International Art News

André VIGNOLES, Paysage

From October 12 to October 16, 2011 – Grand Palais
An international manifestation, fostering dialogue between artists from different horizons
The Salon d’Automne, which authored in 2009 a manifesto condemning the terrifying diktat of a single “aesthetic”, quickly became a welcoming haven for multidisciplinary creation, using all media and all languages. The arrival of a swarm of new exhibitors of all ages and the rich art program for 2011 attest to a renewed growth in popularity.

The first Salon d’Automne was held on October 31, 1903, in the Petit Palais, on the initiative of Frantz Jourdain (1847-1935)—a Belgian architect (the “La Samaritaine” department store), writer, great lover of art and the president of the art critics’ union—and friends, including architect Hector Guimard, painters Eugène Carrière, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard. Based on the “ethic of the brotherhood of the arts,” the Salon d’Automne sought to provide a platform for new artists and introduce the general public to the most innovative movements of the times: Nabis, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, School of Paris, Art Deco, Expressionism, Op Art, Abstraction. Strenghtened in 2004, the Salon d’Automne has pursued its personal path, far from the free-for-all battleground of some commercial fairs.

A permanent renewal
This year again, 550 professional artists from France and every corner of the world will show works of an extreme variety. Organized in different sections (from painting to sculpture and architecture, from mural art to engraving, from photography to artists’ books, from abstraction to figuration), the Salon d’Automne displays a large panorama of contemporary creation. It also includes debates, a fashion show, poetic interludes and various manifestations of urban art proposed by the Académie des Banlieues, as well as a concert-performance by Nima Sarkechik and Jérémie Dauliac, a hip-hop concert and a monumental graphic performance on cellophane.

CHEN Shu-Lin, Mémoire pour le prochain millénaire, 56x76 cm

A widening dialogue with the world
Since its first production in 1903, the Salon d’Automne has steadily welcomed foreign delegations while bringing its art to other European countries and, after 1970, to Japanese audiences, thanks to efforts by the painter François Baron Renouard (1918-2009). After showing in Beijing in 2003, the Salon d’Automne opened in Galicia (Spain), an event in which José Diaz Fuentes, the Galician sculptor, was a decisive influence. In November-December 2010, the Salon d’Automne travelled to Moscow. With its major contribution to the Cairo Art and Literature Biennial in 2009, the Salon d’Automne built a solid bridge between its exhibitors in France and Europe and the art community in the Near and Middle East. At a general meeting on May 10, 2011, in São Paulo, the creation of the France-Brazil Salon d’Automne was ratified. The first exhibition will be held in 2013 in São Paulo. The Salon d’Automne is also preparing future developments in China

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From 12 February – 15 May 2011 – La Maison Rouge, Foundation Antoine de Galbert
La maison rouge is staging an exhibition on anthropophagy and its representations in contemporary visual art. The exhibition’s curator has chosen pieces for the most part by young artists working independently of each other on the concept of incorporation. A body of contemporary works (photography, video, installation, sculpture, drawing and painting) finds echoes in a historic perspective (illustrations, illuminated texts, engravings and ritual objects). Together, they show how the theme of anthropophagy has persisted and evolved through time and place.

Despite being largely ignored by art critics and theorists, anthropophagy is an underlying theme of current creation, as the presence in the show of major artists from the contemporary scene confirms.
Leaving aside images of gore, Jeanette Zwingenberger has chosen artists, almost half of whom are women, who address the cruelty of anthropophagy from a critical standpoint and with a certain delicacy. Dreamlike representations voice and develop the questions that surround this notion. In an age of cloning, organ transplants and virtual worlds, when the integrity of the body has been thrown into doubt, these artists reveal how perceptions of the body have changed. They take the body apart, transforming and reconstructing it as a hybrid organism; one that both eats and is eaten.
Do we not absorb and devour our peers as we construct and share with them our individual self? As Claude Lévi-Strauss observes in a quotation which the curator highlights: “We are all cannibals. After all, the simplest way to identify with another is still to eat them.” (La Repubblica, 1993).
Tous cannibales invites us to lift the veil on a disturbing, repressed, even taboo subject that has implications
for ethnology, history, psychoanalysis, medicine and religion.
Exhibited artists
Makoto Aida, Pilar Albarracin, Gilles Barbier, Michaël Borremans, Norbert Bisky, Patty Chang, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Will Cotton, Wim Delvoye, Erik Dietman, Marcel Dzama, James Ensor, Renato Garza Cervera, Francisco de Goya, J. J. Grandville, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Pieter Hugo, Melissa Ichiuji, John Isaacs, Oda Jaune, Michel Journiac, Fernand Khnopff, Frédérique Loutz, Saverio Lucariello, Alberto Martini, Philippe Mayaux, Patrizio Di Massimo, Théo Mercier, Yasumasa Morimura, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Álvaro Oyarzún, Giov.Battista Podesta, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, Bettina Reims, Toshio Saeki, Cindy Sherman, Dana Schutz, Jana Sterbak, Adriana Varejâo, Joel-Peter Witkin, Ralf Ziervogel, Jérôme Zonder.

Foundation Hours