A number of Parisian cultural institutions are reporting sizable drops in attendance following the attacks in the French capital this month. The Louvre has reported a 30% decrease in attendance, and the Centre Pompidou has seen a 50% drop. “1000 visitors per day versus the 2000 per day that had been coming to see the current Wifredo Lam exhibition,” says Benoît Parayre, director of communication. (more…)
Mona Hatoum is profiled in The New York Times this week, as the artist prepares for her solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou this month, and reviews the multi-faceted international upbringing that informs much of her work. “The basis of it is a feeling of wanting to be free of all those restrictions, whether it’s social or political, that are always put on people,” she says, “so I can be whatever I want to be.” (more…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
Painter Zeng Fanzhi is the subject of a video profile on Nowness this week, shot in Paris and exploring his work and stance towards creating. “An artist should follow his heart, create, then keep moving,” he says. “If you keep repeating yourself than that’s a waste of the artistic life.” (more…)
French art dealer Olivier Thomas is under investigation after Catherine Hutin-Blay, the step-daughter of Pablo Picasso, filed charges accusing him of allegedly stealing artworks he was meant to be transporting and storing for her. (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…)
John Baldessari, Pictures & Scripts: A glass of water sweetheart (2015), all images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery
On view at both Marian Goodman Gallery, London and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris are two simultaneous exhibitions by John Baldessari: Pictures & Scripts and Early Work. The London gallery’s Pictures & Scripts show focuses on a series of new works, while the Paris gallery will show a selection of the artist’s important early catalog.
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.
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.
Bjarne Melgaard, The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment (Installation View), all images courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
On view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s location in the Parisian neighborhood of Marais is the first solo exhibition from the controversial, yet highly respected Norwegian painter Bjarne Melgaard. Entitled The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment, The exhibition is a collaborative effort confronting themes inspired by French film director Catherine Breillat. Known for confronting taboos and shocking audiences into self-reflection, Melgaard takes his cues for his new exhibition exhibition from Breillat, whom he has elevated to the role of a mythical figure. The works in this exhibition center around the 2014 film Abuse of Weakness, and take a shared interest in the beauty industry’s manipulation and domination of perceptions and judgments of others as a generator of profit and cultural currency.
Jésus Rafael Soto, Ambivalencia en el espacio color no. 12 (1981) all photos via Galerie Perrotin
On view at Galerie Perrotin, both in Paris and in New York is a double exhibition dedicated to Venezuelen artist Jesús Rafael Soto, who lived from 1923-2005. Curated by Matthieu Poirer, the exhibition is comprised of around sixty works created between 1957 and 2003, drawn from the estate and from various institutions. The title of the exhibition, Chronochrome, is meant to describe “the kinetic exploration of the monochrome,” a reference to the filmic production process that underscores the artist’s interest in multiple layers of carefully executed optics, creating a subtly shifting and alternating space within works for the viewer to discover. The eye’s movement back and forth, often between the two layers, the artist hoped, would produce a sense of visual vibration and a new perception of color.
The New York Times takes a look at the collection of modern masterpieces soon to go on view at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton. The exhibition has been in the works for several years but was downplayed when the museum first opened its doors last year, and will feature a number of landmark works, including Edvard Munch’s The Scream on loan from Oslo, as well as Matisse’s The Dance, which has not been seen in Paris in 15 years. “The foundation indeed aims to be contemporary,” artistic director Suzanne Pagé said. “But it doesn’t want to ignore the history of art, as it is seen in these major works of the 20th century, which continue to be a vital reference for artists today.” (more…)
Rineke Dijkstra, Selected Works (Installation View), all images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery Paris
On view at Marian Goodman’s Paris exhibition space is the third exhibition from Dutch photographer and filmmaker Rineke Dijkstra, composed of of two new videos filmed in Russia. Dijkstra became internationally known for her beach portraits of teenagers on the beaches of South Carolina, Poland, and Ukraine during the 1990’s, but she has also been producing lesser-known video portraits since 1996. The videos on display here, focusing on young ballerinas, were commissioned by Manifesta (European Biennial of Contemporary Art) for its most recent edition in 2014.
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…)
Marcel Duchamp, 3-Mending Standard (1913-1914 / 1964), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
Few artists have left such a mark on the history and direction of 2oth and 21st Century art in the same manner as Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who was at the forefront of revolutions both on and off the canvas in the first half of the century. Taking this impact as a starting point, the Centre Pompidou is currently presenting Marcel Duchamp: La Peinture, Même, an exhibition exploring the artist’s early roots in painting and drawing, and how these stylistic leanings contributed to his later work in the development of the readymade, installation based work, and other conceptual pursuits. (more…)
Luc Tuymans is profiled in the Financial Times this week, as the artist prepares to open a new show of works at David Zwirner London. “Realism, modernism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism: that is a discourse for people who have no visual sense,” Tuymans says. “I mean, these people have to get by. I still indulge in the perversity of painting, which remains interesting.” (more…)
A recent article on Arnet reviews the story over assailant Andrew Shannon’s attack on a Claude Monet painting, and notes that he is not the first to punch one of the artist’s Impressionist masterworks. In 2007, a group of vandals entered the Musée D’Orsay and punched a hole in another of the artist’s Argenteuil landscapes. (more…)
Amid charges of plagiarism, Jeff Koons’s work Fait d’Hiver has been pulled from exhibition at the artist’s expansive Centre Pompidou retrospective. The work’s owner made the request for its removal, while the museum made a point of expressing its desire to leave the work in the show. “It is essential that museums be able to continue to give an account of these artistic endeavors,” said president Alain Seban. (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…)
Wim Delvoye (Installation View), all photos by Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed
On view at Galerie Perrotin in Paris is a solo exhibition from Belgian neo-conceptual artist Wim Delvoye composed of around twenty new works that continue the artist’s ongoing interest in assemblages that constantly challenge assumptions of the sacred and profane. While the show features some of Delvoye’s previously explored formats, the show also includes a number of new formats and practices.
