Looking for a cultural break? From the Marais to Romainville through République and Ménilmontant, we’ll be your guide for this month’s selection of art exhibits!
Artistes de Ménilmontant – Open Studios 2024
From Thursday, September 26th to Sunday, September 29th
Right: Rue Laurence Savart, Paris © Paris Lights Up
More than a hundred artists will welcome the public to their studios for the 33nd Artistes de Ménilmontant’s Open Studios, a “free event open to all” to be held this year from Thursday, September 26th, to Sunday, Sunday, September 29th. The event is first and foremost an opportunity to talk with the artists “in their own worlds” and creative spaces, transformed into exhibition spaces once a year. “The Artistes de Ménilmontant, in addition to promoting their art, continue their approach of reflection, exchange and integration within their neighborhood”, explains the association. Joint artistic initiatives and other partnerships are planned with several local structures, including the Relais Ménilmontant social center, the Archipelia socio-cultural center, and the ESAT Ménilmontant.
Thursday to Sunday: 2pm-8pm (until 9pm on Thursday) – Free admission
Ménilmontant neighorhood – 11th & 20th arrondissements
Two welcome centers will be open for the duration of the event:
• Main information and exhibition space: Galerie Ménil’8 – 8 rue Boyer, 75020 Paris
• Secondary information center: ESAT Ménilmontant – 40 rue des Panoyaux, 75020 Paris
ateliersdemenilmontant.org
Eglė Budvytytė – De sang chaud et de terre (Warm Blooded and Earthbound)
September 26th to February 3rd
“A major Lithuanian artist on the international scene, Eglė Budvytytė will present her first exhibition in France at the Frac Île-de-France, as part of the France-Lituanie season. She explores the overlap between the visual and performing arts. Her practice, which spans song, poetry, video and performance, delves into the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability and the fluid relationships between bodies, the public and environments. Encounters and collaboration are central to her work, involving other artists and users of public space and exhibitions. The film is a poetic exploration of intimacy between the land and the body, loosely based on the research around matrilineal societies in the neolithic period by the Lithuanian archelogist Marija Gimbutas.”
Wednesday to Sunday: 2pm-7pm (until 9pm on the first Wednesday of each month) – Free admission
Le Plateau – FRAC Île-de-France
22 rue des Alouettes, 75019 Paris
www.fraciledefrance.com
Jérémie Cosimi – Suns and Nights (Des soleils et des nuits)
September 5th-24th & October 4th-19th
“Jérémie Cosimi’s new art works, created for his first’s personal exposition at Galerie Les filles du calvaire, unfold a scattered story, made up of wrecks and absences. Without being part of a determined and pompous narrative, it is anchored in an intimate relationship with the subjects represented. The latter often echo short stories or long poems written by the artist, which escape our reading. His intention is not to give us something to read but rather being capable to see. These words implicitly irrigate his approach and inspire gestures that gradually become stages. The photograph captures the composition before the painting transfigures the image. […] The bodies and objects represented come from the artist’s daily life, implicitly relating a lived proximity, without tipping over into autobiography. Transposed through the prism of staging, then painting, they are revealed outside their original context.”
Tuesday: 2:30pm-6:30pm – Wednesday to Saturday: 11am-6:30pm – Free admission
Les filles du calvaire
17 rue des Filles du Calvaire, 75003 Paris
www.fillesducalvaire.com
Maguelone Du Fou – La nuit, le jour
From September 12th to October 12th
“It starts at night, then comes the day. It all begins at dusk, when life takes its course, when we rediscover the world, friendship, and the sweetness of life. Then comes the day: a time of languor, lulled by the song of the cicadas. Maguelone draws her Provence, suspended moments, memories, familiar places that she recreates, larger, more beautiful, more intense… “Everything is possible in drawing, the only frontier is imagination”. […] This exhibition is like an ode to the “dolce vita”, where pinks, yellows and blues vibrate in unison in formats that are often large, as if to better immerse oneself in these warm scenes where time seems to have stopped.”
Monday to Saturday: 11am-7pm – Free admission
Slow Galerie
5 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris
www.slowgalerie.com
Johann Rivat – Feu(x)
Until September 21st
“The Promethean cycle teaches us that man is “assigned” to incompleteness, that limits are imposed on him: because he has to experience the Other (first embodied in the first woman, Pandora), but also illness, senescence, and death, and because he has to work to provide for his necessities, to make his utensils and tools – especially through the use of fire (glass, ceramics and iron… hence the name Iron Age for this first age of humanity succeeding the idyllic Golden Age). Halfway between beasts and gods, the human condition is necessarily tragic, constrained, limited. […] Bad dream or dark omen? What if Johann Rivat’s art expressed the fragility of our world under the hubris that characterizes it, and the destructive forces that seem to inexorably rise up again? And yet, beyond the pessimism, his art remains permeated by a quest for beauty, evidenced by chromatic richness and variety, from canvas to canvas, and perhaps also by the intuition that a taste for simple, free things – bivouacs and campfires, the majestic beauty of a nature that gives itself without needing an explanation – saves us from inhumanity and nihilism, keeps us from the abyss.” — Mikaël Faujour
Tuesday to Saturday: 12pm-7pm – Free admission
Galerie Sabine Bayasli
99 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris
galeriesabinebayasli.com
Coller l’oreille aux colimaçons
From September 6th to November 3rd
“The fruit of a collaborative process, Coller l’oreille aux colimaçons is a multi-temporal exhibition. The different perspectives of the eleven curators on works from the Frac Île-de-France collection and those of artists who have just graduated from the Beaux-Arts and Arts Décoratifs schools in Paris, are nourished by the philosophical concept of “whirling origin” (developed by philosopher and art historian Walter Benjamin), which considers time no longer as linear, but as being in perpetual motion. Contrary to the idea of a single, fixed point of departure, the origin here is apprehended as a tumultuous flow, enabling a new conception of history in which past, present, and future intermingle.”
Wednesday to Saturday: 2pm-7pm – Free admission
Les Réserves – Romainville
43 rue de la commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville
www.fraciledefrance.com
Ralentir
Until September 7th
“100 artists from the gallery have each created a drawing around the theme Ralentir (Slowing Down): 100 original works created especially for the occasion. An interlude of calm, far, far away from the frenzy of the Olympic Games. For an artist, slowing down is first and foremost a question of technique. Goodbye screens, computer mice, and deadlines! For this thematic anniversary, the gallery’s artists favored the sensuality of paper, the strength of engraving, and the meticulousness of embroidery. Everything is a pretext for dragging one’s feet in the face of modernity. Because getting back to a slow pace and the beauty of gesture: that’s something Artificial Intelligence will never have!”
Monday to Saturday: 11am-7pm – Free admission
Slow Galerie
5 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris
www.slowgalerie.com
Sport en banlieue parisienne
Until December 29th
“The exhibition Sport en banlieue parisienne, in partnership with the FSGT (Fédération sportive et gymnique du travail), invites visitors to consider popular sport and its social practices. Through numerous archives, items, and works of art, the museum presents individual and collective stories, living stories in which sport plays a key role. In this Olympic and Paralympic year, the Musée de l’Histoire Vivante presents a variety of perspectives rather than an exhaustive chronology. Visitors are invited to wander from room to room, from sport to sport, to meet the men and women who have brought popular sport to life, whether amateur or professional, far from the clichés of the suburbs. This exhibition also has an artistic vocation. Thanks to a partnership with the Fonds régional d’art contemporain Île-de-France (FRAC) and commissions to local artists, the museum tour interweaves antique objects and radically contemporary artworks.”
Wenesday to Friday: 2pm-5pm – Saturday & Sunday: 2pm-pm – €5/€4/€0
Musée de l’Histoire vivante
31 boulevard Théophile Sueur, 93100 Montreuil
www.museehistoirevivante.fr
Les Mondes imaginaires
Until December 15th
“The Espace Monte-Christo takes us to a narrative and poetic dimension with its new exhibition. Thanks to a selection of over 50 sculptures by French and international artists, Les Mondes imaginaires (Imaginary Worlds) is an invitation to broaden your horizons through a dreamlike journey designed like a story in several chapters. […] In his immersive installation, La Famille des Hybridus, Jean-François Fourtou, the exhibition’s carte blanche artist, presents over a dozen part-human, part-plant figures illustrating, with poetry and nostalgia, moments in life inspired by the Belle Époque, and projecting an idyllic image of a humanity in symbiosis with nature.”
Wednesday to Sunday: 11am-6:30pm – Free admission
Espace Monte Cristo
9 rue Monte-Cristo, 75020 Paris
fondationvilladatris.fr/espace-monte-cristo
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Illustration (cropped):
Lecture – Artwork featured in the exhibit Ralentir at Slow Galerie
© Pierre-Louis Bouvier