Air de Paris, a number one French gallery, will shut its doorways and declare chapter after 36 years in enterprise, the gallery’s cofounders, Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino, inform Cultured.
Bonnefous says the gallery owes cash solely to the owner and the financial institution, not her artists. The gallery is closing, per Cultured, as a consequence of its “fragile” funds in addition to the founders’ well being (Bonnefous suffers from Power Obstructive Pulmonary Illness, and Mennino additionally has unspecified well being points).
The gallery labored with artists together with Trisha Donnelly, Joseph Grigely, Pati Hill, Pierre Joseph, Allen Ruppersberg, Lily van der Stokker, Mona Varichon, and Amy Vogel, all of whom have been included in its farewell exhibition, “Oh What a Time,” notes Cultured, including that the sellers have been early advocates for now-renowned figures akin to Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Dorothy Iannone, Paul McCarthy, Philippe Parreno, and Sturtevant.
“Little by little,” Bonnefous advised the journal, “we realized we wished to do issues otherwise, and whereas causes for closing are a mixture of many issues, it was additionally crucial for us to distance ourselves from how the artwork market has developed,” including, “What’s extra shocking is that we lasted so long as we did.”
Bonnefous tells Cultured that she’s going to proceed to keep up the estates of Man de Cointet, Pati Hill, Dorothy Iannone, Bruno Pelassy, and Sarah Pucci, and can proceed to work as a curator.
Named after a readymade by French artist Marcel Duchamp, the gallery was based in 1990 in Good, headquartered in Paris since 1994, and situated within the Romainville suburb since 2019. The gallery participated in main artwork festivals akin to Artwork Basel and the Foire Internationale d’Artwork Contemporain (FIAC).
Air de Paris made headlines a yr in the past, when it loudly withdrew from Artwork Basel’s June 2025 Swiss version in protest over a change to its placement on the all-important ground plan, after it had participated in every version of the truthful’s Swiss version since 1999 and served on the choice committee for Artwork Basel Paris since its first version in 2022. In its resignation letter, the gallery bemoaned “the current pattern in the direction of a extra corporatist mannequin,” saying it had “given precedence to managerial effectivity.”
