It is Paris art week. Inaugurated 44 years ago, FIAC is the classic afternoon tea affair whilst, in its third edition, Paris Internationale is the bloody mary on the grunge rooftop of a multi-storey car park. Paris Internationale art fair brings together a young generation of 55 galleries and 8 project spaces from 17 countries. With a sense for the surreal and body awareness, these are my highlights.
Autumn unleashed the annual steady stream of art fairs and after Frieze week in London, this is FIAC week in Paris. The trend was planted last year and it has been cemented: Frieze has given way to FIAC and established international galleries are prioritising the latter. It is a mammoth (and pointless – oops!) task to attend art fairs as a string of collectable pearls. There are just about under 300 art fairs annually* around the world and each one has its own distinctive flavour. Choose wisely.
Walter Pfeiffer (b. 1946, Beggingen, Switzerland) at Galerie Sultana
Pfeiffer started photography in the 70’s without a specific technical ambition, but the will to provide a new visual vocabulary for beauty, erotism and freedom of life. His work, gaining its initial recognition through an underground network, has reached today status of a cult object. It was his 2001 monograph, Welcome Aboard, Photographs 1980-2000, that introduced his candid, documentary-esque fashion work to a welcoming wider audience. Known For his archetypal, boyish casting choices, Pfeiffer’s recognition has grown over recent years, and he has shot for many magazines, including Dazed, Another Man, Interview and GQ Style. His pictures are also being acknowledged internationally in fine-art contexts, a highlight being his large retrospective at Zurich’s prestigious Winterthur Fotomuseum in 2010.
Tomasz Kowalski (b. 1984, Warsaw, Poland) at Galeria Dawid Radziszewski
Kowalski studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and he is the winner of the Guerlain Foundation Drawing Award. In dreamlike works tinged with darkness and ambiguity, Kowalski merges references to Polish culture, art history and his own life experience. Although he works on drawing and painting primarily, he also creates sculptures with an element of domesticity. Influences of expressionism and surrealism come to the fore in his use of color and in the distortion and semi-abstract figures.
Elizabeth Jaeger (b. 1988, Brooklyn, USA) at Jack Hanley Gallery
You may have been lucky enough to see her work last summer at Dreamers Awake at White Cube, London. The artist has participated in notable group exhibitions including Mirror Cells at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Moma PS1’s Greater New York and Sculpture Center’s In Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New. Most recently, the artist exhibited in 99 Cents or Less at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Sticky Fingers at Arsenal Contemporary, and The Sun and the Rainfall II at Galleria Zero, Milan. Published works include Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramics in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2017); Dreamers Awake (White Cube, 2017); Eros C’Est La Vie (Totem, 2013) and How Other People See Me (Publication Studio, 2011).
Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978, Baltimore, USA) at The Sunday Painter
If you are not planning on visiting Paris Internationale this weekend, you can also view Picture Lake at The Sunday Painter, London until 11 November 2017. Daignault received a BA from Stanford University, California. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at FLAG Art Foundation New York; Stems Gallery, Brussels; Lisa Cooley, New York; and White Columns, New York. Her works have been included in many museum exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Fort Worth Modern, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her epic work Light Atlas begins a four-year museum tour in America, opening in September 2017 at the Herron Museum, Indiana. Her first major monograph, Light Atlas, will be released in 2018.
Paris International, 18 to 22 October at 11, Rue Beranger, Paris
*Forbes April 7 2016, The art fair boom is forever changing the way the art market does business
