Poirier En Suspension Palais d'Iena

Designed by architect August Perret in 1939, the Palais d’Iéna which houses the French Economic Environmental Council is an outstanding architectural marvel and also a space that is particularly adapted to three dimensional art.

During the 2018 FIAC in Paris, a year before Giuseppe Penone’s Matrice di Linfa, the Palais d’Iéna hosted « Suspension » an exhibition curated by Mathieu Poirier compiling a history of hanging sculptures from 1918 to 2018. Marcel Duchamp was one of the first to to experiment with gravity with his 1918 sculpture de voyage (sculpture for traveling) and soon paved the way for “Mobile” art which really took off in the 1950’s, in the early days of space exploration with artists Soto, Daniel Buren, Julio Le Parc, Sol LeWitt or Robert Morris.

Yves Klein’s relief planétaire bleu sans titre (RP 23) 1961

A hidden gem in the Royal Stables of Versailles

Away from the public eye, only a few feet away from the Château of Versailles securely stored inside the Royal Stables, lies an unsuspected treasure: the Louvre Museum’s unbelievable gallery of plaster casts of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquites. 

The mouldings of the Winged Victory of Samothrace with and without her wings, the nymphs of Girardon, the metopes of the Parthenon and even the colonnades of the Temple of Castor and Pollux can quietly be observed inside the stone vaulted high-ceilinged wings of the Small Stable built between 1679 and 1682 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. 

Formerly stored in the Louvre Museum, the casts landed in Versailles in 1970 after the events of May 1968 when protesters managed to destroy half the plaster collection considering it a symbol of academicism and artistic rigour. Between 1970 and 1978 more than a hundred casts were reassembled but then left untouched until 1999, when the Louvre’s Department of Greek, Etuscan and Roman Antiquities launched the initiative to restore the entire collection. The gypsothèque in Versailles finally opened in 2014 after multiple restorations and a minute research work regarding the mouldings origin.

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MORE ENTITRE

is life without Christo still bearable?

sketches of Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped on sale at the 2020 BRAFA

He was meant to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in September MMXX and add his touch to the grandparis but on May 31st Christo, the poetic landscape artist, sadly passed away. 

We found Christo’s 2016 floating Piers installation on Lake Iseo in Italy particularly moving as it was executed a few years after his wife’s death and was a project they both had at heart to execute. After multiple failed attempts in Rio de Plata in Argentina and Tokya Bay in Japan, Christo got the permission to extend his orange fabric on the surface of the lake Iseo in 2016 to everyone’s delight, a surreal experience that attracted crowds of visitors.

Born in Bulgaria in 1935, Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff attended the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia and first started his artistic career as a portrait painter in Paris after fleeing Prague when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 broke out.

In Paris, he met his future wife and artistic soulmate Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon - with whom he later formed the inseparable artistic duo  “Christo”- upon the delivery of a portrait he had made of her mother.

With Jeanne-Claude, his work took another dimension and he quickly dismissed painting to focus solely on stacking, wrapping and obscuring surfaces and objects. The couple soon began collaborating together on monumental scale environmental wrappings; Christo would sketch and conceptualise and Jeanne-Claude would enable their conception in the physical world. 

By wrapping objects, and later altering entire landscapes, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work questions their very nature our relationship to them. Christo’s approach to art was unique in multiple ways, he was never signed to a gallery and was the sole commissioner of all his works which he funded by selling the sketches of his future installations. 

L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped sketches on sale at the 2020 BRAFA

Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped installation is now rescheduled to September MMXXI as a posthume tribute to the late artists’ body of work.
justwaitingforradiantday.

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check the CITRUS prelude

The Pont Alexandre III

World Exhibitions effectively contribute to the construction of cities and to their international aura. What do the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre iii have in common? They were all inaugurated in the context of a World Exhibition and still greatly contribute to Paris’ prestige by continuously attracting millions of local and foreign visitors everyday. 

The pont Alexandre iii, situated between the Invalides and the GrandParis and named after the Russian Tsar Alexandre iii was completed in 1900 and was to represent the Franco-Russian alliance in a complicated diplomatic context with the German Empire.

Enjoy a casual day on the Pont Alexandre iii:

The arched bridge is not only one of the most beautiful in Paris to this day, it also represents one that required great innovative technical abilities to build at the time. The architects and engineers comissioned at the time had been instructed to find a way to design a continous river-crossing that was to follow the Champs Elysées’ axis right up to the Invalides Esplanade without obstructing its view.

Seventeen artists collaborated on the decorative programme of this splendid bridge. In the center of the arch, the nymph of Seine and Neva river continues to symbolise the friendship between the two countries, which maintained their alliance 14 years after the first World War.

Due to covid-19, the next World Exhibition: the Dubai Expo 2020 has been postponed to 2021 and will be held from October 1st 2021 - March 31st 2022.