Category Archives: Paris

Paris: FIAC 2017 Highlights

October 24, 2017 butterfly

After Frieze, the art world is gathering once more for the 44th edition of the International French Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in Paris. As the fair drew to a close this week end, we look back at the highlights amongst the 193 modern and contemporary art galleries from 30 countries filling the Grand Palais , like Flame of Desire a five meters high golden sculpture by Takashi Murakami featured at Galerie Perrotin.

Jeppe Hein

Andrea Bowers

Tomas Saraceno

John Giorno

Kohei Nawa

Photo Credit: Celine Neveux for Butterfly Art News

FIAC
18-22 October 2017
Paris

Paris, streets

Paris: Urban Week in La Defense

September 21, 2017 butterfly

For its 4th edition the Urban Week festival returns to the business district of La Defense in Paris from 20 -23 September 2017 with a series of events celebrating street culture from street art, music, sports and food.

Through the project SAATO, 18 international artists are doing live painting sessions: MUG (AUS), BRUSK (FR), VESOD (IT), MONSTA (FR), STOM 500 (FR), BANE&PEST (CH), WISE TWO (Kenya), KALOUF (FR), MR CENZ (UK), BELIN (ES), NEAN (BE), DOES (NL) DEGE (FR), RNST (FR), MOMIES (FR), INSANE 51 (GR), RUSS (FR), MR DHEO (PT).

Photo credit : Celine Neveux for Butterfly Art News

URBAN WEEK
20 -23 September 2017
Paris La Defense

Paris

Paris: Elzo Durt – Colors & Glory

August 16, 2017 butterfly

With the 10th year anniversary of the music label Born Bad Records and the release of a monograph entitled “Complete Works”, Belgian graphic designer and illustrator Elzo Durt is showing 13 years of illustration in an exhibition called ‘Colors & Glory’ at the Gallery du Jour in Paris

With more than a hundred exhibitions to his credit, dozens of projects and album covers, Elzo Durt is one of the most prolific and recognizable illustrators. After a good decade spent imposing a heavy and abrasive style made of creepy and psyche collages within the punk and techno scenes of Brussels, he has, in a few years, colonized the imagination of the French rockers by becoming the main illustrator of Born Bad Records and creating his own label, Teenage Menopause.

The exhibition starts in a psychedelic kitchen from the 1950s, giving the visitor a feeling of drunkenness but also inviting him into a psychedelic universe to discover one hundred and thirty works (posters, record covers …) including 15 of its most iconic pieces as well as some previously unseen works and ends in a gothic-punk church of the future.

As the ultimate fan of underground music, Elzo, and his Parisian friend Francois Froos, launched their own music label Teenage Menopause Records in 2011, dedicated to punk and techno.
A monumental fresco of 1.80 meters by 4 meters bringing together forty small paintings into a futuristic pope is dedicated to his friend Froos.

But Elzo Durts’ universe does not resonate only with these two styles or movements, as he multiplies borrowings and winks, drawing from the world history of graphic design and posterism: from military propaganda of the twentieth century Sci-fi comics; Art Nouveau to Russian constructivism; or from the psychedelic art of the 1960s and 1970s to the flyers of the late 1980s announcing the first raves.

View the full set of pics here

Elzo Durt – Colors & Glory
Galerie du Jour
Rue Cinquapoix Paris

Paris, Shows

Paris: John Giorno

August 11, 2017 butterfly

Cahier d’Arts in Paris presents a series of prints of the works by New York artist John Giorno, as well as four new painting poems until the end of August.

Part of the New York underground scene in the mid sixties, John Giorno was the main actor in Andy Warhol’s first film ‘Sleep’ in 1963. He was also very close to the ‘beat’ movement and to William S. Burroughs. His main concern at the time was to make poetry accessible to popular culture.

In 1965, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit organization that started several musical groups and also became a label that published about forty albums. In 1968, he created Dial-a-Poem, a mass telephone service (in fact the first of its kind) that offered poems to the people who dialed the number and received millions of calls. Giorno has published a dozen collections of poems, as many albums, video works, and has given many performances since the past forty years.

A portfolio of recent works of the artist is illustrated in the last issue of the magazine Cahiers d’Art 2016-2017 and presented at the Palais de Tokyo.

View the full set of pics here

John Giorno – Cahier D’Arts
Until end of August
14-15 rue du Dragon 75006 Paris

Paris, Shows

Paris: Okuda – The Dream of Mona Lisa

August 1, 2017 butterfly 1 Comment

Anna Dimitrova from Adda Gallery and Montana Gallery and Valériane Mondot from Taxie Gallery join forces to celebrate a collaborative new gallery ADDA & TAXIE and present a monographic and the first Parisian exhibition of Spanish artist OKUDA SAN MIGUEL called ‘The Dream of Mona Lisa’.

Inspired by the city of Paris, according to Okuda, the enigmatic Mona Lisa dreams of human figures and muses of the great classic masters. Being a creator and contemporary master, Okuda interprets these icons through his own surrealist prism using intense psychedelic colors and geometric harmonies.

Blending rainbow geometric landscapes with organic shapes, headless animals, figures, and personal iconography, his works produces mental stimulation and visually pleasing content. The artist continuously tries to balance the gray scale with his vibrant palette, using colors as a symbol of life and nature and the latter as a symbol of cement, death, dust and the material of classic sculptures.

In his latest series, Okuda San Miguel expresses his own vision of what the human being is made of. Humans are confronted with their roots, between its natural and ideal part, represented by trees and different types of animals and the capitalist society, represented by bricks. Showing us the world where human beings and animals are created equal, the artist distils his own personal vision of God. This conceptual research is the result of his journeys and continuous contact with different environments. The artist sums up the contradictions between existentialism, universe, infinite, freedom, modernity and the meaning of life as an inextinguishable thirst.