The 42nd edition of FIAC boasts 177 galleries from 22 countries. Here are the top booths to see at the Grand Palais this year.
Galerie Chantal Crousel
Front and center at the Grand Palais, the Paris gallery celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. Roberto Cuoghi’s ominous mixed media totem looks at the entrance with its scraggly thatch wings rising high above its head. The watercolor portrait “Kristian,” 2014, by Elizabeth Peyton continues the mystery, and Haegue Yang’s paintings “Left and Lower Parts in Tune – Trustworthy #202,” 2015, emphasize texture in smooth geometrics.
Balice Hertling
The Paris gallery featured in the Salon d’Honneur could become the hotspot for frazzled fairgoers to take a break. Phone battery dead? No problem. Plug directly into one of Niel Beloufa’s plush industrial pieces for a recharge. Gianfranco Pardi beautifully frames crossed suspension wires. Balice’s artist Isabel Cornaro is currently on show at its Belleville gallery, and also has a major installation at the Louvre.
Lisson
Lisson is pulling double duty in Paris with the fair and assessing the latest damage to Anish Kapoor’s vandalized “Dirty Corner” at Versailles. Staring into Kapoor’s blue stainless steel and lacquer mirror is trippy. A fluorescent light installation by Spencer Fench captures the color of the Paris sky the artist measured and recorded one day. Jason Martin blends painting and sculpture in his thick textural wall piece “Flintwinchthicken,” which looks like perfectly charred black meringue. And Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary’s white steel sculpture “Allegory of Sight,” 2015, plays with light and peers into the origin of centrifugal force.
David Zwirner
Carol Bove’s 16-foot-long hypnotic wall piece made of peacock feathers is the centerpiece at Zwirner’s booth. Luc Tuymans’s delicate cream painting “Cloud,” 2014, continues the sophistication found in Zwirner’s gallery, along with Sherrie Levine’s alligator head cast in bronze. Added to the gallery just this year, Levine also shows her postcard series of 18 female nudes, “After Courbet: 1-18,” 2010. Woflgang Tillmans captures the hyper sensuality of fruit laid bare in his saturated photograph “pear, passionfruit and lychee,” 2010.
Hauser & Wirth
Making a statement at the fair with a stack of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo at the booth’s center, curator Paul Schimmel highlights the political works of the gallery’s artists, such as Mark Bradford, Ellen Gallagher, and Paul McCarthy. Wilhelm Sasnal pays tribute to black athletes of the 1976 Olympics, which was boycotted by many to protest apartheid in South Africa. McCarthy makes no mystery of his political opinion with his “Republican (Bush),” 2004-2006, a sculpture of the former president splattered in red. And Fabio Mauri’s mixed media panels, “Tiananmen [Students],” are haunting.
Kamel Mennour
With a reputation as one of the coolest galleries in Paris (along with Crousel), the booth draws in large crowds with Huan Yang Ping’s split deer leaping across the entrance. Michel François recalls the myth of Narcissus with his untitled print of water inviting onlookers to peer into mounted pool of cast aluminum. The gallery also shows Polish artist Alicja Kwade’s new work “Hypotetical Figure,” twisted copper trombone bells with a solid granite block and a pile of the crushed rock.
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
Martin Creed’s bright red curtain automatically opening and closing on the booth adds to its spectacle, while Latvian artist Ella Kruglyanskaya’s graphic drawings of ladies with attitude practically explode from the walls. Shoppers may have previously seen in her work in the hip windows of Barney’s in 2011.
Capitain Petzel
The Berlin Gallery, founded in 2008, is a polished hipster’s dream. “Maroon Bells (Deer),” 2015, a majestic plaid-pattered stag in the mountains from Sean Landers’s series of North American animals, is a nod to Magritte. Three of Adam McEwen’s white steel jerrycans containing 25 liters of holy water handsomely anoint the space, as well as his matte graphite letterbox, “97 Wooster St.,” 2014.
Nicolai Wallner
The Copenhagen gallery is a breath of cool, elegant air among the mayhem. Mexican artist Jose Davila’s sleek suspension pieces feel like moments frozen right before something is about to happen. Slabs of white marble hang off the wall by a single strap. His “Joint Effort (VI),” 2015, of a pane of glass held in place by a strap balanced by boulders makes you hold your breath. Jeppe Hein’s sculpture “Mirror Balloons with Tree Trunk,” 2015, adds a touch of whimsy to counter the gravitas of Davila’s works. A Kassen’s slick amorphous sculptures add some color to stark Nordic minimalism, but only barely in bronze.
White Cube
Sinister pieces dominate the space. Damien Hirst’s shiny aerial cityscape of the US capital, “Washington,” 2014, could be a circuit board from afar, but a closer look reveals it’s made entirely from pins and scalpels. Mona Hatoum’s “Still Life (metal cabinet),” 2015, is a case of jewel-tone glass grenades. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s creepy bronze mash-up of African sculpture and the Ronald McDonald clown holding a spear welcomes visitors to the hyper sleek booth.
