from urs fischer to jean prouvé, explore paris+ par art basel's public artwork program

Paris+ par Art Basel’s second edition lands in the french capital

The international Paris+ par Art Basel fair will officially launch its second edition in the French capital on October 20, 2023, with a new, citywide public program. Freely accessible to everyone, the program increases the fair’s presence beyond its central location, the Grand Palais Ephémère, by hosting three exhibitions, two monumental outdoor installations, and a series of talks and debates presented in six iconic sites 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 welcomes the show’s Conversations program. Exhibiting artists include Urs Fischer, who will bring a five-meter-high aluminum sculpture to the Place Vendome. Read on to discover more public artworks taking over Paris this October. 

Wave (2018) by Urs Fischer | milled aluminum, steel, 520.1 x 760.1 x 449.9 cm

image © Stefan Altenburger, courtesy the artist and Gagosian

discovering the citywide public program and artworks

Paris+ par Art Basel’s public program begins at the Tuileries Garden, where an exhibition of public artworks unfolds under the curation of Annabelle Ténèze for a second year, jointly with the Musée du Louvre. 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.

Swiss artist Urs Fischer is joining this year’s fair at Place Vendôme, exhibiting Wave (2018) — a five-meter-high aluminum sculpture, based on a mound of clay 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 resembles a sweltering, glistening wave and 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). 

Wave (2018) by Urs Fischer | milled aluminum, steel, 520.1 x 760.1 x 449.9 cm

image © Stefan Altenburger, courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Moreover, monumental sculpture by American artist Sheila Hicks will be presented on the parvis de l‘Institut de France, located in front of the Pont des Arts and the Institut de France, a 17th-century building hosting five French academies, including the Académie Française. Hicks’ work VERS DE HORIZONS NOUVEAUX (2023) is a six-meters-high column covered in multicolored strands of sustainable, waterproof textile; the sculpture’s bright chromatic palette will be in dialog with the muted tones of the surrounding buildings. The artist, who has been living and working in Paris since 1964, is known for her vibrant and often sprawling installations predominantly made of fabric, a material she celebrates as an endless source of possibilities and an antidote to rigid artistic classification. The project is presented by galerie frank elbaz (Paris), in collaboration with Meyer Riegger (Berlin, Karlsruhe) and Galleria Massimo Minini (Brescia).

Next up, 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.

Windy by Meriem Bennani | image courtesy the artist, C L E A R I N G, High Line and Audemars Piguet

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, based on an industrial fabric pattern, as his exclusive motif. 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 crucial moment in Arte Povera.

The 17th-century chapel of the Beaux-Arts de Paris comes in fifth, hosting 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).

Tony Cragg / Buchmann Galerie | image courtesy Art Basel

Lastly, this year’s Conversations program is realized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and takes 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 celebrates avant-garde figures such as Chantal Akerman and Antonin Artaud; explores the intersection between art collecting and fashion; sheds light on purveyors of contemporary myths, from the Walt Disney Studios to drag culture; examines the connections between Paris, the Maghreb, and the Caribbean; and features known formats from Art Basel’s Conversations programs, such as the Premiere Artist Talk and The Artist and The Collector. Running October 19 to 21, Conversations is free to the public, held in English and French with simultaneous translation. 

General Idea by Esther Schipper | image courtesy Art Basel

Zanele Muholi / Galerie Carole Kvasnevski | image courtesy Art Basel

project info:

name: Paris+ par Art Basel / Public Program 

location: Paris, France

running dates:  October 20-22, 2023