Paris/Brooklyn Exchange
Stéphanie Calais, Delphine Coindet, Véronique Journard, François Paire, Paul Pouvreau, Hugues Reip, David Renaud, Laurant Grasso, Timothy Mason, François Nouguiès, Florence Paradeis, Cécile Paris, and Brigitte Zieger
Parisians invade Brooklyn, April 26 & 27, 2002
Ten exhibitions of French contemporary art until June, 2002
The first events of this project to exchange exhibitions of contemporary art between Paris and Brooklyn will happen in Brooklyn on April 26. Eight galleries in Williamsburg will have opening receptions that evening for shows they are hosting from eight galleries in Paris.
The following evening, April 27, a group exhibition of French artists entitled ‘Rendez-Vous’,curated by Claire Le Restif will be opening at Smack Mellon in Dumbo. A specially commissioned installation by French artist, Hugues Reip will also be visible at the Brooklyn Museum of Art from April 29.
At the beginning of June, the return event will take place as Brooklyn artists and galleries take Paris by storm on June 6 and 7, with exhibitions in eight galleries and a group show curated by Kathleen Gilrain at Espace Paul Ricard.
The exhibitions taking place in Brooklyn will mostly be visible until the end of May, and propose a diverse cross-section of the dynamism of contemporary practice in France today. Some of the exhibiting artists are highly regarded and well-known in France but have had little visibility in New York, while others have been chosen from the freshest crop of emerging young talent on the Parisian scene.
Schroeder Romero will present work by seven photographers from Galerie Anne Barrault. The diversity of this exhibition gives an interesting overview of new photography from Paris, with works by Caroline Bach, Philippe Calandre, Anne Deguelle, Manuela Marques, Eric Nehr, Magdi Senadji and Christophe Mauberret.
Roebling Hall presents a solo show by the painter, Dominique Gauthier, represented in Paris by Galerie Filles du Calvaire. Well-known in Europe since his early successes with solo shows at the Pompidou Center and Fondation Cartier, Gauthier represents the energy and freshness of French abstraction today.
Pierogi exhibits intriguing work by Christophe Cuzin, from Galerie Bernard Jordan, an artist extending the limits of geometric, minimal painting into the architecture of gallery spaces. Saturated color and structured lines manipulate the gallery until it becomes fused with the artwork itself.
At Parker’s Box, two exciting young artists from Galerie Michel Rein, will collaborate in an exhibition mixing drawing, objects and installation. Saâdane Afif’s exploration of language in relation to objects, will infiltrate Fabien Verschaere’s wall drawings, themselves juxtaposing different registers of imagery.
Momenta collaborates with Four Walls, and together they present a video work by Nicolas Moulin from Galerie Chez Valentin in Paris. This work, already acclaimed in previous showings in Berlin and Paris, shows the streets of the French capital with its inhabitants digitally erased.
At Southfirst, Isabelle Lévénez from Galerie Anton Weller, presents multi-disciplinary work including video, photography, drawing and wall writings. This obsessive work, which has already generated a following in Paris, deals with the ambiguous frontier between childhood and womanhood.
Plus Ultra shows three artists from Galerie Eric Dupont, ranging from emerging to established, who take on the gallery’s compact space in contrasting, coherent and refreshing ways. All three tend to conquer space through installation techniques, Didier Mencoboni with negative space and color, Corinne Sentou with repeated volumes, lines, and shapes and Damien Cabanes, with repetitive, small sculptures of familiar but transformed objects.
Star 67 presents work by five artists from Espace Huit Novembre. Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Olga Boldyreff, Françoise Maisongrande, Roland Schär and Yann Toma form a diverse and interesting group of artists dealing variously with fiction, illusion, games and interaction through video, performance, drawing, painting, installation and photography.
The group exhibition at Smack Mellon in Dumbo (opening April 27) has been curated independently of the gallery exchange, by the young French curator, Claire Le Restif and includes photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and video by younger French artists who have all had recognition in Europe. Le Restif invited Stéphane Calais, Delphine Coindet, Véronique Joumard, François Paire, Paul Pouvreau, Hugues Reip and David Renaud to produce new in-situ works in direct response to the space and its particular architecture. In addition a video program will also be shown, of work exploring the urban and human context of the city by Laurent Grasso, Timothy Mason, Francois Nouguiès, Florence Paradeis, Cécile Paris and Brigitte Zieger.
At the Brooklyn Museum of Art (on show from April 29), Hugues Reip whose work also appears at Smack Mellon will be presenting another site-specific installation. Reip was recently artist in residence at Art in General.
This project has been made possible with generous support from AFAA (Association Française d’Action Artistique), The City of Paris, The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, The Florence J. Gould Foundation, ACT Association, ADIAF, Pernod Ricard USA and France, Atelier 4, IAT, The Brooklyn Brewery, zingmagazine and Galapagos Art Space.
