Paris’ new contemporary art museum looks like a nuclear bunker.
Visitors enter via heavy steel doors to see the collection founded by French Internet entrepreneur Steve Rosenblum. A black tunnel leads to a white space containing a 1950s fallout shelter.
“It’s a cross between an art foundation and an apartment,” says Rosenblum, the founder of the electrical e-commerce Web site Pixmania.
Photo: Bloomberg
“This is a place to show contemporary artists who need exposure, and it’s also a place to hang out with friends. It’s a mix,” says the 36-year-old, dressed in a dark blue suit and open white shirt, surveying the labyrinth of minimalist black and white walls.
His international overview of emerging and emergent talent invites comparisons with established taste-making collectors such as Charles Saatchi in London and Don and Mira Rubell in Miami. Like them, Rosenblum buys from dealers before artists become fashionable brands at auction. The presence of buyers such as Francois Pinault and Bernard Arnault is boosting Paris’ rivalry with London as the capital of Europe’s art market.
Rosenblum and his wife Chiara have been collecting for five years and have acquired more than 120 pieces. His Fotovista Group, owner of Pixmania, was acquired by DSG International Plc, formerly known as Dixons Group, in April 2006.
The 1,394m2 gallery in the southeast of Paris near the Bibliotheque Nationale de France is called Rosenblum Collection & Friends. It is a conversion of a former photographic laboratory by local architect Joseph Dirand.
The centerpiece of the gallery is a newly commissioned piece by the American artist Matthew Day Jackson. Second Home consists of a 16-tonne fallout shelter infinitely reflected through the floor of its glass vitrine. Visitors can walk into the steel refuge, which is equipped with items such as a patchwork spacesuit and sculptures of internal organs made out of crude oil from the recent Gulf of Mexico spill.
“Matthew’s work is all about science,” Rosenblum says of the permanent installation he funded. “Science helped us manage the atom, and then we made the Bomb.”
The Rosenblums, who curate their own shows, began by collecting African masks and tribal artifacts. Then came the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
“There is a world after 9/11,” Rosenblum says, explaining how he and Chiara became increasingly drawn to the way living artists confront contemporary issues. Jackson is one of 20 artists represented in the inaugural show, Born in Dystopia, exploring current political themes.
Others include Kelley Walker, Tala Madani, Christoph Buechel, Steven Shearer — who will be representing Canada in next year’s Venice Biennale — and the Frenchman Loris Greaud, who has made a black wall sculpture of a life-size family of endangered white rhinos. Russian-born Andrei Molodkin’s 9/11 is a stopped digital clock with the numbers half-filled with oil.
Last month at Sotheby’s in London, Saatchi sold a painting by the Iraqi artist Ahmed Alsoudani for ￡289,250 (US$465,000), more than four times the low estimate. It was the first time the artist, whose works the Rosenblums also collect, had appeared at auction.
“It’s good for the market. You can’t just collect, collect and collect,” Rosenblum says. His current show features a wall of canvases by Berlin-based Alsoudani, who creates painterly evocations of violence in the Middle East. “Though I haven’t sold anything yet, I can’t say I won’t sell anything in the future.”
The Rosenblums want to make the experience of looking at art as informal and enjoyable as possible. A ground-floor kitchen and easy chairs will enable them to entertain guests who can browse an open-access library of books and magazines that have influenced the exhibiting artists.
Upstairs, children can create mayhem in a playroom that is kitted out with painting materials.
“There’s no fixed plan. We want it to be easy-going,” the gallery owner says.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth — Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example — women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples
RSS