Art Paris — Just art ! — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Fair — Slash Paris

Past: March 31 → April 3, 2011

ArtParis, the Paris springtime event for the modern and contemporary art market, is returning to the Grand Palais. Some one hundred international exhibitors are being asked to conceive stands that showcase painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, video, installations, etc.

Focus on the exhibition projects of five galleries.

Land-Art retrospective at the Repetto Gallery stand

For its Land-Art retrospective, the Repetto Gallery (Italy) will be showing historical pieces by major artists such as Richard Long, Christo, and Jeanne-Claude, Walter De Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, considered one of the theoreticians of this movement. The emblematic work “Spiral Jetty” demonstrates Smithson’s fascination for artistic intervention in large open areas that have thus far remained untouched… while reminding us of nature’s dominion over mankind. For instance, we also find Hamish Fulton and his art of walking among those artists who put nature at the core of their work, and vice versa.

Rising stars of the Asian Pacific selected by 10 Chancery Lane

Katie de Tilly and her gallery, 10 Chancery Lane (Hong Kong), are returning to ArtParis with a selection of artists forming the strength of the Asian Pacific region: Cambodian Sopheap Pich, the Chinese artist duo Muchen and Shao Yinong, New-Zealander Fiona Pardington, as well as Tibetan Gonkar Gyatso. He will be showing his Buddhas made from collages of stickers drawn from pop and consumer culture.

Gonkar Gyatso, Buddha in our tim 155 × 122 cm Courtesy 10 Chancery Lane Gallery

Katie de Tilly pays hommage to Australian art by inviting artist Hannah Bertram, who works on ephemeral pieces in connection with traditional ornamentation, such as decorative Victorian patterns from the 19th century, while using temporary materials, thus questioning the value of permanence, the visible, and invisible. For Artparis, she imagines the reconstruction of a dining room from evanescent elements such as talcum powder, scented powder, dust, ashes, and recycled paper. In so doing, she creates a space of intimacy through a visual and olfactory impression of fragile and unfathomable beauty

A solo show by Hans Hartung offered by the Sapone gallery

The Sapone Gallery (France) is devoting its entire stand to the work of a major representative of gestural abstraction: Hans Hartung. In the 1920s his brushstroke became synonymous with the search for a language and grammar of signs. He built a scholarly space ordered by lines, scratches, and strokes, while being one of the first to have launched “painting as action,” which would be taken up later in New York in the context of Action Painting. His work is dynamic, yet silent, because the artist denigrated what he called excessively brutal screaming and gesticulation. In a word, the symbiosis of a subtle balance between order and disorder, harmony and chaos. For ArtParis 2011, the Sapone gallery will focus on his canvasses and China inks from the 1950s and 1960s.

“Reality Revisited”: a stand designed by Paul Ardenne for the Analix Forever gallery

As a newcomer to ArtParis, Analix Forever (Switzerland) is preparing a stand curated by art critic Paul Ardenne on the theme of “Reality Revisited” with pieces by Mounir Fatmi, Ali Kazma, Mat Collishaw, Joanna Malinowska, Charles Moody, Andrea Mastrovito and Jean-Yves Jouannais, as well as a performance by Marc Horowitz to be enjoyed on the opening day of ArtParis. Paul Ardenne explains: "Largely fashioned by the media using botched portrayals, reality is a fertile area of experience for contemporary artists. For these artists, walking in its midst means taking back a world in the making, of which not all has been said or shown. It also means setting up the conditions for a relationship with the real, for an exchange and aesthetification. Thus, the artist aims to revisit commonplaces, revisit a new alliance. He meanders through the “thickness of the world” (Hans-Georg Gadamer), not to be subjected to it like a wound or a poisoned gift, but apprehending it without spite, like a frame lending itself to all possible poetics."

Semiose: contemporary canvasses and installations

The young Semiose gallery (France) of Benoît Porcher is leaving the 20th Paris arrondissement to take up residence in the Marais. The gallery will present the abstractions of Bruno Rousselot, as well as the baffling canvasses and installations of Hippolyte Hentgen, a duo of female artists who love to blur boundaries. Also worth discovering: paintings by Amélie Bertrand, enigmatic in both colour and form, for they portray nothing more than a thought under construction. Lastly, the Nature Carpets by Piero Gilardi and other spectacular pieces introducing fragments of nature made of painted polyurethane foam beneath the glass dome of the Grand Palais.

Questioning Chinese contemporary art at the Eli Klein Fine Art stand (New York, Beijing)

Established in New York and now a recent arrival in Beijing, the Eli Klein Fine Art gallery will participate in ArtParis for the first time with a selection of Chinese artists expressing the cultural mutations China is currently experiencing. Zhang Dali belongs to that generation of artists and intellectuals who fled China shortly after the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989. Upon returning to China after his exile, he was confronted with the denial of the political class and an experience of disillusionment. Through his work, he punctuates the societal upheavals that are shattering traditional communities. For instance, with “Heads” we can discover the resin-cast faces of migrant workers who have left rural areas to move to cities, whereas other recent works by Zhang Dali reinterpret the imagery of communist propaganda. In their midst are sleeping the “Unknown Creatures” of Shen Shaomin. Working like an anthropologist, he collects real animal bones to build a bestiary of fantastic creatures that both fascinate and frighten us, for these monsters, which symbolize death, nevertheless appear to be on the verge of awakening… And yet, the artist warns of the dangers of human intervention in Nature.

Philippe Pasqua one-man-show at the Laurent Strouk gallery (Paris) stand

The Laurent Strouk gallery will devote its stand to Philippe Pasqua by showing his most recent monumental sculptures, particularly a Ferrari sheathed in leather and tattooed. We can also discover his recent oil paintings and works on paper, which are as impressive by their size as by the intensity of their subjects. “His characters explode the gauge of normality, blur the order of propriety, and disturb the registers of well — intentioned honourability. Philippe Pasqua becomes imbued with them and the truth springs forth, bare and beautiful, strikingly photogenic as is the human condition in its mysteries and raw poetry…,” as critic Jean Corbu puts it. On Pasqua’s vanities which are present at ArtParis, he further comments: “When Philippe Pasqua composes the head of a dead person, he conjures up meditation and allegory through his radical interpretation of the invisible.” Through his fascinating work on the human form, Pasqua renders the flesh in painting and the soul as food for thought. Philippe Pasqua, Ferrari sheathed in leather and tattooed.

Philippe Pasqua, Sans titre Ferrari gainŽée de cuir et tatouée

Olivier Waltman (Paris) gallery presents “Faraday Cage” conceived by Noart

The Olivier Waltman gallery is calling upon one of its artists, Noart, whose metal design the gallery has been showing for five years. But the gallery’s intention was to have him participate as a set designer and decorator (movies, advertising): to build a stand completely out of metal that resonates completely with the work of the gallery’s other artists on exhibit at ArtParis. Noart’s project — a crazy, extravagant, and Jules-Vernesque homage inspired by the metal architecture of the Grand-Palais — is entitled The Faraday Cage (France). Like him, photographers Jean-Pierre Attal (France) and Aleix Plademunt (Spain), and painters Jonathan Huxley (UK) and Jorge Enrique (USA) question the conditions of a hyper-technological and ultra-fast world and the place it holds for humanity.

Aleix Plademunt, Dubailand Courtesy galerie Olivier Waltman

Contemporary Russian creation on exhibit at the Orel Art gallery (Paris) stand

The Orel Art gallery, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2011, continues to promote the Russian contemporary scene. The gallery will present well-established artists, such as Dubossarsky & Vinogradov, Andrei Molodkin, and Evgeny Yufit, as well as young, upcoming talent, such as painters Ivan Plusch and Valery Chtak. They draw on their own experiences and past to highlight in their works an observation of a loss of rationality in current society. Current society is called into question through experimentation with various types of media, each one aimed at deconstructing its cultural references. Orel Art, which is furthermore open to international creation, will also present the intentionally-damaged canvasses by English-born artist Rupert Shrive, for whom Ilona Orel will inaugurate a second personal exhibition at the gallery starting on 15 March.

Andrei Molodkin, Democracy, 2010 Blocs d’acrylique Courtesy galerie Orel Art

acte2galerie (Paris) will devote a one-man-show to photographer Albert Watson and is inviting Maison Particulière as guest

acte2galerie will present a solo show dedicated to the great Scottish photographer Albert Watson. After graphic art and cinema studies, this artist, although blind in one eye from birth, chose to devote himself to photography. Albert Watson’s particular style quickly established itself, drawing the attention of American and European fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, etc. Watson surprises us through the tender, filtered colour palette of his portraits and landscapes. His photographs are impressive through their brilliance, depth, and magnificence. His way of lighting his subjects, especially objects of fetishism and models, creates a quasi-meditative atmosphere.

Albert Watson, Kate Moss, Marrakech, 0 Courtesy acte2galerie Paris

For ArtParis, acte2galerie is inviting Maison Particulière, the space dreamed up by Amaury and Myriam de Solages to promote Art in Belgium and reinvent the world of a private home inhabited by collectors and their collections. They will present a colossal work by Angelo Musco. Entitled “Tehom” and measuring 14 metres long and 3 metres high, it addresses the theme of birth. During the show, American performer Natalie White will fill the space with choreography blending a feeling of weightlessness (in a Plexiglas case filled with water) with the unfathomable sensation of abandon.