Now is the time for the public.
“This is also the symbolic title chosen by François Pinault,
“
Opening ”, for this inaugural sequence which will unveil our collections on May 22 at the heart of the Bourse de Commerce.
», Declares with faith Martin Bethenod, Deputy Managing Director of the Bourse de Commerce.
This eagerly awaited premiere, three times postponed due to the health crisis, covers all exhibition areas, whose volumes and heights vary in this monument returned to Paris, around 7,000 m2 spread over 10 exhibition spaces with the reception areas, the Passage, the Foyer, the stairs, the Medici column.
We enter it as into a world in itself where the language is resolutely contemporary, where artists, from veterans Martial Raysse and Miriam Cahn to rising forces Luc Tuymans and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, are entitled to radical freedom of expression.
An invitation to something else.
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The new life of the Bourse de Commerce
All disciplines deployed
“A new place. A new chapter in the history of the Pinault Collection, born in the 1980s and established in a museum project in Venice in 2006. It is a point of view on art. It is not art for the sake of art. The works chosen for this first act are in direct contact with the world, its racial, social and gender issues, its humanist issues. It is an art which manifests its porosity to the world ”
, warns Martin Bethenod, this former Center Pompidou and Fiac who has continued to revisit the hanging, more and more refined, concentrated, over the months.
The spirit of the place is born from the confrontation of a historical grandeur, on the scale of this Parisian monument, and of contemporary creation which questions, jostles, disturbs, intrigues, even annoys the refractory.
This alliance of opposites lets float a
Zeitgeist
made of flesh and ideas, anguish and vitality, sometimes raw as birth, delicacy and strength.
Like rough stones before the cut.
Untitled, by Urs Fischer, 2011. Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich
Nearly 200 works and 32 artists for a
“choral project”
thought out and rethought by François Pinault, who chose each artist and each work, in dialogue with his team, Caroline Bourgeois, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Matthieu Humery and Martin Bethenod. The Breton collector was keen to pave the way with Martial Raysse, our pop art star, the only artist finally invited to the Salon (
Here beach, as here below
, 2012, the most creaking fresco that closed its retrospective at the Center Pompidou in 2014 and that the Palazzo Grassi exhibited in 2015). The most French of conceptual, Bertrand Lavier, then opens the ball in his mischievous way. It is in glory in a mini-retrospective full of humor in the 24 historical windows of 1889 of the passage which encircles the concrete cylinder of Tadao Ando. There are mini versions of his ready-mades and his diversions, from
Showcases
faded to Spanish white to
painted objects
. On the balustrades of the top floor will live the 52 stuffed pigeons, renamed
The Others
, which were installed by the insolent Maurizio Cattelan at the Venice Biennale of the Zurich artist Bice Curiger in 2011 above the Tintoretto.
Often, therefore, artists throughout the Pinault Collection. The introspective Rudolf Stingel, the militant poet David Hammons, who juggles with racial archetypes, the shadow painter Marlene Dumas (
Skulls, Mamma Roma or Destino
), the masters of the intangible, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. The latter places his light signal, the
Mount Analogue
, a metaphorical journey to the top of the Medici column. All disciplines, from painting to the sound piece, are deployed. The principle is to reveal to the Bourse de Commerce artists, works or sets never shown in the exhibitions of the Pinault Collection. All the generations, of Martial Raysse, 84 years old, the veteran of this “Opening”
,
up to the young Chinese Xinyi Cheng or the transgender artist from Los Angeles Ser Serpas, 25 years old.
A piece of bravery
Arriving in the rotunda, a magnificent clear arena right under the dome and the sky of Paris, the piece of bravery of this first hanging is a vanity, destined to disappear, like us.
The monumental wax statues of Urs Fischer, Zurich resident of New York, made the event at the Venice Biennale 2011. Here in Paris is the large replica of
The Abduction of the Sabine Women,
by Jean de Bologne, which rises to 8 meters from high with its dying candle lights.
A little further on, the wax portrait of friend Rudolf Stingel, life-size, seated, like the painter who reflects on his canvas.
And, to complete these classics, seven wax chairs,
"symbols of our time and globalization" ...
Little by little, everything will melt, by a very sharp and calculated device for igniting the wicks included in the sculptures.
A performance.
On the first floor, gallery 3 will be the place of the intimate, conducive to photography.
She continues the debate.
Like these six sets, unpublished for many, often creaking, from the 1970s (Michel Journiac, Martha Wilson, Cindy Sherman) or from the Picture Generation (Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince).
They show the unity of a look through series work, the use of cross-dressing, disguise, appropriation, role-playing, staging, all these choices so typical of the 1970s. 1980 when the critical use of the image becomes the stake of photography.
On the second floor, a large set of four galleries offers a painting trail. And against all expectations, this time figurative painting, from the late Martin Kippenberger to the young Florian Krewer, the new star of amateurs (the grimacing heads, sculpted by Thomas Schütte, overlook them all). Gallery 4, the smallest, square in format, houses the three portraits of Rudolf Stingel, which form his
"mental universe"
(portraits of gallery owner Paula Cooper, and artists Franz West and Ludwig Kirchner). Painting all! in the 550 m2 of gallery 7, which extends into gallery 6, thanks to the windows left visible everywhere and the picture rails that seem to float without ever touching the architecture. Make way for the human figure with Miriam Cahn, a formidable artist discovered almost on the eve of his 71 years. Followed by the generation born in the 1950s, Marlene Dumas, to the
Milanese Orphans
, Peter Doig, to cinematographic snapshots, Luc Tuymans, ghostly, and Kerry James Marshall, the American who explores the color black.
Today's society is found among the artists of the Pinault Collection.
Black lives matter
, also in art.The future will unveil the South African queen of photography, Zanele Muholi, to whom Delpire & Co has just devoted a first French monograph,
Salut à toi
,
lionne noire.
She joins the Briton Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, present at the opening, and the African-American artist from Los Angeles Arthur Jafa, golden lion of the Venice Biennale 2019 for his video
White Album
, visible later. They all bear witness to current events and are part of this new art history. The last generation of painters is viscerally expressive, Claire Tabouret, Xinyi Cheng (seen in
"Antibody"
at the Palais de Tokyo), Ser Serpas and Antonio Oba.
Tatiana Found spread her bronze armchairs, ghosts of absent bodies, throughout the Bourse de Commerce.
The ultimate spicy note, no doubt.
David Hammons, an American myth in majesty
It is the invisible artist, so to speak immaterial, like his mythical performance which saw him selling snowballs, cut like precious stones,
neatly
arranged in decreasing sizes, in the streets of New York (
Blizaard Sale
, 1983, performance photographed by Dawoud Bey). King of museums, large collections and an art market hungry for references, he refuses interviews, documentaries, retrospectives. Radical, uncompromising, rare because fundamentally resistant to the idea of exhibitions, deeply poet like the rebels of the Arte Povera were, militant like the representatives of the Black Arts Movement, David Hammons, 77 years old, is a myth that he- even maintains as a Hollywood star or as a survivor.
He is
“the very example of the artist anchored in the Pinault Collection”
, since he was present in the 1980s. This set of 30 works brought together over three decades is in itself a form of retrospective, disarming and poetic.
“David Hammons asks the racial and post-colonialist questions that cross the United States and now France, in a time marked by Black Lives Matter. His metaphorical sculptures evoke these critical readings. Like his rare Body Prints, made in the style of Yves Klein's Anthropometries, but with his own body and humble materials, lard, margarine, sunscreen oil and dust, street versions of salon chic performance. All these works mark the place of African-Americans, their codes or the stereotypes assigned to them, basketball, street games, frizzy hair, skin color, and the importance of jazz, this first aesthetic avant-garde born from the black community, ”
explains Martin Bethenod. In one of his most beautiful
Body Prints
, David Hammons reinterprets in complete freedom, in all power,
The Kiss
by Gustav Klimt, in 1974.
Works on paper from the end of the 1960s until the recent large installation, Minimum Security, never before left the studio (scale 1 replica of a cell in high security quarters, accompanied by a prison stone Alcatraz).
The Parisian public will also find in this original ensemble the major pieces that punctuated the highlights of Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, such as High
Level of Cats
(1998) or
Central Park West
(1990), marked by the
"jazz paradigm. "
.
A shock, for those who accept the subliminal message of this world of codes, signs, cries.
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