ART PARIS reduces environmental impact… opening 7 April

According Guillaume Piens, Director of Art Paris Art Fair, the art world has a bad record when it comes to the environment. For this 24th edition of Art Paris, the entire chain of production and logistics has been redesigned to reduce its environmental impact and themes relating to nature and ecology have been accorded high priority.

Art Paris 2022 intends to set an example for art fair organization and for raising awareness of ecological issues. To do this, the fair’s management has created two thematic focuses: Art & environment (curated by Alice Audouin) and Natural history (curated by Alfred Pacquement), but it has also decided to rethink all of its services from a unique eco-design perspective, including swapping the lighting from halogen to LED, recycling the textiles used in booths into insulation materials and reducing its website’s energy-consumption.

“Whether a good or a service, all stages of a product’s life cycle are taken into account in our inventory flow, from the ‘cradle to the grave’. Guillaume Piens

In partnership with Art Paris, Artprice is producing a brochure to accompany the fair containing a number of interesting texts. As well as an introduction to the French art market (by Céline Moine), the brochure will contain interviews with the fair’s Director, Guillaume Piens, with Alice Audouin, exhibition curator (and President and founder of the association Art of Change 21) and with Alfred Pacquement, (cultural consultant and independent exhibition curator). Here are a couple of excerpts from these articles:

Alfred Pacquement – Why focus on nature?

The theme Natural histories, a Focus on the French scene seemed relevant to me having noticed that numerous artists today (and indeed in the past as well) are working on subjects resulting from their approach to nature in all its aspects. One might think that painting flowers, depicting animals, capturing landscapes, etc. belong to a bygone era, before modernity. But these themes are in fact everywhere today. You just have to go around the exhibitions of the moment to realize this. Nature, a major subject of our time, is at the heart of civic, sociological and philosophical concerns, and artists are no exception. While reflecting on this focus, I kept on realizing how many artists of different generations have worked on ‘natural’ themes using extremely varied and open artistic means. But what strikes me the most is that these themes are now coming back with tremendous force. It is probably no coincidence that in this era of uncertainty and questioning, the natural world is once again becoming a major subject.

 

Alice Audouin – Have you noticed that more and more artists are taking up the question of ecological urgency?

(…) what is particularly interesting is the way ecological motivations work both as artistic themes, and of course as ways of changing production processes, with the rise of eco-design for example. More and more artists are measuring the impact of their works and their studios and talking about ecological issues with their galleries or the museums that exhibit their work. For example, Tomas Saraceno asked his new gallery Neugerriemschneider to change its opening hours to save energy! Not to mention Olafur Eliasson who transported his works from Berlin to Tokyo without using air transport for his exhibition Sometimes the river is the bridge!

A selection of galleries : 

gb agency (Paris), Pietro Sparta (Chagny), Max Hetzler (Berlin, Paris et Londres), Bernier Eliades (Athènes, Bruxelles), Danysz (Paris, Shanghai, Londres), Galerie Claire Gastaud (Clermont-Ferrand, Paris), rodolphe janssen (Bruxelles), Magnin-A (Paris), Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris, Bruxelles), Perrotin (Paris), Kamel Mennour, etc.

Discover all exhibitors HERE

ART PARIS 2022

April, from 7 to10th

Grand Palais éphémère

Place Joffre. Champ-de-Mars. Paris 75007