Art Basel Paris, and the week around it, is a highlight of the city’s cultural calendar, playing host to a dizzying array of events and exhibition openings. This year, though, there was one opening that trumped them all – after all, we’re not talking merely about the opening of a show, rather an entire, museum-scale institution smack dab in the heart of Paris: the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
Occupying a zinc-roofed Haussmannian city block on Place du Palais Royal – a literal stone’s throw (even by the feeblest of shots) from the Louvre – the building has, in former lives, served as a stately department store (one that, famously, inspired Émile Zola to pen his fin-de-siecle masterpiece The Ladies’ Paradise) and a grand hotel. Its original purpose, though, invokes a poetic sense of kismet – it was first built in 1855 for the very first Exposition Universelle, a predecessor to today’s World Expos that “broadened the urban cultural field and heralded a new era for the circulation of knowledge”, a wall text in the sprawling space’s colonnade-fronted foyer reads.
Works by Cai Guo Qiang and Mario Merz Panamarenko. Photography Cyril Marcilhacy / Item. Courtesy of Cartier
Outside view from rue de Rivoli. Photography Cyril Marcilhacy / Item. Courtesy of Cartier
Following an extensive redesign by storied French architect Jean Nouvel – the man, incidentally, behind the jewellery giant’s art foundation’s iconic glass cube of a former home deep in the Left Bank – the building once again serves a similar purpose. Stretching over 150 metres in length – and featuring over 6,500 square metres of exhibition space spread over three storeys, it’s something of a Wonka’s factory for exhibition makers. That may sound like an odd analogy, but it holds true on account of the Fondation Cartier’s giant moving floors, which allow for dramatic, tailored reconfigurations of the environment, creating spaces with ceiling heights of up to 11 metres.
First to be let loose on the space are FormaFantasma, the designers of Exposition Générale, which takes inspiration from the exhibitions that the former Grands Magasins du Louvre – the department store that once occupied the spot – created both to draw curious shoppers in and have them linger longer (and, well, spend more) in its regal enfilades.
Work by Andrea Branzi Gazebo Photography Cyril Marcilhacy / Item. Courtesy of Cartier
Works by Junya Ishigami and Luiz Zerbini. Photography Marc Domage. Courtesy of Cartier
Of course, the impetus here isn’t to get you to buy stuff (though there is a very chicly appointed library and gift shop on the premises, should you feel so compelled). Rather, it’s to offer a nuanced immersion into the cultural wealth and profundity of the foundation and its heritage. Featuring a sprawling curation of artworks that have featured across Fondation Cartier’s seminal exhibitions over its four decades running, the exhibition is divided into four themed sections, proposing material dialogues reflecting on mechanical architectural processes, the preservation of living worlds, and sci-fi speculations of what the world could look like.
Moving up, down and through the space, artworks place one another in relief – a stark, organic installation from Matthew Barney’s emblematic Cremaster Cycle, installed on an elevated platform, gives onto a column topped with a hulking feathered canopy by Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, sprouting up from the ground three storeys below. Windows giving out onto the Louvre are backdropped by jutting David Hammons sculptures and visceral, cartoonish tableaux by Congolese painter Chéri Samba. Behind them, two floors below, a submarine sculpture with scarlet Cyrillic script on its fin lies beached in the middle of the hall.
Works by Ron Mueck, Solange Pessoa and Olga de Amaral. Photography Cyril Marcilhacy / Item. Courtesy of Cartier
Works by Absalon and Annette Messager. Photography Cyril Marcilhacy / Item. Courtesy of Cartier.
That it is an impressive space is a fact that requires little underscoring; what with its regal, honey-stoned expanse, bisected by cool slate-grey metal pillars and horizontal grooves that gesture towards its modular nature. What is truly spiriting about its opening, though, is its status as a physical vote of confidence in – and commitment to – the importance of contemporary art, particularly at a time when the field is blighted by news of market slowdowns, slashed funding and institutional closures. While big-ticket art exhibition spaces are hardly scarce in the centre of Paris, the opening of the Fondation Cartier is but further proof of the French capital’s ongoing re-establishing of itself as a world-leading contemporary art hub. All the more reason to hop on the Eurostar.
