The name of the tenth winner of the Emerige Revelations grant was announced on Tuesday, on the eve of the VIP opening of Paris + by Art Basel, the major contemporary art fair at the Grand Palais Éphémère. As every year, Laurent Dumas, the businessman and collector who created this initiative, launches this great ball of contemporary art with his prize which rewards a young French artist - this year all but one, born in the 1990s - by offering him a studio and the possibility of exhibiting his works in a gallery
There were 12 finalists - chosen from a thousand entries! - presenting their works beforehand in a former garage at 109, rue Lecourbe (Paris 15th) soon to be transformed into a building. In this less convincing panel than last year, Johanna Mirabel won. The artist, born in 1991 in Colombes, lives between Paris and La Rochelle, and creates large formats, powerful in their framing or perspective, with broad brush movements, juices, drips and transparencies. His interiors are animated by characters, often those of his family, in sometimes crude positions. They project the viewer into a strange atmosphere of red ochre tones, punctuated by flat blues. The scene catches the eye violently.
Faced with the heat again of our climatic and social evolution, this is a generation that also knows that it can be quickly absorbed by fashion or the market.
Gaël Charbeau
She is, by far, the best artist in the 2023 selection, curated by Gaël Charbeau. The artistic director of the last "Un été au Havre" and the future Olympic Village Zac with "Manifesto", has given it the title of "Hit again", with all the puns that it entails. "Of theHits is all the contradictory pressure that is exerted on the younger generations: to be part of the history of art while imagining a world of tomorrow that can still be figured out, he explains. Faced with the hit again of our climatic and social evolution, this is a generation that also knows that it can be quickly absorbed by fashion or the market.
»This anniversary is an opportunity to take stock of the action taken by Laurent Dumas, the chairman of the supervisory board of the real estate developer Emerige, in favour of the French scene. For a long time, it remained on the fringes of the international one, both from the point of view of the notoriety of the artists and their rating, but it has taken on a real dimension. But there's still a lot of work to be done to bring it up to speed. This kind of scholarship is undeniably a stepping stone. Like the Pernod-Ricard Foundation prize, whose winner of the 24th edition will be announced on October 20, or that of Sandra Hegedus' Sam Art Projects, which is exhibiting its winner Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, since today, Tuesday, at the Palais de Tokyo. As soon as he was spotted, he was immediately taken into the stable of a good gallery. Like the French Ymane Chabi-Gara, finalist for the 2021 Emerige Revelation grant, who joined Kamel Mennour in the wake of her first exhibition at the gallery owner in Saint-Germain des Prés.
The stakes for the candidates for this award are not the least. They receive a financial endowment of 15,000 euros, with a view to a first exhibition in a renowned Parisian gallery and support for their work, i.e. a one-year workshop at La Ruche. Obviously, we are returning to the traditional model of the gallery as a career lever, in an art world that is nevertheless in full mutation, where artists are turning to new platforms without necessarily a fixed exhibition space (CMS collection or Hatch_Paris), incubators (Poush or Artgaon) or fairs unearthing nuggets such as the one in Montrouge and use abundantly social networks to promote themselves.
Whether or not they are winners, this grant has a real impact on their careers, especially since they will also be shown this winter at the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon (partner of the Villa Noailles) and at the French Institute in Madrid, during Arco, the contemporary art fair in Madrid that has regained real momentum in Europe. Two new awards further strengthen this support for artists for 2024: a residency in the workshops of the Manufacture de Sèvres and a show at the Project Room, the new space of the Plateau Frac Ile de France. Johanna Mirabel will also benefit from an exhibition at Nathalie Obadia's gallery. Without visibility, without support, a young artist can't get by on his own.