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Nearly on the beach

Artists wishing to capitalise on the heightened awareness of Australian art in France might consider applying for one of the six Australian studios located at the Cité Internationale des Artes that is in the heart of Paris and just across from the Paris Plage. During summer, this area along the bank of the Seine, tonnes of sand, palm trees, and deck chairs are transported in to create a quasi-beach. The average studio occupancy is for three months. Current artists using the studios at the Cité are Jude Rae, Tim Burns, Sean Meilak, Stephen McClymont, Annabel Butler and Bronwyn Clarke Cooley.  Visit www.ciup.fr.

More Oz Indigenous art in Paris

A stroll along the left bank of the Seine river away from the Quai Branly, and past the Eiffel Tower, you can see an exhibition of the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection Mythology and reality: Contemporary Aboriginal desert art at the Australian Embassy. The Pizzi Collection features seventy painted works and includes many by leading Indigenous artists such as Walter Tjampitjinpa, Tatali Nagala, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Pansy Napangati.  Until 17 January next year, visit www.france.embassy.gov.au …

Across the Seine in the Marais district in a classy gallery space called the Passage de Retz there is an exhibition called The spirit of Arnhem Land: Aboriginal art of Northern Australia from the collection of Arnaud Serval. This is another diverse and intriguing exhibition of some 130 works displayed over five rooms. The works include many contemporary paintings, four recently-created Morning Star poles, new bark paintings, ceremonial poles as well as some excellent works dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Serval, a French artist and collector, first went to Australia in the 1980s and has lived and worked among the peoples of Central Australia and Arnhem Land. His gallery in Paris, Woo Mang, opened in 1992 and is now devoted to the promotion of the Indigenous artists of Australia. See The spirit of Arnhem Land until 11 September, or visit www.passagederetz.com.

Just a tad more on Quai Branly…

Musee Quai Branly has rightly caused much excitement in art circles especially in Paris. How could it not have? It’s not often that a major city opens a grand-scale museum like this one. VIPs jetted in from around the world, proud politicians postured en force, and it was a fine event indeed. But as the summer queues fall away, the museum will have to fend off criticisms – and there do seem to be nearly as much criticism as praise. People complain that the staff look absolutely stunning but seem to have little in-depth knowledge, and that it is possible to trip and stumble around some of the landscaping features (I know someone who broke their ankle!). More seriously, given the raw nature of many of the works, they seem incongruous displayed in such sophisticated glass cabinets. All this aside, and even forgiven, there remains the serious fact that while the darkness undoubtedly contributes to an aura of magic in the museum, we simply can’t see the Australian Desert paintings well enough.

The Australian selection projects a powerful, yet quiet, sophistication. It is surprisingly dissimilar from the rest of the works, perhaps due to the fact that the visual language of our Indigenous painting, whether on canvas or on more traditional three dimensional forms, sits comfortably within a mainstream contemporary art aesthetic, but also partly because there is a predominance of sculptural forms rather than painted works throughout the main collection. Interest in Australian art and culture in Paris has been raised considerably since the opening of the museum, and while for many years there have been a few private galleries and collectors here specialising in Australian Indigenous art, right now these promoters are playing a critical role raising awareness of Australian Indigenous art in France.

Several fine exhibitions of Australian Indigenous art have been tired to coincide with the summer opening of the Musée du Quai Branly…

Roots across the world

…is the title given to a project by idiosyncratic South Australian sculptors James Darling and Lesley Forward, who constructed and sadly, just a week later, deconstructed Circle one on the sculpture esplanade at La Defense last month. You had to be quick to catch it, but for those who did, it generated considerable excitement. Circle one was created for the Paris Quartier D’Ete summer festival of arts, and it is one of a series of signature mallee root sculptures to be created by the sculptors this year in Madrid, Paris and Singapore. It took the form of a circular wall, neck high, a metre deep, and about three metres in diameter, created by the careful assemblage of 12.5 tonnes of South Australian mallee roots that had been sorted and boxed into size order then shipped to France in a container. The work was positioned along what is known as the Historic Axis that runs between the Arc de Triomphe and the Grande Arche of the skyscraper business district of Paris known as La Defense. Sufficient funds have been secured to have the roots stored in Paris for up to a year, enabling the sculptors to create subsequent works. The project was supported by Paris Quartier D’Ete, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australia-France Foundation.