Innholdsfortegnelse for No.31 i L'Officiel Art

Born in Germany in 1976, Katinka Bock graduated from Lyon’s Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and remains a fixture in metropolitan France. Now living in Paris, she won the 2012 Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard and is a finalist for the 2019 Prix Marcel Duchamp. However, she has not previously exhibited in Paris. In addition to what Bock’s work conveys through its own materiality, the show at the Galeries Lafayette Foundation building, known as Lafayette Anticipations, is also symbolic. Bock creates sculptures, installations, and performance art that attempt to revive the “physicality” of a location in its historical, political, and social identity. For instance, the Anzeiger-Hochhaus building in Hanover caught her attention for the political-cultural myth it represents – it was where the newspapers Stern and Der Spiegel were founded. This…

L’OFFICIEL ART: You are exhibiting three works in the Palais d’Iéna: the 45m-long Sap Matrix and two new pieces. How did you choose these works to show? GIUSEPPE PENONE: The tree rings show that the excavated tree would be eighty years old, the same age as the Palais d’Iéna. This space, conceived of by Auguste Perret, perfectly matches the work, which needs fifty-odd meters to be shown. It has already been shown in Paris and in Belgium, then taken down and stored. I was curious to see it again, because its size makes it difficult to install. Inside the tree, the inner surface is filled with resin and terra-cotta, the latter acting to prevent any leakage of the resin. The work has several elements; it’s rather complex. The two related…

“Sculptors of my generation [...] and myself as well can be considered to be the sustaining forces of the ancient tradition of those stonemasons and wood carvers who having left the forest sang freely their dreams of fantastical birds and of enormous tree trunks” — this quotation from Ossip Zadkine was chosen by the Musée Zadkine as the launching point of their superb exhibition gathering a bevy of artists from Guillaume Apollinaire to Germaine Richier, Eva Jospin, Ariane Michel, and even Paul Gauguin. A hundred works of all media from forty-odd artists bring to life our connection to the forest. A place of myth, fear, rebirth, and fantasy, the forest is divided into three parts: the edge of the forest, its birth, and the sacred, or sleeping, woods. Under Noëlle…

In 2008, the Italian Order of Merit for Labor (Ordine al Merito del Lavoro) was awarded to Giovanna Furlanetto, not just for her family’s work as craftsmen over generations, but also for her efforts as a patron of contemporary art. In 2000, Furlanetto launched a rigorous program of patronage for the visual arts through the Furla Art Award (Premio Furla per l’Arte). Until 2015, this important prize was awarded by the curator Chiara Bertola in consultation with leading artists, such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum, Marina Abramovic, Christian Boltanski, and Jimmie Durham. For more than ten years, the prize shone a light on the young Italian artists for whom it was created, earning them the attention of Italian and international museums. In 2016, the decision was made to…

L’OFFICIEL ART : Autumn 2018 marked another step forward in Audemars Piguet’s support for the world of contemporary creation as part of Tomas Saraceno’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. What do you remember from this experience and of the encounter with the artist? OLIVIER AUDEMARS: The goal of our involvement in the field of contemporary art is to contribute to the realization of a project that surprises us, that allows us to discover new territories and that inspires reflection. This realization began with the photographs made at our request by Dan Hodlsworth, which gave us access to a totally different vision of the Joux Valley, where our factory is located. We wondered why people had settled in this very beautiful, harsh climate. We then understood the extent to which…

01-15 TIMECODES 15 Sakura 2018 14 Finite and Infinite Games 2017 13 Abu Dhabi 2016 12 Strange Magic 2014 11 Rio 2012 10 Points on a Line 2010 09 Chicago 2011 08 Beijing 2008 07 1972 2008 06 Robert Towne 2006 05 Los Angeles 2004 04 Miami 2002 03 Capital 2000 02 AM/PM 1999 01 Midtown 1998 The artist is filming in a molecular biology lab in Kyoto. Shredded paper is in a clear plastic bag. She kicks the bag into the line of the camera. Intellectual property made into a confetti of genetic data. The scientist explains the configuration of companies that actually own the copyrights and patents that surround pluripotent stem cells. She makes a diagram in her mind. Timecode in the camera is 02:30:27. The artist creates…

L’OFFICIEL ART: What prompted you to call on Laurent Le Bon, director of the Musée Picasso Paris, to curate the exhibition “The Mind Begins and Ends in the Fingertips”? OLIVIER BRAULT: In our commitment to the crafts, our interest has mainly been in extracting them from the confinement in which our society places them, crossing borders, and showing their profoundly contemporary dimension. It seemed to us that Le Bon’s generous, willingly transgressive, and open-ended gaze was relevant to the curatorship of this exhibition. We hoped that this event would allow us to take a step forward in offering the public the best of French knowledge. The Fondation Bettencourt Schueller provided financial support for the establishment in 2017 of Toguna, a place for exchange and sharing created by artists and craftspeople,…

Two huge rectangular wings are joined by a transept of 1,500 sq m, housing a restaurant with a single 25m-long table capable of seating ninety diners. The motif is clear: inclusivity, collectivity, diversity. In this part of northern Italy, where the far-right Lega Nord holds sway, it’s not without reason that this theme is emphasized. “OGR is above all else a space of unification,” says Massimo Lapucci, the managing director. “And it’s not just for artists, for youth, and for entrepreneurs, but for all of the public, whatever their walk of life and interests.” OGR Cult (9,000 sq m) and OGR Tech (13,000 sq m) aim to bring together the best of the visual arts on both a national and international stage, and to operate as a think tank for…

“As for me, I want to stay free. In mind, thought, and action. Not to let myself shut in, by others or myself. It is this stubborn permanence that, throughout my life, has allowed me to continue, to pursue my path. Not to betray myself or my ideas...” This manifesto could be expressed by everyone, so striking is its relevance and its anchoring in the truest aspects of existence. Applied to the artistic task, it takes on an even stronger dimension, as it questions the identity, place and role of the creator. A major artist of the twentieth century and a precursor of abstraction, the German artist Hans Hartung (1904-1989) lived through the disturbances of the century with the fierce will to explore the twists and turns of his discipline,…

These are four female artists whose inner voices give rise to questions that needle our minds. Roxane Daumas creates a grammar of bodies describing the places of our lives. Tania Mouraud questions the aesthetic limits of art via our use of language. Maya-Ines Touram presents photographs within the continuity of her exploration of stilllife images inspired by the Dutch aesthetic of the 17th century. Not sculpture, nor drawing, nor painting, the works of Fatiha Zemmouri include all these genres at the same time. Here, she meditates upon the way that a work comes into being. Each has a specific language, and yet the four together form a harmonious whole. “There are Treasures Everywhere,” Montresso Foundation, Marrakech, until December 3, 2019.…

L’OFFICIEL ART: David Wojnarowicz was the subject of a traveling exhibition, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” presented first at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2018, then at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid earlier in 2019, and at Mudam Luxembourg from this October. Why did the New Galerie want to exhibit Wojnarowicz’s photography specifically? What impact can it make on art in Paris? MATHIEU CÉNAC: There were never any plans to show “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” in Paris. But Wojnarowicz’s intellectual friendships, romantic relationships, and the other friendships that he developed in France defined his short career. He came to Paris in 1978 and became the lover of Jean-Pierre Delage, a hairdresser who later modeled for the artist’s first series of photographs – which became…

L’OFFICIEL ART: Since that first collaboration on the launch of Egoïste, Chanel and Jean-Paul Goude have worked together on many projects. Which, in your eyes, are the most important in this thirty-year period? THOMAS DU PRÉ DE SAINT MAUR: I see three periods. First, that of beginnings, of an incredible vitality, of a feverish, exalted creativity, with the film ads Egoïste (1990), Coco (L’Esprit de Chanel) (1993), and Egoïste Platinum (1994) as high points. The second would be that of the perfume Chance, from the first film ad to the launch of Chance Eau Tendre – a period bursting with energy and youth, with perhaps even childish accents, or, simply put, an overwhelming effervescence. The third, then, would be that of the last film ads for Chance, from Eau Vive…

The mechanism of climate change can be reduced to a series of material transformations: air becomes living matter becomes air again. Burning fossil fuels reverses the chemical transformations of photosynthesis. Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria change carbon dioxide into the living matter of their bodies. Carbon, reconfigured and recombined, moves from gas into solid. As the physical remains of ancient photosynthesizing organisms burn, the carbon locked within them transforms again into air, and the energy captured from a younger sun is released. “The Drowned World” (2018–) names a series of works that engage the organic origins – and the ongoing biological consequences – of industrialization and climate change. The works appropriate living matter and the chemical operations of photosynthesis as artistic media. The found ruins of fossil fuel infrastructure and the…

The feeling of mastery. The keys underhand. The end dancer. The moment when you nail it. What if it brings you the most joy possible? What if you touch god but that also means zone dance. Serena’s crip walk. The swan song of a ballet your death? The higher you soar, the more you are punished. Challenged. Attacked. Persecuted. Shamed. The closer you get to the real thing, the stronger the pull of the opposite force becomes. It feels like they are trying to kill you. Like they (white people, men, etc.) actually want you dead. They want to take you out at the fucking knees. YES YOU HURT ME. I thought you were my fucking friend. SAIDIYA HARTMAN “It explores the utopian longings and the promise of a future…

“My studio is a large space with stone walls and a steel roof. It’s a large empty space in which there’s room for people to perform. When I proposed Mick to play there he was also intrigued by what the sound would do in such a space with the stark reflectivity of sound of these hard surfaces. I decided for a stationary camera and a second handheld camera. I wanted to film it as dry as possible and have the sound carry it. We were just 3 people in the space Mick, Colin Marston the sound recordist and myself.” — Ari Marcopoulos…

L’OFFICIEL ART: Which semantic and creative fields are expressed in the title of the first Rabat Biennale of Contemporary Art, “An Instant Before the World.” ABDELKADER DAMANI: “An Instant Before the World” is an excursion into religious and scientific thinking about the creation of the universe. Both consider the instant that precedes the beginning of the story to be mysterious, whether it be the Big Bang or the mythology of creation in six days, to mention only the example of the monotheistic religions. The “world” in the biennale’s title is to be understood in the sense of “making a world” or the “conditions of a world”, thus going beyond the geographical and spatial comprehension of this term. The instant is, in this new configuration, the totality of duration. And this…

FLORENCE MEYSSONNIER: Your work does not show an explicitly claimed ecological positioning, but it has nevertheless been imbued with this dimension since its inception. This dimension is above all that of an “attachment” to the living, to the form of life that is part of an atmospheric ontology: an ambiguity that goes beyond the contours of form or interpretation. In this sense, your work seems to be truly steeped in the atmosphere of contexts of invitation, and more particularly in the resources that others offer you. Let’s go back to your recent projects in order to consider the modus operandi underlying your practice, which is fundamentally an ethos – not an ethos or principle being applied “to” something, but rather a disposition, both a way of being and of living…

The first Parisian art fair entirely focused on the Asian art scene, Asia Now begins its fifth edition this season under the auspices of a successful vision. This vision was built and carried into the heart of the capital by Alexandra Fain, the event’s founder. A demanding selection of galleries and an ambitious and amplified program of satellite events has facilitated the arrival of newcomers. The fair is thus hosting, for the first time, Chambers Fine Art (Beijing, New York), Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, Habana), Over the Influence (Hong Kong, Los Angeles), Star Gallery (Beijing), M97 Gallery (Shanghai), Gallery 55 (Shanghai). With a total of around fifty galleries, Asia Now is an art fair on a human scale, but is nonetheless a unique opportunity to observe a…

L’OFFICIEL ART : From its formal inauguration in 2011, the Louis Roederer Foundation has developed its roadmap for supporting the world of culture, whether photography, film, modern art, or contemporary art. How did this vision come about, and how did the foundation’s goals come to be defined? FRÉDÉRIC ROUZAUD: On the whole, our blueprint developed over time, intuitively, and through friendships that developed naturally in the course of things. The beauty of these interactions with people in the art world is that they came about spontaneously, without fuss, from common values, and from a desire to discover new talent. It isn’t a concerted agenda, planned for decades: everything is done by steps, taking the necessary time to build. This project remains modest, yet steadfast, with a fixed budget and a…

After exploring in previous issues the project of the Foundation of Contemporary Art ( L’Officiel Art no.19, September 2016) and various commitments in the fields of cultural philanthropy and sponsorship ( L’Officiel Art no.26, June 2018), we believed it was necessary to highlight those companies that have chosen to devote funding and energy to the acquisition of artworks intended primarily for employees and company partners. We have reflected on the identity of each of these corporate collections, the synergies developed, the shared values, their content, the purchasing policy, and the role they play in the art market through support for artists and galleries, as well as possible extensions through the creation of a prize or foundation. We met three major French companies with an international presence: Societe Generale, Renault, and…

Between 1949 and 1956, sculptor Isamu Noguchi received grants from Paul and Mary Conover Mellon’s Bollingen Foundation, which had been actively supporting the translation into English of the writings of Carl Jung and early pan-Asian texts. Noguchi was born in the US in 1904 to an Irish-American mother and an absent Japanese father, grew up in Japan between the ages of three and thirteen, and self-incarcerated in 1942 at the Japanese internment camp in Poston, Arizona. He was the perfect recipient and interlocutor for the Bollingen Foundation’s mission of deepening the understanding between Eastern and Western cultures after World War II. With the foundation’s support, Noguchi was able to travel around the world for seven years to conduct research for a book called Environments of Leisure, which he never completed.…

Chapter 1: Michael There is a bench at Plumb Beach in Brooklyn. This bench, painted green, sits in solitude as a memorial to a single human life, Michael Sandy, and in solidarity with those killed through violent hate crimes. Michael’s existence on this planet was brief: just twenty-nine years to the day, almost. This bench – not his tomb, but a marker no less – sits sandwiched between Jamaica Bay and the Belt Parkway, where he was hit by a car while fleeing from a group of men who lured him to the desolate beach at night to rob him. They selected him because he was gay and they thought he would put up less of a fight. On either side of Michael Sandy in the moment of deciding where…