PARIS.- ArtParis, the Paris springtime event for the modern and contemporary art market, is returning to the Grand Palais from 31 March to 3 April 2011. Some one hundred international exhibitors are being asked to conceive stands that showcase painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, video, installations, etc.
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. 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.
Other exhibitors are also confirming their arrival: Ernst Hilger, Sollertis, Daniel Templon, Maruani & Noirhomme, André Simoens, Lelong… On the solo-show side, Bernard Ceysson is putting the spotlight on Claude Viallat, Jean-Pierre Ritsch-Fisch on Thomas Palme, and Acte2 on Albert Watson. Architecture will be in the limelight with the Oniris gallery, which is inviting Odile Decq to its stand, whereas Hadrien de Montferrand is turning to Zaha Hadid.
