T: New York Times Style Magazine

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“Paris, Europe’s Former Art Capital, Is Back on Top”

Noor Brara
T: NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
May 4, 2022 [in print May 8]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/t-magazine/paris-art-galleries.html

Excerpt:

“The impression of Paris as a place with excellent museums but sleepy galleries run by conservative, change-averse dealers has persisted for decades. Over the last three or four years, however, the city’s art scene has made a surprising comeback […]

In Chinese, the word for crisis — weiji — contains two characters: wei, which means “danger,” and ji, which means ‘opportunity.’ This conflation is what propelled the art dealers Vanessa Guo and Jean-Mathieu Martini to open Galerie Marguo in the fall of 2020. Guo, the former director of Hauser & Wirth Asia, was visiting Martini in Paris, where he was an independent dealer of photography and art books, when the pandemic struck. As was true for so many around the world, the ensuing pause ignited a kind of reckoning of purpose in them. […] ‘I used to organize big exhibitions for names like Mark Bradford and Louise Bourgeois, but I realized there’s only so much you can do for established artists,’ she says. So while Galerie Marguo is set in a 1,200-square-foot former military complex in the heart of the Marais, among established galleries like Thaddaeus Ropac and Perrotin, in addition to the Musée Picasso Paris and the Centre Pompidou, it focuses on work by lesser-known international artists […]

‘The Hearing Trumpet,’ a recent group show of theirs inspired by the hopeful and radical world-building in the artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s 1974 surrealist novel of the same name, brought together work by Asian artists living in cities across the Americas and Europe. Ms. Guo describes it as a statement show. […] ‘I think it had a really good impact.’ So much that a second installment of ‘The Hearing Trumpet,’ with work by the video artist Astria Suparak, the ceramicist Heidi Lau and others, opened Saturday.

Ms. Guo also attributes the success of the show to a larger shift — away from stuffiness and localism”

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Read in full at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/t-magazine/paris-art-galleries.html