Artmonte-carlo 2023

Over these years, the artmonte-carlo fair has become a leading artistic platform to meet the demands of the many art connoisseurs of the region.

Bernard Frize (PERROTIN)For Frize, paint, resin, brush and canvas are not materials to be mastered, but collaborators with whom he enters into a working relationship. The terms of this partnership may vary from series to series, but ever-constant is the notion that the media itself is equally as important as the hand of the artist in determining the look and feel of a final painting. The drips, pools, swirls, and blobs of paint found throughout Frize’s large colorful abstractions evidence his anti-auteur relationship to painting. Moreover, his abstract painting is decisively process-oriented.

Hans Hartung (PERROTIN)
Hans Hartung rejected naturalism in favor of an expressive approach to painting. He achieved international recognition as a seminal figure of art informel, which arose in France during World War II. The artist’s bold, calligraphic, non-objective canvases evolved from an interest in rational, mathematical-based approaches to artmaking, particularly the harmony of the golden ratio. The Grand International Prize for Painting, which he won at the 1960 Venice Biennale, marked a decisive turn in his practice.

Laure Prouvost (Galerie Nathalie Obadia)
The Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost is known for her lush, immersive films, artworks and mixed-media installations. Interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images, and meaning, she confessed that in her works “fiction and reality get really tangled”, seductive and jarring. “The octopus is the oldest mind or brain of this planet. With her arms, she’s touching and thinking many things at one time. And could it be where we all come from? The only thing the octopus doesn’t have is memory, so she cannot evolve so much. I also often forget things, so I can connect to that.”

Jean-Michel Othoniel (PERROTIN)
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s enchanting aesthetics revolves around the notion of emotional geometry. Through the repetition of modular elements such as bricks or his signature beads, he creates exquisite jewellery-like sculptures whose relationship to the human scale ranges from intimacy to monumentality. Othoniel’s holistic sensibility compares to fêng shui, or the art of harmonizing people with their environment, allowing viewers to inhabit his world through reflection and motion.

Martial Raysse (LGDR)International gallery LGDR makes its Artmonte-carlo debut showcasing works by Martial Raysse, one of the founding figures of the French Nouveau Réalisme movement in the 1960s. Breaking with the lyrical, abstract styles then dominant in Paris, the artists declared their commitment to “new perceptions of the real,” incorporating found objects and quotidian materials into their work in an attempt to blur the distinction between art and everyday life. The parents of the artist were involved in the French Resistance against the occupation by the Nazis, and this had a profound impact on the boy. As Raysse stated back in 2000, “I know what it is like to be torn from my bed at 3 a.m. by the Gestapo.” His first creative experiences in poetry and fine art began at the age of 12.

Oli Epp (PERROTIN)
Oli Epp’s paintings circulate a number of themes to do with the tragicomic element of living in the 21st-century society, dealing with the complexity of identity and anxieties living in the digital age; consumerism and consumption which leads to control and addiction, anxiety and conflict. The paintings work in an endlessly cyclical way of Epp ironically questioning idealisms and our pursuit of perfection and the conflict that arises as a result. The overall aesthetic of Epp’s paintings conveys the digital world; mimicking the screen, toying with the physicality of the surface.