One of this year’s memorable exhibitions was Fibra Architectures in the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. It was about architecture made of, yes, fiber: seagrass, bamboo, palm leaves, reeds, sugarcane leaves, banyan tree roots, straw, mycelium, wheat stalks, wicker, willow branches and the humblest of all – grass.
I first saw work by the French-Luxemburg artist duo Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil two years ago at Galerie Fontana. It was the exhibion ‘Un monde parfait – In dust suspended’. I wrote an article for NRC about the way they use their sculptures to come to grips with the desolation of the modern utopia that was realized in concrete on the edges of Paris – as in many other cities.
The young, affordable, contemporary counterpart of the très arrivé Paris Photo is NoFound. It was held this year for the second time and was also at the festival in Arles this past summer. NoFound’s mission: ‘Contemporary art galleries are teeming with artists who work through the medium of photography: mixed media artists, sculptors, performance artists. Our aim is to shed light on the links between photography and contemporary art.’ One of the exhibitors in the enormous garage on the rue Turenne was the flamboyant collector Marty de Montereau. Read the article…
This short iPhone-movie shows the Eiffel Tower sparkling brightly on the other side of the Seine at midnight. In retrospect it’s amazing to think how controversial Gustave Eiffel’s proposal was for the construction of a tower of cast iron for the World Exhibition of 1889. He compared it to the Egyptian pyramids: ‘My tower will be the tallest edifice ever erected by man. Why would something admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris?’