Outside the Grand Palais for FIAC, all photos via Art Observed
As the doors to one fair close, another set has opened on the opposite side of the English channel. Paris’s FIAC is now in full swing after opening its VIP preview yesterday at the Grand Palais, packing in guests to view the fair’s deep selection of works from Europe and abroad. (more…)
Continuing what could arguably be the most controversial series of Christmas-themed public artworks, Paul McCarthy this past week installed Tree, an enormous inflatable sculpture on Place Vendome in Paris that bears a striking resemblance to both a Christmas tree or a sex toy. The work has already garnered considerable controversy, with one man slapping McCarthy as he viewed the work. “Does this kind of thing happen often in France?” McCarthy reportedly asked shortly after being attacked.
Since being installed, the sculpture has been repeatedly attacked by vandals, and has ultimately been removed from Place Vendome.
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Jules de Balincourt, Underneath the Trees They Listened…and Heard Silence (2014), Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac‘s Marais gallery in Paris is currently presenting fifteen new paintings by Jules de Balincourt, his third solo exhibition for the gallery. Titled “Blue Hours,” the exhibition continues Balincourt’s exploration of broad expanses of bright colors that dominate many of his pieces, and bring the viewer into vivid worlds just beyond the bounds of reality. (more…)
The New York Times profiles the work of Bernard Arnault in building the Museum for the Fondation Luis Vuitton’s expansive art collection, a massive structure in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. “We don’t speak of numbers when we speak of a dream,” he says when asked about the final cost of the building. “Let’s just say it is a very expensive sculpture.” (more…)
Parisian Taxidermy specialist Peyrolle has announced a collaboration with Damien Hirst. Titled Signification (Hope, Immortality and Death in Paris, Now and Then), the “Cabinet of Curiosities” includes stuffed birds and insects, alongside a selection of cleaning products. “From the Surrealists to now, artists have come to Deyrolle not only to be inspired, but also to have a relationship with le vivant — the living — and the collapse of the living,” says Deyrolle’s owner Prince Louis Albert de Broglie. (more…)
The Financial Times profiles the long-awaited opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, the Frank Gehry-designed museum housing the renowned design house’s immense art collection. The article includes a number of notes from LVMH head Bernard Arnault on the Fondation’s approach to collection. “When we buy something it has to meet two conditions,” he says. “One is that I have to like it, the other is that Suzanne Page (the Fondation curator) should consider it something worth exhibiting in the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The Fondation’s collection focuses on the link between contemporary artists and the second part of the last century. So you see the evolution.” (more…)
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue (1921), Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. © 2014 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c:o HCR International
“I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects,” Piet Mondrian’s quote reads in the introduction to his expansive retrospective at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. The Dutch artist, who moved slowly but steadily through the early history of abstraction, explored a diverse body of work in his career, from early impressionist experiments through to his iconic grids, colorful, reductive patterns of black lines and squares of color. (more…)
The Wall Street Journal reports that, after five years and a €52 million renovation, the Picasso Museum in Paris will reopen on October 25th. The museum, which is housed in a 17th century mansion built by a favorite of Louis XIV, was founded by the city in 1985 to house what would become the largest Picasso collection in the world. Closed for renovation in 2009, the museum was meant to reopen in 2011 but pushed back the date twice thanks to delays and controversies such as the museum’s decision to dismiss its director Anne Baldassari. (more…)
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aujourd’hui, le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive], Photo: André Morin via Domus
In “Aujourd’hui, le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive]” on display at Palais de Tokyo, Hiroshi Sugimoto peers through time and presents a world balanced between life and death. Known for his photographic collections Diorama (1976), in which he photographed animal displays in natural history museums, Theaters (1978), long-exposure photographs of old-style American theaters while movies play on the screens, and Seascapes (1980), long-exposure black-and-white photographs of the meeting of sea and sky, Sugimoto explores the passage of time, making it tangible through the era of his subjects and the long exposure times used. (more…)
In the midst of a recent “boom” in art funds, The Art Newspaper looks back at André Level’s La Peau de l’Ours, a fund founded in 1904 that purchased works like Picasso’s Les Bateleurs and successfully sold them at markedly higher prices. The fund was inspired by the 1903 Salon D’Automne, which greatly inspired Level. “I had seen there the canvases that seemed to me, without the slightest doubt, the authentic art of our time and the near future,” he wrote. “I believed in it; I had faith.” (more…)
FIAC has announced a new event set to take place during the larger fair this October, titled (OFF)ICIELLE, and focused around promoting young galleries and artists on the international circuit. The event will present 50 galleries from around the world in Paris, opening for a private viewing on October 21st. (more…)
The Winged Victory of Samothrace is back on view at The Louvre, following an extensive 8-month cleaning and restoration project. Experts noted that some lost parts of the statue had been replaced with plaster, but also restored these pieces, maintaining evidence of the statue’s history. (more…)
JR, Au Pantheon! via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed
The 31-year-old French photographer and artist JR has completed an impressive installation for his global INSIDE OUT project, which allows participants to express themselves through photographing their own portraits and allowing JR to paste them in a new artistic statement. The French artist started the project after he was awarded the TED prize in 2011, which gave him $1 million to make a world-inspiring idea to come to life. Since then, INSIDE OUT has traveled across the country: California, New York, and Minnesota; and the globe: Italy, Brazil, Palestine, etc. Now in Paris, JR has covered the floor, cupola, and dome of the Pantheon in Paris with 2,500 of his signature black and white portrait posters. (more…)
The Foundation Louis Vuitton is set to finally open its museum this coming October, showcasing the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton corporate art collection, Bernard Arnault has announced. It will express the artistic, cultural and emotional values, as well as the art of living, promoted by Bernard Arnault and the LVMH Group, but it is truly a charitable foundation, devoted to the public as a whole,” says advisor Jean-Paul Claverie. (more…)
Thomas Hirschhorn, Flamme Èternelle (Installation View), via Flamme Eternelle Website
“I am interested in the ‘too much’, doing too much, giving too much, putting too much of an effort into something. Wastefulness as a tool or a weapon’ says Thomas Hirschhorn about his practice. The Swiss-born artist’s new exhibition, Flame Èternelle in Palais de Tokyo in Paris is the indisputable proof of this effort of presenting the ‘too much’.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Flamme Èternelle (Installation View), via Palais de Tokyo (more…)
The city of Paris has named a public square in its 13th Arrondissement after Jean-Michel Basquiat, a fitting choice given the area’s popularity with street artists and street art tourists. “Basquiat is one of the biggest contemporary artists,” 13th Arrondissemnet mayor Jérôme Coumet says. “He defended the cause of African-Americans in the US, and was also a lover of France. He was the artist who blazed the trail for street art, and art in public space.” (more…)
The Musée Picasso in Paris has announced Laurent Le Bon, currently a the head of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, as its newest director, following the dismissal of Anne Baldassari earlier this year. (more…)
Pierre Soulages, Peinture 175 X 222 Cm, 23 Mai 2013, via Art Observed
Held in high regard in his home country of France, and throughout much of continental Europe, the work of Pierre Soulages has never really achieved the same stature in the United States, despite his formal ties to the particularly American strains abstract expressionism and minimalism that have populated his work over the past sixty years. But it’s that same lack of recognition that Dominique Lévy and Emmanuel Perrotin are looking to change this spring, bringing a selection of the artist’s most recent work, and some of his most classic canvases to show at the pair’s uptown exhibition spaces.
Pierre Soulages, Peinture 202 X 159 Cm, 18 Octobre 1967, via Art Observed (more…)
Alex Katz, Nabil’s Loft (1976), all images courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
On view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Pantin, is a retrospective of paintings by American figurative and Pop artist Alex Katz. The monographic exhibition is composed of around one hundred works, including paintings from the 60’s and 70’s, as well as more recent works through to the present. The exhibition will remain on view through July 12, 2014.
Cécile Eluard, daughter of surrealist poet Paul Eluard, is interviewed in the Guardian this week, recounting her experiences growing up surrounded by some of the most famous artists of the day, including Max Ernst, Dali, and Pablo Picasso, who would take her to boxing matches. “He never got old,” Eluard says of Picasso. “I never felt the 40-odd years between us. We would go and have a swim in Vallauris, I would come and visit him whenever I liked in his studio in rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. He would show me his little sculptures made of bric-Ã -brac. He was so alive, so earthy, so absolutely not abstract!” (more…)
The Guardian has published an imaginative profile on Marcel Duchamp, noting some of the artist’s quirks and passions, including his avid chess-playing, his daring transportation of his art materials out of Nazi Germany posing as a cheese vendor, and his takes on quickly produced artworks: “Quick art, that’s been the characteristic of the whole century from the cubists on, ” he once said. “The speed that’s being used in space, in communications, is also being used in art. But things of great importance in art have always to be slowly produced.” (more…)
Rankin, A. Galerie, Paris, all photos by Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed
Launched in 1998, the Art Paris fair has charted a course of its own through the increasingly glutted calendar of sales events internationally, sitting squarely between the behemoth proceedings of New York’s Armory Show and the bustle of Hong Kong’s recent Art Basel edition. This past weekend saw the 2014 edition of the Art Paris Art Fair come and go, as 140 galleries set up shop in the Grand Palais for several days of strong sales, and an impressive attendance count of 58,387, up 10% from last year. (more…)
Emmanuel Perrotin is profiled in W Magazine this month, underlining the gallerist’s penchant for risk-taking, and his adventurous spirit in regards to his relationship with his artists. “There are a lot of dealers in Europe who just want to complain,” Perrotin says. “I’m rather positive and energetic. But it’s true that the bigger you get, the more you start to worry and to ask yourself how well you’re really doing.” (more…)
