Any other business

In my post about Art Basel Paris 2025 , I mentioned that both it and Paris Internationale seemed better than last year - whether because they were showing more interesting work, or because I was in a better mood, I don't know. This year, the peripatetic fair was located in the former Adidas shop on the Champs Elysées, not far from Art Basel (recalling the 2021 Athens Biennale ). I spent quite a long time there, partly because it was a better space altogether than the old post-office building or telephone exchange the fair was in in the last couple of years and partly because I enjoyed quite a lot of the work. But also, I had a nice chat with Gaby (Gabriela Magaña) at the Gaga booth (showing lots of Julien Ceccaldi, but also works by his brother, new to me), and another, over coffee, with Jeremy Parker. Jeremy's someone I first met when he was with Project Native Informant in London, but he's now bravely opening a gallery of his own in Cambridge, called Corpus . Apparently,...

  This year, unlike last, I was well-organised enough to be back from Greece in time for Paris's annual contemporary art week. Two years ago, I wrote a series of posts grouped together by the notion of 'art-fair fatigue' ( Art-Fair Fatigue 1: Basel , Art-Fair Fatigue 2: Athens Biennale , Art-Fair Fatigue 3: FIAC , the FIAC not yet having been replaced by Paris+ by Art Basel, and finally, Art-fair fatigue 4: Paris Internationale and Asia Now ). I'm not alone, I know, in finding the profusion of events, many of them major, going on simultaneously in Paris in a single week a bit too much to take in: art-fair fatigue again. I started with Paris Internationale. This is a peripatetic event that usually takes place somewhere unusual and disused or undergoing refurbishment. This year it was housed in one of a number of striking telephone exchanges, quite avant garde for their date, that went up in Paris circa 1920. The building, while intact outside, was gutted, leading to com...