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"With this new museum, in the heart of Paris, I intend to share my passion for contemporary art." - François Pinault.
"Architecture acts as a hyphen between the past, present and future." - Tadao Ando.
A highly anticipated visit to this relatively new space for art in the heart of Paris. Having seen much online about this gallery, a trip to the Bourse de Commerce was a priority on my itinerary on my last visit to the French capital. The 18th-century architectural space - a former grain trading centre with a 21st-century intervention did not disappoint. The building itself was the star of the show, and actually overshadowed much of the artworks on display. The original building is capped by a vast glass and metal dome which was the first in the world of such proportions. It was a great opportunity to wander through the calm, opened gallery spaces, formerly enclosed bustling offices, where clerks would have filled ledgers and dealt commodities on the busy trading floor. A really nice nod to the former use of the building is that the original murals in the central space although they depict aspects of France's colonial past have been retained to give a sense of time and history. Other such clues to the buildings past such as wooden plaques and classical paintings can also be found in situ in other places about the building. Tadao Ando's sweeping circular wall of concrete, demarcates the central gallery space on the ground floor. His definitive intervention sympathetically imposes, but doesn't overwhelm this vast space on the ground floor. It is such a huge, open space, and as such delivers a heightened sense of drama. Going into that ground floor for the first time is like entering an open air theatre. The central space on my visit contained an absolutely huge screen video installation by Anri Sala depicting shots of the earth from space and a record being played with a jarring soundtrack. It was certainly a spectacle deserving of the size of the space. As big as this central space is though, it was the tiniest installation in a side room by Ryan Gander which in my opinion made the biggest impact. His work entitled - /.../.../... 2019, features a very realistic looking animatronic mouse emerging from a hole in the buildings skirting board, spouting a hesitant, stream of conscious narrative to visitors. It is an amazingly, surreal, spectacle which has to qualify as one of the cutest and most emotive artworks ever. I was, and remain smitten by this piece. I was really unmoved by most of the other artworks on display here, but did enjoy Anri Sala's drawn interventions in which he drew on old zoological engravings, and also Maurizio Cattelan's Others, 2011, a series of pigeons which have invaded the sanctity of the upper gallery spaces, just hanging out, yet evoking Hitchcockian levels of anxiety when one remembers his film - The Birds. Unlike many other gallery spaces there is a real sense of air and light in the Bourse, it a fantastic backdrop in which to display art, and I look forward to discovering what the curators put on future programmes, and planning future visits around this.
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