth of the Hudson River School, Zehnder constructs quilt-like, layered horizon lines that evoke frenetic movement, the fragmented reconstruction of memory, and the sublime as described by Edmund Burke, a force that both compels and destroys. His paintings dissolve the boundaries between natural and artificial, structure and entropy, while exploring perpetual cycles of decay, regeneration, and transformation. Inspired by medieval and Renaissance devotional art, pop media, and natural phenomena, Zehnder’s work navigates themes of entropy, metabolism, religiosity, and humanity’s relationship to time and nature. The resulting terrains are simultaneously dissolving and reforming, alien yet familiar, and alive with the potential for renewal and rebirth.

Together, the presentation at 7 rue Froissart offers a rich dialogue between sculpture and painting, past and present, and individual practice and collective reflection. Atterbury, Onabulé, and Zehnder each engage with transformation, memory, and the natural and constructed worlds in distinct ways, yet their works resonate in conversation, creating a cohesive experience that is both contemplative and dynamic. The exhibition invites viewers to consider cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, ultimately revealing the enduring capacity to explore the complexities of time, place, and human experience.

Elizabeth Atterbury (b. 1982, West Palm Beach, FL) lives and works in Portland, Maine. She received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from MassArt. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Mrs., Maspeth, NY; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY; The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Et al., San Francisco, CA; TSA, Brooklyn, NY; and The ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME. Recent institutional group exhibitions include the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; and the deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. She has also held solo exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2024) and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2025). Atterbury’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; and CELINE, among others. She is represented by Mrs., Maspeth, NY and DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL.

Kemi Onabulé (b. 1995, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. She earned her BFA in Painting from Wimbledon College of Art in 2016. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Sim Smith, BEERS, Guts Gallery, Oliver Projects, Saatchi Gallery, and Bosse & Baum, London, UK; Mrs., Maspeth, NY; James Cohan, New York, NY; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Bode Projects, Berlin, Germany. Her work was recently highlighted in The Wall Street Journal. Onabulé is represented by Sim Smith, London, UK.

Robert Zehnder (b. 1992, Summit, New Jersey) earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. His work has been included in exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; C L E A R I N G, Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA; Mrs., Maspeth, NY; DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL; Spider Gallery, Wichita, KS; and the Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI, among others. Zehnder’s first solo exhibition with Mrs. was held in September 2022, followed by a solo presentation at Independent in May 2023. His next exhibition will be held at Mrs., Maspeth, NY in November 2025. His work is included in the permanent collections of ICA Miami, Miami, FL; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; and The Warehouse, Dallas, TX. Zehnder lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and has been represented by Mrs., Maspeth, NY since 2023.

Location: 7 rue Froissart, 75003 Paris
Vernissage: Sunday, 19 October, 5–8pm
Open hours: Monday, 20 - 25 October, 11am–7pm

Participating Galleries & Curators:

  • Brigitte Mulholland, Paris

  • Chilli | Harlesden High Street, London

  • DIMIN, New York

  • HESSE FLATOW, New York

  • Marinaro, New York | Gattopardo, Los Angeles

  • Mrs., New York

  • SCHWARZ CONEMPORARY, Berlin

  • the black chip, Ireland

  • Slip House, New York