Critic and Educator Nicolas Bourriaud has been dismissed from his post as the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts by Fleur Pellerin, French minister of culture, following a lengthy exchange over the direction of the school.  “Dear friends, the Minister [of Culture] has just fired me ‘for reasons related to a change of direction’ of her politics,” Bourriaud wrote on Facebook.  “Not a single factual argument in the course of a forty-five-minute discussion.” (more…)

Philippe Parreno, Danny La Rue,  H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS

The Park Avenue Armory has opened its doors this summer to Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno’s largest U.S. installation to date, H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, a symphony of events unfolding in scripted and random sequences that constantly blend and transform in shape and context, tuning the entire space as a series of interlocking events.  Sharing authorship, Parreno avidly collaborates with performance artist Tino Sehgal, artist Pierre Hughye and pianist Mikhail Ruby, giving Parreno the role of both artist and director.  (more…)

François Pinault is reportedly looking to Paris for the potential site of a museum housing his collection of art, WWD reports.  “He has met with [Paris mayor] Anne Hidalgo, who expressed her interest,” says a source close to Pinault. “They are looking together.” (more…)

Cyprien Gaillard, Where Nature Runs Riot (2015). All Images courtesy Sprueth Magers Berlin.

Now through July 18, Sprüth Magers Gallery in Berlin hosts Where Nature Runs Riot, an exhibition of new work by Cyprien Gaillard, combining film, sculpture, and sound to inform and interrupt each other in the three main pieces that comprise the show.  Thematically, Gaillard focuses on the dialogue formed between natural and man-made structures erected at the limits of history and civilization, testing the capacity of sculptural form to illustrate both the esoteric and psychedelic.  References to major figures and tropes from art and musical history reveal the artist’s interest in synthesizing seemingly disparate elements towards a type of aesthetic logic to history and dialogue, an often palimpsestic structure of overlapping layers and interpretations. In this exhibition, Gaillard demonstrates and forges relationships between stillness and movement, natural and man-made form, sound and vision.

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Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner, the central installation at the artist’s recently opening Versailles Palace commission, has been vandalized with spray paint.  The work has already commanded harsh criticism for its subject matter and relationship to French history.  “It was lightly sprayed with paint,” says the estate management.  “The work is being cleaned.” (more…)

Artist Bernar Venet’s Venet Foundation and Museum in Le Muy, France, is the subject of a New York Times profile this week, documenting the artist’s impressive collection of major American artists, including Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, which the artist often secured through barters or purchases on “friend rates.”  “Our works had no commercial value,” Mr. Venet says of the works he often traded his own pieces for. “We produced more than we sold.” (more…)

Anish Kapoor has opened his new installation of works at Versailles to controversy this week, after the artist noted his new work Dirty Corner, as a reference to the sexual organs of Queen Marie Antoinette as she rose to power.  “I know it is a composition, but let’s say that this is ruining the perspective that visitors of the castle may have,” says retired professor Pierre Dhainaut. (more…)

Richard Serra was awarded last night with The Insignia of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, the highest honor in France, recognizing the artist’s long history of work in the nation, and his contributions to the development of contemporary art both in France and abroad.   (more…)

The case surrounding the theft of works from Picasso descendent Catherine Hutin-Blay has taken a new turn, as Art Newspaper reports that more than 60 works could be missing from Hutin-Blay’s Gennevilliers storage facility.  “One thing is for sure,” her lawyer, Anne-Sophie Nardon says, “this case is extremely serious and much bigger that we first thought.” (more…)

Continuing her fundraising quest through the sale of her grandfather Pablo Picasso‘s estate, Marina Picasso is selling her inherited villa in Cannes, La Califnornie, a space she has already seen a €150 Million offer for. “Of course I’m selling,” she says. “But it’s also a way to share.” (more…)

The Institut Giacometti, the foundation museum dedicated to the life and work of Alberto Giacometti, is set to open next year in Paris, featuring a meticulous recreation of the artist’s small, 270 square-foot studio.  The opening of the museum is the result of settled disputes over the estate of the artist, as brokered by Institut head Catherine Grenier, former deputy director of the Centre Pompidou.  “When I got here a year ago,” Grenier says, “this foundation was not at all well known, for one essential reason: It was closed to the public. My priority is to make its activities and its extraordinary collection accessible.” (more…)

Ed Ruscha, Cold Beer Beautiful Girls (2009), © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

On view at Gagosian Gallery’s Paris exhibition space are two exhibitions entitled “Prints and Photographs” and “Books & Co.,” organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk to explore the innovation and legacy of Ed Ruscha across a range of printed media.

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Daniel Keller, Stack 1 (2014), via Max Hetzler

Presenting a selection of artists working at the bleeding edge of social and economic critique, Max Hetzler’s exhibition Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism easily clocks in as one of the season’s most unexpectedly energetic exhibitions.  Curated by Lisa Schiff, Leslie Fritz and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo, and spread between the gallery’s Paris and Berlin locations, the show places post-capitalist theory and economic transition as its central conceit, examining the material and social costs of contemporary life within systems of capital exchange.  Pulling from the works of writer Jeremy Rifkin, the exhibition explores a historical juncture at which the traditional modes of national economic and political systems are slowly giving way, and a new, digitally-accelerated model of consumption and distribution is swiftly establishing itself.

Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism (Installation View – Paris), via Max Hetzler (more…)

Pierre Le Guennec, the electrician accused of stealing over 200 Picasso pieces from the artist years ago, has been handed a suspended two year sentence for his possession of the works, and has been ordered to return the works by a Parisian court.   (more…)

Louise Bourgeois, Anatomy (1998), all images courtesy Galerie Lelong

On view at Galerie Lelong is an exhibition featuring graphic works, sketches and drawings made early the career of the late French-American artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), whose work often incorporated autobiographical elements.

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La Coiffeuse, a 1911 Pablo Picasso painting stolen from a Centre Pompidou storage room in 2001, has been recovered, after customs officials at the Port of Newark found it in a package marked with the words Merry Christmas.  “A lost treasure has been found,” said US Attorney Loretta Lynch.  “Because of the blatant smuggling in this case the painting is subject to forfeiture to the United States. Forfeiture of the painting will extract it from the grasp of the black market in stolen art so it can be returned to its rightful owner.” (more…)

The 2015 edition of the Kurt Schwitters Award, which comes with a $28,000 prize an an exhibition in the Sprengel Museum Hannover, has been awarded to Pierre Huyghe.   (more…)

A Jeff Koons exhibition planned to open this year at the Louvre has been canceled after a reported “lack of funding,” according to Artforum.  The exhibition had been previously reported to consist of a number of the artist’s balloon animal sculptures. (more…)

The trial for Pierre Le Guennec, a former handyman for Pablo Picasso, and his wife has begun.  The pair recently revealed an enormous trove of works by the artist they claim they were given in the 1970’s, and which state prosecutors claim they stole.  If convicted of theft, they could face up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine. (more…)

The Association for the International Diffusion of French Art has announced the nominees for the 2015 edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize: Davide Balula, Neil Beloufa, Melik Ohanian, and Zineb Sedira.  The prize honors one French artist or artist living in France working in the plastic or visual arts. (more…)

David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Art Observed

Canadian-born, New York-based artist David Altmejd brings his uniquely executed sculptures and installations to the Musée D’Art Moderne in Paris this winter, the artist’s first career retrospective in France, and one which sees him realizing one of his most ambitious new sculptures to date, alongside a selection of his work from the past twenty years. (more…)

The Met has announced its next artist for the museum’s ongoing site-specific rooftop installation series, commissioning French conceptualist Pierre Huyghe to create a new piece looking out on Central Park.  “Pierre loves the fact that the park is full of animals,” says associate curator Ian Alteveer. (more…)

Over the past year, Catherine Grenier, the former deputy director of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, has been streamlining the Giacometti Foundation, working to repair years of scandal and controversy over the artist’s legacy.  “I’m not interested in archaeology, in digging up the past,” she says. “I’m only interested in progress, in moving forward in a positive way.”  (more…)

The New York Times looks at the nearly $67 million in upcoming renovations slated for the Louvre in Paris, and president Jean-Luc Martinez’s vision for a more visitor-centered experience.  “I lived in a suburb that was very modern, and everything was new,” Martinez tells the NYT. “And when I arrived here, everything was ancient. Imagine for a child, to see five centuries of art, some as old as two or three millenniums. In this space, I felt the depth of human history.” (more…)