‘It’s Like Putting on Someone Else’s Jacket, and It Fits’: David Zwirner’s Paris Branch Is Open for Business, With a Bang

On Tuesday morning in Le Marais, the chic neighborhood in the
3rd arrondissement of Paris, the latest outpost of the David
Zwirner empire opened its doors to a select few clients and
insiders.

These lucky few stepped off Rue Vieille du Temple
and through a large iron gate where a spacious, stately
courtyard emerged, and into a spiffy new gallery space with
Zwirner’s name freshly appended to the door.

The place was a veritable hive of activity. London director
Angela Choon breezed by on the phone screaming, “Just buy it, it’s
beautiful!” Hong Kong director Leo Xu led a group of Asian
collectors into a back room full of primo works by gallery artists
Carol Bove, Alice Neel, and Richard Serra. Xu’s group nearly
knocked into a band of European collectors led by partner David
Leiber. Caterers fluttered about with coffees and frazzled
assistants whipped by holding two phones in one hand. And in the
guts of the building, a dozen or so sales associates sat tapping
away on laptops, ready to offload works.

“We are already fully operational,” Paris director Victoire de
Pourtalès told me, standing in one of the private showrooms.

To be fully operational that quick, de Pourtalès managed a
pretty gnarly turnaround—until this summer, she was running the
previous occupant of the gallery, VNH Gallery, and now heads up the
Zwirner Paris spot with Justine Durrett, a gallery vet called in
from New York. VNH closed at the end of July, and in just a few
months, the space morphed into an instantly recognizable Zwirner
space, with all the bells and whistles of its other branches. (The
floor, for example, is the exact same color as the gallery in New
York, which a rep insists is a coincidence).

The tight deadline was due in part to the desire to open during
the third week in October, when the art world gathers in the City
of Light for FIAC, but also because of another pressing matter: the
seeming inevitability of Brexit, which is scheduled for October 31.
As David Zwirner said when the Paris gallery was announced: “Brexit
changes the game. After October, my London gallery will be a
British gallery, not a European one.”

The move was a canny one: in the months after it was announced,
White Cube said it would also open in Paris, though with an office
and viewing room. Pace is looking for a space as well. There are
rumors that Hauser & Wirth will follow—the logic being that, once
Brexit happens, its only EU gallery will be in Menorca, which is
too remote to be a major art-world hub.

But there’s also the pure appeal of Paris, its aura of sex long
an intoxicant for moneyed Americans, and its history as a global
capital of culture. And the convenience of finding a
soon-to-be-defunct gallery in a prime space in the Marais,
absorbing its director and staff, and turning it into a Zwirner
branch was too much to let pass.

What’s more, the space has some real art-historical bonafides:
before it was VNH, it housed Yvon Lambert’s legendary gallery,
where Conceptual art legends Carl Andre and Lawrence Weiner had
early Paris shows. As Zwirner said during a preview Monday (as
relayed to me via a rep: “It’s like putting on someone else’s
jacket, and it fits.”

Intriguingly, the first show is new work not by one of the
gallery’s many European artists, but by Raymond Pettibon, the
illustrator who came up in the Los Angeles punk scene in the ’80s
and is now known for his large-scale drawings of surfer-dude waves,
baseball diamonds, and scabrously political caricatures.

They works are installed, salon style, in the large soaring main
space, with the gigantic rendering of blue waves acting as
showstoppers. But better yet are the caricatures, which skewer
longstanding targets of hippie opprobrium such as Nancy Reagan,
Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler. Occasionally, there are more
loving caricatures, including poignant portraits of Pettibon’s
spiritual soulmates, such as Martin Kippenberger and the late
Anthony Bourdain.

“The first show with Raymond is such a great idea,” de Pourtalès
said. “He’s such an interesting character, and this space, it’s so
right. The caricature is so much part of the culture here in
Paris.”

There’s certainly a pretty penny to be made from the Pettibon
works. Last week, advisors said they were being offered the large
wave paintings for $1.2 million a pop, with several of them spoken
for. But the gallery’s real red meat is in the ancillary gallery
spaces that run from one side of the building and into the back. De
Pourtalès said that the gallery’s artists were asked to make new
work to inaugurate the space, and there are freshly made paintings
by Josh Smith, Harold Ancart, Oscar Murillo, and Lisa Yuskavage
lining the walls. According to a price list left in one of the
galleries, all of those are on reserve already (the day before the
gallery opens!) and priced in the mid six-figures.

“Most of the artists came to the opening, and we really want
them to be interested in the Paris space,” de Pourtalès
said.

And the gallery is also successfully moving some older
inventory. Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY NETS (KOZPP) (2017) is
priced at $2 million and on reserve, as is Maypole, a 2000
painting by Luc Tuymans, priced at $2.5 million. Not yet snapped up
(as of Tuesday afternoon, that is) are a Jeff Koons gazing ball
sculpture, Gazing Ball (Diana) (2013), priced at $2.8
million, and a large Yuskavage painting, The Big Pileup
(2015), on sale for $1.2 million.

De Pourtalès said that, while the space will be an important
venue for its artists to debut new work, it will also become the de
facto European headquarters for the gallery. And given the dueling
crises facing Hong Kong and London, Paris may soon become the city
that comes after New York in terms of prominence for the
gallery.

“David’s very happy with the London space, but with what’s
happening, it will be the only gallery he’ll have in Europe,” de
Pourtalès said. “We’re going to be able to do secondary market
business, but we’ll see how it goes—it needs to be very organic and
instinctive.”

To that end, the next show will of be historical work by Dan
Flavin, which not only strengthens the secondary market status of
the gallery, but also echoes back to the ghosts of the gallery’s
past—Yvon Lambert showed Flavin as early as 1974.

“Yvon had this kind of minimal idea of a program, which David is
very interested in as well,” de Pourtalès said.

The post ‘It’s Like Putting on Someone Else’s Jacket, and It
Fits’: David Zwirner’s Paris Branch Is Open for Business, With a
Bang appeared first on artnet News.