Every time around the end of the year, the French capital and city of love is turning into an international meeting place for contemporary art lovers. About 180 galleries from 25 countries show their most exciting works of art as well as offering a platform to new artists. With such a wide range, it is hard to know where to go. We picked three galleries and will highlight some of the artists they’ll show during FIAC, from today until the 23rd of October.
Gallery Kamel Mennour
Latifa Echakch — Les Géants
This French born artist, now living in Switzerland, is using her work to communicate issues regarding individual and cultural identity, but also to highlight socio-political changes that create new challenges for our society. Characterised by the use of simple, yet always impressive gestures and materials, Latifa connects subject to final artwork. With Les Géants she’s created figures up to four meters tall that symbolise representative characters, like a king and queen. By removing them from their original context –being carried through festive parades– and giving them an unidentifiable skin colour, it makes you question the familiar elements that are absent and it makes you look at the giants from another perspective.
Lee Ufan — Dialogue
Seemingly simple-looking artworks make people think, “I can be an artist too” – but don’t get ahead of yourself too fast, the more basic something looks, the more difficult it is to make. With oil and mineral pigment on canvas, Lee Ufan applies a limited number of discrete strokes, built up over an extended period of time, with a broad, flat brush loaded with grey paint, a colour that to him expresses “a vague, ephemeral and uncertain world.” The incorporation of strong blue, red and green colours create a dimension and might relate back to his previous work Landscape (1968). Lee’s gestures are minimal; his mind is focused, resulting in a resonant emptiness that requires time to look at and concentration to appreciate.
Seemingly simple-looking artworks make people think, “I can be an artist too” – but don’t get ahead of yourself too fast, the more basic something looks, the more difficult it is to make. With oil and mineral pigment on canvas, Lee Ufan applies a limited number of discrete strokes, built up over an extended period of time, with a broad, flat brush loaded with grey paint, a colour that to him expresses “a vague, ephemeral and uncertain world.” The incorporation of strong blue, red and green colours create a dimension and might relate back to his previous work Landscape (1968). Lee’s gestures are minimal; his mind is focused, resulting in a resonant emptiness that requires time to look at and concentration to appreciate.
Gallery König
Jeppe Hein — Why are you here and not somewhere else
Jeppe Hein challenges and confronts the passive viewer by waking them up with his work. The neon text Why are you here and not somewhere else literally speaks to you and is questioning the way people look at art. The combination of a screaming material such as neon tubes with an intimate question creates a surprising contradiction that makes the message even stronger. Hein’s works are conceptual, interactive and often come to life when being viewed.
Gallery Emanuel Layr
Philipp Timischl — They were treating me like an object as if I were some sex toy or shit I don’t wanna see them again
Vienna-based Austrian artist Philipp Timischl is questioning the development and contradictions in our current society, which has been taken over by media. He confronts the viewer with the intimate and extensive relation between images and identities. Video displays are turned into sculptures when placed below canvasses that incorporate historical text or appropriated imagery. By doing this, Philipp creates a link between historical visual conventions and the more recent visual devices of our current mass-cultural technology.
