Culture bounces back
“To be an artist is to believe in life,” said Henry Moore. And to see art is to feel alive. It liberates our souls, feeds our imaginations and breaks down barriers; it brings joy and can prompt sudden sadness, but most of all it makes us free... In a time when the future of cultural institutions is more uncertain than ever, some brave newcomers have popped their heads above the parapet, daring to open for the first time during the pandemic. We round up the best of them.
Bourse de Commerce Gallery
Paris, France
François Pinault, the French businessman and founder of luxury group Kering, says that art is “the best medicine.” Never has this idea been loaded with more meaning. In the final throes of its completion, his 21-year project to build a museum in Paris to house his art collection was further delayed by the Covid crisis. On May 22, 2021, however, the Pinault Collection finally opened its doors at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The vast exhibit includes Modernist masterworks by Mondrian and Rothko alongside pieces by contemporary artists including Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, and Cindy Sherman.
The 19th-century stock exchange that houses the gallery has been exquisitely reimagined by architect Tadao Ando. At the core of the redesign is an austere concrete structure within the walls of the glass-domed rotunda. Initially Pinault was surprised by the notion of this circle within a circle.
“But after thinking about it, I realized that was exactly what needed to be done,” he says. “And it’s extraordinarily done. My intention was to show that this remarkable old building could exist in harmony with a radical 21st-century design. By allowing today’s architects to appropriate this old building, and do something radically new with it, that’s a way of showing that life goes on.”
