Paris+ par Art Basel has revealed an expanded, citywide public program for its 2023 edition, including new locations, institutional collaborations, as well as participating artists and curators. Freely accessible to the public, the program comprises three exhibitions, two monumental outdoor installations, and a series of talks and debates presented in six iconic locations across the city.
They include the Jardin des Tuileries – Domaine national du Louvre, the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and the Place Vendôme – all of which already hosted projects in 2022 – as well as three new venues: the parvis de l’Institut de France, the Palais d’Iéna, and the Centre Pompidou, which will welcome the show’s Conversations program.
I am delighted that with three new venues, we were able to significantly bolster the public program of Paris+ par Art Basel’s upcoming edition. The fruitful institutional partnerships we put in place and the ambitious proposal resulting from them are defining features of our show in the French capital. With Paris+ par Art Basel’s 2023 public program, Parisians and visitors from out of town will be able to experience thought-provoking art and engaging discourse in the context of historical, if not legendary, locations.
Clément Delépine, Director of Paris+ par Art Basel
Exhibition at Jardin des Tuileries – Domaine national du Louvre
Organized in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre and curated for the second year by Annabelle Ténèze, presently Director of Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse and incoming Director of the Louvre-Lens Museum, an exhibition of public artworks will unfold across the Tuileries Garden, in the center of Paris. Titled ‘La cinquième saison (The fifth season)’, it draws from Ténèze’s 2022 Tuileries show ‘La Suite de l’Histoire’ (‘The Aftermath of History’) and explores the garden as a place where water, plant, mineral, and animal life coexist. The works on view underline our interdependence with the living world and question the ways we interact with nature; they question how together with its inhabitants, we can shape the ‘aftermath of history’. Participating artists include Joël Andrianomearisoa, Meriem Bennani, Jacqueline de Jong, Vojtech Kovarik, Zanele Muholi, Jean Prouvé & Pierre Jeanneret, and Claudia Wieser. Several artists chose to produce new work especially for the occasion.
Annabelle Ténèze says:
I am happy to propose an exhibition that brings together artists who consider their works “living objects”, objects that are touched by life. They address not only the marks we leave on nature, but also those nature leaves on us. The environment and how we cohabit with the protagonists of our “terrestrial community” are fundamental to these artists’ practices; they hence invite us to look and listen to the movements of the garden and its inhabitants in subtle yet innovative ways.
Paris+ par Art Basel at Palais d’Iéna
The exhibition in the museum spaces of the Palais d’Iéna brings together two artists with exceptional careers, Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, Italy, 1933) and Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 1938), who have exhibited in major cultural institutions and galleries across the world. The project, led by art historian Matthieu Poirier and supported by Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Pékin, Boissy le-Châtel, Dubai, La Havane, Paris, Rome, São Paulo), will be fully revealed in October. The exhibition will bring together elements conceived and realized in response to the specificities of the Palais d’Iéna, built by Auguste Perret in 1937: its monumental spaces, the subtle polychromy of its raw concrete, its singular luminosity, its urban surroundings, its perspectives and various levels, and its complex symmetry.
Since the 1960s, Daniel Buren has been exploring the relationship between motif and support, as well as form and context. This led him to choose fixed vertical stripes 8.7 cm wide, alternating white with another color, as his exclusive motif, based on an industrial fabric pattern. Starting from this neutral visual register, Buren further impoverished it by systematically repeating it to achieve a ‘zero degree’ of painting. From 1967 onwards, he worked in situ, i.e., making this ‘visual tool’ of stripes interact with the context in which it is displayed, whether natural or man-made (street, gallery, museum, landscape and architecture).
In the mid-1950s, Michelangelo Pistoletto began a pictorial exploration of the self-portrait, followed by the monochrome, using metallic paints. Around 1961-62, this exploration was synthesized, resulting in mirrored paintings, created by collaging a one-size-fits-all image on a polished metal plate. These works offer the viewer both a (fixed) image and a (fleeting) reflection of themselves and the surrounding space. The artist hence inverts the Renaissance perspective and conjures an idea of art in vivo, as a unique, lived experience of real space and time. These ideas are developed in various ways in his equally seminal, 1965-66 work ‘Ogetti in meno’ (‘Objects in less’) and constitute a key moment in Arte Povera.
I like the idea that the solemnity of architecture can be shaken up by the combined interventions of Pistoletto and Buren, that the works invite visitors to experiment together, to see each other and even to engage in dialogue.
Matthieu Poirier
The project is realized in collaboration with the Palais d’Iéna, seat of the Economic, Social, and Environmental Council (ESEC).
Paris+ par Art Basel at Chapelle des Petits-Augustins des Beaux-Arts de Paris
The 17th-century chapel of the Beaux-Arts de Paris will host an exhibition by British artist Jessica Warboys, exploring the overlap between man-made culture and nature. Titled ‘THIS TAIL GROWS AMONG RUINS’, it will combine a multichannel video and sound installation with a large collage of unstretched paintings. Warboys makes these by following a unique process: She brushes the canvas with beeswax, immerses it in wild bodies of water, and then sprinkles it with mineral pigments on the shores. In her eponymous video work, the artist stages the journey of a candle through various sites where nature and culture intersect, from the Biblioteca Joanina in Coimbra, Portugal – home to a colony of bats that protect its precious manuscripts from insects – to the pine forest surrounding the Arvo Pärt Center in Laulasmaa, Estonia. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack using the amplified sounds of bats, composed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen. The project is presented by Gaudel de Stampa (Paris).
Paris+ par Art Basel at the Place Vendôme
A work by Swiss artist Urs Fischer will be exhibited on the Place Vendôme. Titled Wave (2018), is a five-meter-high aluminum sculpture, based on a mound of clay that was pressed, kneaded, and squeezed by the artist. The piece of clay, bearing the marks of Fischer’s hands, was then enlarged, magnifying the tactile details left on the material.
The work, which resembles a sweltering, glistening wave, reflects the artist’s interest in materiality, scale, and contextual ambiguity. The straightforward process behind the original model of ‘Wave’ is intentionally at odds with its monumental scale, shininess, and placement on a square known for its majestic feel. The project is presented by Gagosian (New York, Basel, London, Los Angeles, Geneva, Hong Kong, Paris, Rome, Basel, Gstaad, Athens).
The applications to present artworks as part of the public program were open to all galleries, irrespective of their participation in Paris+ par Art Basel. From October 19 to 22, students from the École du Louvre will be present at all locations featuring artworks to provide visitors with information.
Paris+ par Art Basel Conversations in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou
This year’s Conversations program will be realized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and take place in its Renzo Piano- and Richard Rogers-designed building, located in the heart of the Marais. Curated for the second year by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou, Conversations will comprise nine talks investigating contemporary cultural discourse. The program will celebrate avant?garde figures such as Chantal Akerman and Antonin Artaud; explore the intersection between art collecting and fashion; shed light on purveyors of contemporary myths, from the Walt Disney Studios to drag culture; explore the connections between Paris, the Maghreb, and the Caribbean; and feature
known formats from Art Basel’s Conversations programs, such as the Premiere Artist Talk and The Artist and The Collector.
Running October 19 to21, Conversations is free to the public. The program will be held in English and French with simultaneous translation. Further details will be announced in September.
Paris+ par Art Basel, the Grand Palais Éphémère from Friday, October 20th to Sunday, October 22nd, 2023, with Preview Days on Wednesday, October 18th and Thursday, October 19, as well as a publicly accessible Vernissage on the afternoon of October 19th.
About
Annabelle Ténèze (1979) is Chief Curator of Heritage and Director of Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse since 2016. In July 2023, Ténèze was appointed the Director of the Louvre-Lens Museum by Laurence des Cars, Présidente-Directrice of the Musée du Louvre. She will start her new role in the fall of 2023. Ténèze was the first curator in charge of the graphic arts cabinet at the Musée national Picasso-Paris (2006 to 2012). She then became director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Haute-Vienne – Château de Rochechouart from 2012 to 2016. There she organized many monographic exhibitions (Jules de Balincourt, Eduardo Basualdo, Raoul Hausmann, Kent Monkman,
Laure Prouvost, Carolee Schneemann, etc.). In Les Abattoirs, she has organized, among other, exhibitions that combine both contemporary art and history, such as ‘Medellín. A Columbian History’, ‘Picasso and Exile. A History of Spanish Art in Resistance’, ‘Revue noire. A History of African Contemporary Arts’, ‘La Déconniatrie. Art, exile and Psychiatry around Francois Tosquelles’, and ‘Niki de Saint Phalle. The 1980s and the 1990s. Art Running Free’. Ténèze has edited and published on artists emerging in the 1960s in several catalogs such as Marion Baruch, Jacqueline de Jong, Roy Lichtenstein, ORLAN, Peter Saul, Daniel Spoerri, and Tom Wesselmann.
Matthieu Poirier, Dr. Pr. (1976) is an art historian. A specialist in abstract art, he holds a doctorate from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) where he also qualifed to be a Senior Lecturer. Poirier is a former visiting scholar at the German Center for the History of Art; he has taught at the University of Paris- Sorbonne and has been Professor of modern art history at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris-Cergy and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. An author and editor-in-chief of numerous publications, he has curated many exhibitions, such as ‘Lucia Koch’, ‘Suspension. A History of Abstract Hanging Sculpture. 1918-2018′, ‘Artur Lescher’, ‘Carlos Cruz-Diez’ (Palais d’Iéna), ‘Dynamo. A Century of Light and Movement in Art. 1913-2013′ (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais), ‘Hans Hartung’ (Perrotin New-York), ‘Soto. A Retrospective’ (Musée Soulages), ‘Spectres’ (Roesler Hotel, São Paulo), and ‘Sous le motif’ (Collection d’Art Société Générale, Paris-La Défense). He has been the scientific advisor for exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo Reina Sofia, Louisiana Museum, Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo and Palazzo del Monte di Pièta in Padua. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT).
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos (1989) and Charles Teyssou (1988) are a duo of curators and writers based in Paris. In addition to curating the Conversations sector of Paris+ par Art Basel, they have been working on Paris Orbital, a live program at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection and the ongoing archives Arles Terminal City, LUMA Foundation, Arles. They co-curated with Kevin Blinderman ann exhibition dedicated to the dandy figure of Jacques de Bascher at the Kunsthalle Bern and Treize, Paris. They were the editors-in-chief of L’Officiel Art and contribute to Mousse Magazine, Spike, and Double Magazine.
