BENJAMIN SWAIM MICHEL NESSIM BOUKRIS LAUREATE
Benjamin Swaim: Michel Nessim Boukris Laureate 2024
The Fondation des Artistes is delighted to announce that Benjamin Swaim is the 2024 laureate of the Michel Nessim Boukris Prize, a prestigious distinction awarded each year to an artist selected for his or her talent and outstanding contribution to contemporary art.
Born in 1970, Benjamin Swaim has distinguished himself through his innovative pictorial research into landscape, a subject that has become central to his artistic work. His ability to capture light and colour with remarkable creative freedom won over the jury, who chose to support his artistic output with a €10,000 grant.
In his work, Swaim explores the landscape through drawings made on the spot, which serve as a starting point for expressive and dynamic painting. His paintings, characterised by bold flat colours and daring compositions, invite the viewer into an immersive and emotional visual experience.
This recognition is all the more significant in the context of the Michel Nessim Boukris Prize, which pays tribute to Dr Sauveur Boukris’s philanthropic commitment to the arts. Every year for the next 20 years, this prize will support emerging and established artists, perpetuating the legacy of Michel Boukris through the Fondation des Artistes.
The Michel Nessim Boukris 2024 Award will be presented at an official ceremony in the spring, marking an important milestone in Benjamin Swaim’s career and underlining the importance of his contribution to the arts.
— Translated from an article by Artistes du Temps
YASUAKI ONISHI AT POLA MUSEUM OF ART, JAPAN
Stone on boundary
December 16, 2023 – May 19, 2024
The HIRAKU Project is a series of exhibitions showcasing contemporary artworks by recipients of the Pola Art Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists. In the 15th exhibition in the series, we are pleased to present works by Yasuaki Onishi, who takes a sculptural approach to space in numerous large-scale installations which he has presented both in Japan and abroad.
Onishi studied sculpture at university, and through his experience with making molds, became interested in relationships between positive forms and negative space and in grasping not only objects themselves but also their surroundings. His works have consistently dealt with the themes of margins, voids, volumes and boundaries.
This exhibition features new works made with copper foil, a material Onishi has utilized extensively in recent years. Copper foil plays crucial roles inside countless electronic devices, yet people rarely see it and most are barely aware of its existence. Onishi removes copper foil from the context of its functional underpinning of our daily lives, shapes it by hammering it over river stones, and subsequently assembles it in large-scale installations.
The surfaces of innumerable stones that traverse the earth’s surface over millennia have undergone physical loss through wear and erosion, but have conversely accrued unimaginable spans of time and come to embody the collective memory of our planet. Through the process of mold-making, Onishi’s copper foil works reveal this interplay of absence and presence and imply that perceiving things requires more than knowing their surfaces––it also requires applying the full richness of our imaginations, and we must acknowledge that even then we will never achieve full understanding.
Onishi’s focus on the absent and the invisible aids us in applying a freer and more flexible sensibility to our grasp of this endlessly complex and diverse world.
MATHIAS BENSIMON AU MUSÉE D’ORSAY – PASTELS XXL
MUSÉE D’ORSAY
PASTELS XXL
March 16 – June 29, 2023
On the occasion of the exhibition “Pastels, de Millet à Redon“, Mathias Bensimon created in front of the visitors alongside seven other students of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, a vast panoramic pastel drawing ten meters long. This live performance will take place in the Seine gallery (Level 0) until June 29, 2023, at the rate of one session per week.
The students of the Beaux-Arts de Paris will intervene on a paper support (224gr/m2), in a panoramic format 10 meters long by 1.50 meters high.
From this original intervention, a real dialogue with the works presented in the exhibition, will be born, over the weeks, a giant pastel allowing the public to appreciate all the varieties and subtleties of the uses of this medium.
This performance will take place every Thursday evening from March 16 to June 29 from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. and on Saturday May 13 during the European Night of Museums.
CORNELIA KONRADS AT THE CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN, USA
On the occasion of the exhibition Flourish: The Garden at 50 at the Chicago Botanic Garden, USA, Cornelia Konrads presents the Passenger, a site-specific installation in the sensoriel garden made of branches and twigs rising from a pair of rubber boots. It looks as if the person wearing these boots is about to dissolve and get blown away. It reveals the invisible in the visible and inspires the joy of thinking about possibilities, about what could be.
YASUAKI ONISHI AT THE KYOCERA MUSEUM OF ART IN KYOTO, JAPAN
Onishi Yasuaki recently unveiled his latest project “Stone and Fence” at KYOTO STEAM 2022 exhibition in Higashiyama Cube, Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Japan.
In his work thus far, Onishi has used a variety of materials to reconfigure voids, margins, and other spaces and boundaries of which we are not usually conscious. By rendering visible boundaries between inside and outside, front and back, or in indeterminate zones in between, he creates uniquely tranquil works that investigate relationships between humans and the natural world.
The installation was made using materials and expertise provided by Fukuda Metal Foil & Powder Co., Ltd., a manufacturer of metal foils and powders with a history going back more than 300 years.
CORNELIA KONRADS AT THE FONDATION CARMIGNAC
A new monumental artwork has joined the collection of sculptures in the gardens of the Fondation Carmignac. The German artist Cornelia Konrads questions with poetry and humor the relationship between man and nature with dreamlike works that reconcile these two forces.
The artist has transcribed the particularly powerful energy of nature on the island of Porquerolles. Between the olive grove and the vines, Le tourbillon is made up of driftwood gleaned by the artist and teams from the National Park on the coast of the island. Carried by the sea currents around Porquerolles, they now tirelessly continue their flight among the trees.
Cornelia Konrads, Le tourbillon, 2018 – Fondation Carmignac © Clément Sauvoy
YASUAKI ONISHI AT THE BEIJING TIMES ART MUSEUM
“WAVELENGTH: AT THE MOMENT” exhibition will be held from March 27th to June 14th, 2021 at Beijing Times Art Museum. After three successful collaborations between WAVELENGTH and Beijing Times Art Museum, from 2017 to 2020, the two parties once again join hands to bring a novel feast of art for all art lovers in Beijing. The exhibition gathers the works of 18 well-known local and foreign contemporary artists with different cultural and artistic backgrounds, presenting the “new spacetime of contemporary art” to the audience, and creating an unprecedented exhibition experience.
The exhibition takes the “tenses” of art as the main theme, categorizing the artists’ works in the form of different “tenses” to create a “temporal” landscape of said distinctions. All installations are divided into 4 particular “tense” areas: “Past Future Tense”, “Present Continuous Tense”, “General Present Tense” and “Future Continuous Tense”. 18 contemporary artists from different cultural and academic backgrounds utilize their unique life and artistic practice experiences to elaborate each’s logical concepts and perceptions of “time” and “space” into multimedia pieces. In these installations, the audience is presented with a perspective of Space-time that breaks the norm through varied temporal divisions. At the moment of viewing, the audience can feel the concepts of time, space, and tenses preserved in the artworks colliding together, not only within their own minds, but also simultaneously floating around the entire exhibition space itself. Hereby, the pieces have become a special medium of feeling and exploring time and space. As a kind of “temporal” theater, the tenses of the artworks experimentally explore a new concept of social life, in the form of pieces themselves.
“WAVELENGTH: AT THE MOMENT” focuses on the time and space aspects hidden within contemporary art which are meant to evoke both the artistic perception and emotional connection of the audience. “Tense” is employed to describe the relationship between artistic works and viewers’ behavior and feelings, transforming the exhibition scene into a rendezvous between different times, space, and realities. From this perspective, art has become a Space-time intermediary that connects the past, the present, and the future, allowing the audience to become “Space-time Travelers” shuttling between different exhibition scenes.
The artists participating in the exhibition are (in alphabetical order): Brody Albert, Charles Pétillon, Elise Morin, Grönlund-Nisunen, Ken+Julia Yonetani, Karina Smigla-Bobinski, Loliloli Studio, Miguel Rothschild, Nils Völker, Raquel Kogan, Rejane Cantoni, Sali Muller, VAVE Studio, XXXL, Xin Wang, Ya Liu, Yasuaki Onishi, Yuqi Wei.