Jean Fournier Gallery — À propos — Slash Paris

Galerie Jean Fournier was founded in 1954 by Jean Fournier (1922–2006), initially as the Kléber bookshop-gallery, which offered Simon Hantaï his first exhibitions. Jean Fournier opened under his own name on Rue du Bac in 1964; this was followed by a move to Rue Quincampoix in 1980, then a return to Rue du Bac in 1999. The gallery continues to function today under the aegis of its president, Jean-Marie Bonnet.

After ten years with Elodie Rahard at the helm, Emilie Ovaere-Corthay became the gallery’s director in May 2013. A former curator at the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, she went on to curate the annual Art in the Chapels event in Pontivy, Brittany, from 2010 to 2013. Her curatorial and research activities have led her to organise projects combining modern and contemporary art and it was only natural that she should ultimately find her way to the Galerie Jean Fournier, whose founder was a great lover of Matisse.

Jean Fournier was Simon Hantaï’s gallerist. He began showing Hantaï’s work in 1956 and the partnership lives on today: since the eminent artist’s death in 2008 the gallery has continued to publicise his work and instigate research.

Jean Fournier was also a long-time advocate of the American painters who made the move to France in the 1950s, among them James Bishop, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Jean Paul Riopelle and Kimber Smith.

In the wake of Fournier’s initial commitments, the gallery has been mainly involved with abstraction and painterly practice from the 1950s up to the present day. Its identity and driving force are now founded on the fruitful intergenerational dialogue this approach generates.

With a long and prestigious past behind it, Galerie Jean Fournier is also home to American and European painters and sculptors whose work has been developing since the 1980s and 1990s: Stéphane Bordarier, Didier Demozay, Gilgian Gelzer, Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel, Frédérique Lucien, Pierre Mabille, Jean François Maurige, Peter Soriano and Claude Tétot. Since 2008 Pierre Buraglio has been showing here again, and there is now a commitment to younger artists like Nicolas Guiet, whose work, situated on the cusp between painting and sculpture, is totally redefining the picture as we know it.

The quality of the gallery’s highly original, scrupulously produced invitations and catalogues is another feature of the Jean Fournier tradition of excellence. The programme is divided between solo exhibitions of artists’ recent output and spotlight shows focusing on specific aspects of the work of the gallery’s historic figures. There is, too, an innovative new series of group exhibitions in the form of ’imaginary museums’.