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7 of the Best Gallery Booths at Paris Internationale 2022

by Paul Laster

Justine Kurland, Paris Internationale

Galerie Magazine

10/21/2022

Hosting 60 contemporary art galleries from 26 countries, Paris Internationale, returns for its eighth edition of the fair at a new location, the former studio of French photographer Nadar and the site of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, in the second arrondissement of Paris.

A cross between the NADA Art Fair, which focuses on emerging artists, and the Spring Break Art Show, which prefers previously abandoned locations, Paris Internationale 2022, which runs through October 23, occupies four floors of a patched-wall structure with exposed skeletal beams that’s been built-out with a free-flowing design, which brings the art and galleries into a fascinating dialogue with whatever is visibly nearby.

“The only way of survival for young galleries is to create a community, which is exactly what Paris Internationale has done. It presents very good galleries from around the world,” Belgian art collector Alain Servais shared with Galerie on opening day. Commenting further on the fair, Stefano Pirovano, director of Conceptual Fine Arts, a Milan-based publication, gallery and consulting agency and a media sponsor for the 2022 edition of the fair, told us, “Changing the venue every year stimulates creativity for the artists and galleries. It’s about keeping it contemporary rather than repeating the same thing.”

Highlighting works fresh from the studios, Galerie has selected the best presentations at the fair, ranging from solo shows of Justine Kurland’s collages made from cutting up other artists’ works and Mara Wohnhaas’ sculptural assemblages constructed with found objects to the pairing of Romane de Watteville and Chalisée Naamani, who have a shared aesthetic interest in fashion, and David L. Johnson and Kelsey Isaacs, who are drawn to the readymade devices and shiny consumer goods.

1. Higher Pictures Generation, New York

In 1968 radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas gained instant notoriety when she shot Andy Warhol for losing the script to her play Up Your Ass, but when her story was better known she became equally famous for writing and self-publishing the SCUM Manifesto in the year prior to the shooting. Taking the writer’s SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) philosophy as her point of departure, artist Justine Kurland recently created the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books, which grants her license to re-author the published works of famous male photographers, such as William Eggleston, André Kertész and Boris Mikhailov, as her own photographic collages by cutting up and re-ordering the images in their celebrated books.

Presenting the solo exhibition “Justine Kurland, SCUMB Manifesto” at the fair, New York’s Higher Pictures Generation offered a dozen new collages by the artist, including the striking piece Shadow and Light, which deconstructs British photographer Bill Brandt’s iconic book of black-and-white pictures from a 2013 exhibition, which featured several of Bill Brandt’s female nudes, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to the gallery, “Before making the work available to collectors Kurland offered to sell them to the original photographers. None of the men have taken her up on her offer.”

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