With Paris's position in the global art market having strengthened in recent years, FIAC is returning to high expectations.
Following a rapid succession of European fairs this autumn, FIAC key for galleries who may not have participated in Art Basel or Frieze. Zeno X Gallery, for instance, did not attend the latter, opting instead to reveal works by former fashion designer Martin Margiela in Paris, whose work is also going on view at Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation des Galeries Lafayette.
Needless to say, institutions and galleries across Paris are bringing out their best. Among them, Gagosian is opening an exhibition of work by Alexander Calder at their newly opened space on 9 rue de Castiglione. Spilling outside, the artist's monumental red Dragonfly (1975) sculpture will be situated on Place Vendôme.
We select some of our favourite works showing at FIAC.
Amy Sillman at Capitain Petzel
Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based Amy Sillman's four-decade-long career has traversed painting, drawing, animation, and most recently, iPhone videos.
Shifting between abstraction and figuration, Amy Sillman's large-scale canvases are a melting pot for shape, colour, and line, which appear to be in a constant state of flux, offering a renewed form of Abstract Expressionism for the 21st century.
A presentation of Sillman's paintings and drawings will be on view at Capitain Petzel's Berlin gallery at the end of the month.
Rashid Johnson at Massimo de Carlo
Chicago-born, New York-based Rashid Johnson began his artistic practice in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since graduating in 2005, his career has sky-rocketed.
Last month, it was announced that Johnson will be inducted as National Academician at the National Academy of Design, an artist-led artist organisation representing the breadth of cultural practice across America.
Brandished with black soap and wax, the wooden surface of this 2011 work recalls the gestural mark-making of his recent 'Bruise Paintings' and 'Anxious Red Paintings'.
Johnson is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery entitled Black and Blue running until the end of this month, while two new monumental mosaic commissions are on view at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Christa Dichgans at Contemporary Fine Arts
Born in 1940 in Berlin, Christa Dichgans studied at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin before moving to New York for a year upon graduating in 1965. From 1984 to 1988, she worked as Georg Baselitz's assistant at the Akademie.
Salsicce, Italian for sausage, is one of many works by Dichgans populated with the Italian delicacy. Rendered in an almost pointillist technique, her common representation of the consumerist object placed her at the forefront of the 1960s German Pop movement.
In 2018, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover held a major retrospective exhibition of Dichigans' work—her first major institutional show in Germany for over 30 years.
Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian
One of her more intimately scaled works, Red Outline (1961) highlights the polarity of Helen Frankenthaler's oeuvre.
Expressive blue and brown oil paint sits in perfect conjunction with stark crimson and blue lines, broken up by harsh crayon marks that cut through the wash. Frankenthaler's colour-soaked canvases have been a regular auction highlight this year, signalling rising appreciation, and demand, for the Abstract Expressionist's work.
Royal Fireworks (1975) sailed past its estimate of $2-3 million, selling for $7.8 million at Sotheby's, while more recently her 1978 work Warming The Wires was the top lot at Christie's Postwar to Present auction earlier this month, going for $2.67 million.
Marking a decade since the artist's death, Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty is now on view at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Theaster Gates at Gagosian
Theaster Gates works across painting, sculpture, film, installation, sound, and performance, as well as through processes of salvaging, archiving, and place-making. In so doing, he creates a potent visual discourse around labour, material, spiritual capital, and commodity in charged social contexts.
Celebrating Gates's three-decade-long engagement with clay, A Clay Sermon, his survey exhibition of clay works recently opened at the Whitechapel Gallery, including his earliest ceramic productions as well as the recent 'Afro-Mingei' sculptures and large vessels.
The Chicago-based artist will design the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion as the first non-architect solely commissioned for this prestigious project.
Louise Bourgeois at Xavier Hufkens
Born in 1911, Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois studied at Paris's École des Beaux-Arts before moving to New York to pursue her prolific career.
Femme (1993), a small-scale bronze hanging sculpture of the female figure, represents Bourgeois' life-long exploration of gender norms, feminine forms, and womanhood.
On the subject of womanhood, Bourgeois once wrote, 'I have endeavoured during my whole lifetime as a sculptor to turn woman from an object into an active subject'.
It was recently announced that London's Hayward Gallery will present a major retrospective of the artist's fabric and textile works. Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child opens on 9 February 2022.
Nan Goldin at Marian Goodman Gallery
Born in Washington D.C. in 1953, Nan Goldin has dedicated her practice to capturing the vulnerability of her personal life alongside social complexities of adolescence and beyond.
Having played an instrumental role in documenting New York in the 1970s and 80s, her raw and intimate photographs lay bare the AIDS crisis, drug abuse, and the underground culture of New York City's 'golden years'.
French Chris on the Convertible, NYC (1979), showing with Marian Goodman Gallery, is a poignant example of Goldin's unique diaristic style.
Maria Lassnig at Capitain Petzel
Born in Carinthia, Austria in 1919, Maria Lassnig studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at the height of World War II, before moving to Paris then New York in the 1960s.
Today, Lassnig is recognised for coining and developing the term 'Körpergefühlsmalerei', meaning 'body sensation painting'—a practice of pictorially expressing inner sensations. On this approach, Lassnig explained, 'I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point which has come from my realisation that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body.'
A self-portrait, Die grüne Malerin (The Green Paintress) (2000) depicts the artist in almost lizard form, rendered in expressive pinks and turquoise shades.
Hans Josephsohn at Galerie Max Hetzler
After studying sculpture in Florence in 1938, Hans Josephsohn devoted his practice entirely to the human form.
A balancing act between figuration and abstraction, his works arise from the most basic anatomical shapes, before being coarsely worked and moulded in plaster and cast in brass.
Gleaned from the art and antiquities of classical Egypt and Greece, among others, his sculptures embody a renewed sense of tactility through their irrefutable heaviness and materiality. Josephsohn's work is currently part of a group show at MASI Lugano on view until 20 February.
Georg Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac
Executed in 1972, Fingermalerei - Haubentaucher (1972) is one of Georg Baselitz's earliest 'Fingermalerei', or finger paintings.
The approach stemmed from Baselitz's desire to explore the relationship between his materials and his own emotional connection with the process of painting.
A major retrospective of Georg Baselitz's work opens at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on 20 October. The exhibition includes the artist's famed upside-down paintings begun in 1969.
Main image: Nan Goldin, French Chris on the Convertible, NYC (1979) (detail). Archival pigment print, edition of 25. 76.2 x 114.3 cm. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.
