Culture has always accompanied major events, Olympicsthe most important event in sport, is no exception. That is why Paris today displays not only the excitement of the competitions but also an impressive variety of shows that celebrate the common points of the artistic and athletic disciplines.
According to specialized media in the City of Light today a series of events called “Cultural Olympics” And although galleries and institutions usually enjoy long summer holidays at this time, many have decided to remain open and are organizing exhibitions that link the notions of art and sport.
Proposals range from collages of Olympic posters to a sculpture on skates, a futuristic study of sports ergonomics and an interactive vision of amusement parks.
On this occasion, we discuss some of the most relevant ones:
‘The Long Run’by American Clotilde Jiménez, will be on view until September 28, 2024. Presented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, the exhibition expands the artist’s explorations of movement, identity, community, and competition, building on previous work including the series of official Olympic posters she created for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Clotilde Jiménez ‘The Long Run’, 2024, Installation view. © Fabrice Gousset. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim and the artist
‘The art of the Olympic Games’ On view until 7 September 2024, this two-part exhibition is taking place across Gagosian’s two Paris galleries. At the Castiglione gallery, Christo’s drawing Running Fence (1974) – a sketch for a temporary public project in Northern California – shares space with playful combinations of works by nine other contemporary artists. Meanwhile, the Ponthieu gallery is exhibiting a selection of posters from the Olympic Museum in Lausanne featuring iconic designs by David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg and Rachel Whiteread, among others.
The project is on display at the Centre Pompidou Piazza until 15 September 2024. “Cycloïd Piazza” by artist and self-proclaimed “collector of shapes”, Raphaël Zarka. Begun in 2005, the French artist collected photographs from various magazines showing skaters performing tricks on sculptures installed in urban spaces; he continued the project by making his own photographs and films on the same subject. Over the course of two decades, Zarka’s work has encompassed geometry, gravity, modernism, board sports and a good dose of adrenaline – all of which are present in Cycloïd Piazza (2024), his new monumental sculpture for the Piazza del Centre Pompidou.
Cycloïde Piazza by Raphael Zarka for the Pompidou Center, 2024. Photograph © Fred Mortagne, 2024.
For its part, Lafayette Anticipations has partnered with Ebb.Global, a creative studio that uses innovative technology, to turn its spaces into a temporary amusement park. Taking elements from the cultural industries and gaming culture, the family project ‘Gold Rush’ is attuned to the dreams, fears and hopes of young people as it attempts to imagine new sports and rewrite the rules of games. Robots, spaceships and exercise bikes are combined with role-playing activities, mini-golf and slightly absurd sports contests, all of which outline their own ultra-bright, hand-made environments. The project, curated by artist Neïl Beloufa alongside Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, director of Lafayette Anticipations, and filmmaker Clément Postec, was co-created with 60 students from a vocational high school in the northern suburbs of Paris and concludes one chapter of a year-long continuing educational training programme. It will run until 1 September 2024.
‘The Collection: a sporting event’ The exhibition, which is on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton until 9 September 2024, presents five works from its collection in a dreamlike celebration of the impulse to defy norms and laws, both social and natural. Abraham Poincheval appears to be wandering through the ether in the video installation Walk on Clouds (2019), while a series of red kayaks suspended from the ceiling encapsulate humanity’s basic need for speed in Roman Signer’s Installation mit Kajaks (2003). Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Napoleonic Stereotype Circa 44 (1983) retells the story of how hitherto undefeated African-American boxer Joe Louis lost to Germany’s Max Schmeling at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin – a result exploited by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. In this fateful painting, a chess-like grid covers the canvas: stylized protagonists face each other as world history is about to turn upside down.
