PARIS, FRANCE.- This October one of the world’s most important modern and contemporary art fairs will celebrate its 30th anniversary. The Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) will be held until October 13 at the Porte de Versailles, while celebrations throughout Paris will commemorate FIAC’s 30-year history of discovering and exhibiting first-rate modern and contemporary art. What began 30 years ago as a gathering of 80 dealers in the old Bastille train station with 9,000 attendees has grown to become one of the most important events on the international art calendar. FIAC 2003 will welcome 70,000 visitors, including collectors, curators, museum professionals and journalists, providing them with an international perspective on the world’s best modern and contemporary art. With 175 exhibiting galleries based in 22 countries, FIAC 2003 will include museum-quality modern, contemporary and cutting-edge art in every medium – from paintings, sculpture and works on paper, to photography, video and installation – by nearly 1,000 artists.

The fair will be divided into five sections: Solo Shows; Group Shows; and Editions; as well as the critically-acclaimed Perspectives and Video Cube sections. The Editions section offers prints, photographs and editioned sculpture, providing visitors to the fair with more affordable buying opportunities. Perspectives is FIAC’s annual exhibition of emerging artists, represented this year by 18 cutting-edge galleries. The Video Cube, launched at FIAC in 2001, displays works by nine video artists selected by a jury of international art professionals in a 4,000 square-foot space at the center of the fair.

FIAC 2003 will feature a number of events and programs celebrating FIAC’s 30th year, including: Special "30 Years of FIAC" exhibitions, performances, installations, and projects by participating galleries; 30th Anniversary Party attended by artists, celebrities, and business & government leaders; An exclusive soirée at Maxim’s to celebrate FIAC’s 30th birthday, featuring a special performance of Le Dancing by David Rosenberg, with dancers Florence Augendre, Foofwa d’immobilité, Luc Favrou and Lisa Rosenberg; Bal Jaune Soirée, a festive event planned, decorated, and run by top contemporary artists organized by Ricard S.A. and Beaux Arts Magazine; and 33 solo exhibitions, including shows from modern artists (Jean Arp, Roberto Matta, Victor Brauner) and contemporary artists (Thomas Ruff, Yayoi Kusama, and Erwin Olaf), as well as 18 thematic exhibitions.

VIP Collectors Program - FIAC’s signature program for international collectors, Parcours Privé will offer VIP guests exclusive access to a series of special tours and events including behind-the-scenes museum visits, and advance exhibition previews. New to Parcours Privé this year, Art Taste is a series of gourmet food and wine tastings sponsored by Nicolas Feuillatte Champagnes, Kaspia Caviar, Illy Café and Richart, the chocolate designer who created a new treat for FIAC’s 30th birthday.

Public Programs - Le Café des Arts, FIAC’s annual forum for conversations with leaders in the international art community, will feature round-table discussions, lectures and screenings with artists, curators, and art critics. FIAC is proud of its tradition of giving artists a forum to express their ideas and provide context to their work and the work of their peers. In honor of FIAC’s 30 years of giving artists a voice, this year’s Café des Arts will be themed The Artist’s Word.

October in Paris  - This fall, Paris will offer FIAC visitors rare opportunities to see masterpieces of modern and contemporary art. In addition to the fair, there will be a variety of notable exhibitions on view in Parisian museums. Highlights include: Jean Cocteau and Roni Horn at the Centre Georges Pompidou; Chen Zhen at Palais de Tokyo; Edouard Vuillard and Gauguin in Tahiti at the Grand-Palais; Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Musée Maillol and Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris: 1918-1939 at the Musée d’Art Américain in Giverny.

The Year of China in France - This year’s FIAC is marked by a strong presence of Chinese art in response to "The Year of China in France," a cultural exchange that will run from October 2003 through July 2004. FIAC 2003 will offer an unparalleled opportunity to discover contemporary Chinese art, both in galleries from China and in European and American galleries exhibiting work by Chinese artists.

Chinese galleries at the fair include Kwai Po Collection (Hong Kong), ShanghArt (Shanghai), Xin-Dong Cheng (Beijing); and Courtyard Gallery (Beijing). European and American galleries exhibiting Chinese art include Patrice Trigano (Paris), with a show of abstract landscape paintings by Chu Teh-Chun; and Marlborough Gallery (New York), with an exhibition of Paris-based Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki, whose work blends traditional Chinese painting with abstract Western painting.

Mao’s Red Book at Chinese Contemporary (London) will feature works by artists including Xu Yihui, one of the first artists to create works of "Gaudy Art," a movement comparable to American kitsch; while Galerie Albert Benamou (Paris) will exhibit a new generation of Chinese artists including Feng Zheng-Jie, whose Pop Art style paintings define a new, updated vision of Chinese society.
 
FIAC 2003 demonstrates both cultural and geographical diversity, with more than half of the exhibiting galleries from outside France. This year’s galleries come from 22 countries in Western and Eastern Europe, North and South America, Asia, and the Middle East. This year FIAC 2003 welcomes galleries from five new countries: Cuba (La Casona, Havana); Canada (Artcore Gallery, Toronto); Luxembourg (Alimentation Générale, Luxembourg); Japan (Mizuma Art, Tokyo); and Portugal (Mario Sequeira, Braga).

There is a sizeable contingent of Asian exhibitors participating in the fair, including important galleries from China, Korea and Japan. Participation by American galleries includes Finesilver (San Antonio), and Art of this Century, I-20, Marlborough Fine Art, and Spencer Brownstone (all from New York).

Almost 30 percent of the galleries at FIAC 2003 are first-time exhibitors. Newcomers include major contemporary art galleries such as Art & Public (Geneva), Christian Stein (Milan), Pepe Cobo (Seville), Karsten Greve (Paris, Cologne, Milan, St. Moritz), as well as rising new galleries on the international scene such as Anita Beckers (Cologne), MW Projects (London), Isabella Brancolini (Florence), Distrito4 (Madrid), and Cosmic (Paris).

Solo Shows: One of the strengths of FIAC 2003 will be its 33 one-person shows representing works in every medium. Among the important artists featured in solo shows are ground-breaking German photographer Thomas Ruff, on view at Nelson (Paris); and Romanian-born surrealist Victor Brauner whose paintings often exhibit a naïve, folk art quality at Samy Kinge (Paris).

On view at La Galerie Natalie Séroussi (Paris) will be an exhibition of works by Jean Arp. This special commemorative exhibition will focus on Arp’s sculpture from the 1930s to the 1960s. Claude Bernard (Paris) will feature works by the late Chilean-born surrealist Roberto Matta, including several of the last paintings the artist created before his death in 2002.

Additional solo shows of interest include Christoph Wedding at Aurel Scheibler (Cologne); Haitian painter and sculptor Hervé Télémaque at Louis Carré et Cie (Paris); self-described "obsessional" artist Yayoi Kusama at Piece Unique (Paris); Pia Rönicke’s video, drawing and collage at GB Agency (Paris); works by Cuban painter Roberto Diago at La Casona (Havana); and Russian-born artist Kristina Solomoukha at Martine & Thibault De La Châtre (Paris).

Group Shows - Group shows and thematic exhibitions at FIAC showcase the dealer’s curatorial style, and afford viewers insight into the relationships between artworks. A number of galleries at the fair have chosen to present exhibitions exploring historical movements, while others will focus on themes within contemporary art.

Among the group exhibitions on view will be "Fantasme Fantasque" at Jérôme de Noirmont (Paris). The exhibition explores the element of fantasy in artworks of many mediums by artists from the 1980s to the present. Highlights of the exhibition include Pierre and Gilles, who mingle reality with the fantastic in their photographs; Bettina Rheims, whose photographs are noted for their depiction of feminine sensuality; and Yi Zhou, who creates mirror-like interpretations of video games, imagining herself as a reincarnation of video-game action hero Lara Croft. Other major artists included in the exhibition are Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Anh Duong, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons.

Jean-Pierre Ritsch-Fisch Galerie (Strasbourg) explores "The Five Themes of Art Brut: Theory, Obsession, Eroticism, Memory and the Sacred." Art Brut, a term coined in the 1940s, describes art created by unschooled artists who work in isolation, outside of an accepted "art world" or cultural influence. On view will be works by self-taught artists including sculptor Barbus Müller and photographer Morton Bartlett, as well as drawings by Henry Darger, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, and Rosemarie Koczy.

Exhibiting portraits of artists by artists, Photo & Contemporary (Turin) will present "Artists: Face to Face" with silkscreen prints of Liza Minelli and Pia Zadora by Andy Warhol and black & white prints of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol by photographer Mimmo Jodice, in addition to works by William Klein and others.

"The Unveiled Truth," an homage to 18th-century Italian prince, chemist, anatomist, and alchemist Raimondo de Sangro, will be on view at the gallery mimmoscognamiglio arte contemporanea (Naples). The exhibition includes works by world-renowned British sculptor Antony Gormley and Jannis Kounellis, one of the founding figures of the Arte Povera movement.

Contemporary Photography  - Contemporary photography will be represented in a number of exhibitions at FIAC 2003. Jenny Gage at Taché Lévy Gallery (Brussels) is a filmmaker and photographer whose ambiguous portraits of teenage girls are at once appealing and disturbing. Gilles Peyroulet (Paris) will exhibit works by conceptual artist Kevin Landers, known for his photographs and handmade sculpture which reproduce people, urban scenes, and commercial products in a style that is both heartfelt and bitingly ironic. The unusual and the abnormal figure prominently in the photographs of Dutch artist Erwin Olaf, the subject of a one-person show at Flatland Gallery (Utrecht).

A number of photographers will be exhibited by more than one gallery: works by Danielle Buetti will be shown at B&D Studio (Milan) and Sfeir Semler (Hamburg); and works by Jean-Marc Bustamente will be exhibited at Nathalie Obadia (Paris), Sollertis (Toulouse) and Xavier Hufkens (Brussels). Works by Sophie Calle will be on view at Arndt & Partner (Berlin) and Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris).

Perspectives - Launched at FIAC in 1996, Perspectives has become known as a prominent showcase for the newest art in every medium. Established to encourage younger galleries to participate in the fair, the Perspectives program identifies high-quality galleries less than two years old and offers them subsidized exhibition rates. Perspectives 2003 is co-sponsored by Espace Paul Ricard, and provides an exhibition area to 18 galleries from 13 countries, exhibiting 60 emerging artists from four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, America).

A highlight of this year’s Perspectives section is a solo exhibition at Finesilver (San Antonio) of Texan artist Chuck Ramirez, who will exhibit large scale, digitally manipulated photographs. Previously a graphic designer, Ramirez uses the visual language of contemporary advertising and design to recontextualize familiar objects. His witty photographs are both personal and political, exploring such issues as consumer society, the AIDS crisis, Latino identity and sexuality.

Dvir Gallery (Tel Aviv) will present provocative color photographs from Pavel Wolberg’s series "Point-Blank (Israel)–Photography of the Recent Time." Wolberg’s photographs taken at the Israeli/Palestinian border escape the usual clichés of photo-reportage, offering a nuanced and incisive look at the social, political and military struggles in the Middle East.

Müller de Chiara (Berlin) will exhibit the paintings of British artist Ellen Harvey. Harvey creates oil paintings that are contemporary mutations of the most traditional artistic genres: portraits, landscapes, and history paintings. By placing these paintings in "non-art" contexts such as graffiti-laden city streets, Harvey questions how context affects the perception of art.

Video Cube - This year marks the third annual presentation of FIAC’s Video Cube, a 4,000 square-foot installation of new or recent video works by nine artists from around the world. Selected by a professional jury, each video is screened continuously at the fair in an individual booth. The artists on view will be Pierre Huyghe (Roger Pailhas, Marseille), last year’s winner of the prestigious Hugo Boss prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum; French-born, Brooklyn-based artist Stephen Dean (Xippas, Paris), whose video Pulse was exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial; Olga Kisseleva (Quang Paris); Yang Fudong (ShanghArt, Shanghai); Mark Lewis (Cent 8, Paris); Tania Mouraud (Rabouan Moussion, Paris); Joao Onofre (I-20, New York); Jun Nguyen Hastushiba (Mizuma Art, Tokyo); and Sven Pahlsson (Spencer Brownstone, New York). During the fair, a panel of curators, critics and key members of the art community will award a special FIAC prize of 5,000 € to the most compelling new video work. Previous winners were Wan Janwei in 2001 and Sebastian Diaz Morales in 2002.