(James Turrell/Almine Rech Gallery)
For the Citizens of Humanity brand magazine
An uncompromising commitment to a radical vision
is leading gallerist Almine Rech’s favorite quality in an artist. “Radicalism
has always been the narrative for me,” she says, speaking on the phone from
London. “I love it when artists take big risks and don’t feel the need to
justify them, despite any notions of good taste or bad taste. They just go for something
radical, and they make zero compromises.” One could say that Almine herself,
one of the few female gallerists in Paris, is herself a woman of zero
compromise, in that her taste for that which is daring has come to define her. There is little room in Rech’s heart for artists
who bend to please the fickle whims of the art-buying public. “It’s a special
feeling you get when you are in front of someone who is not going to try to
please people. Someone who is going to impose their vision. That’s when I feel
confidence. They don’t need even need to say it. You just feel it.”
The daughter of famed French fashion designer
Georges Rech (founder of
one of France’s first ready-to-wear companies), and the wife of Picasso heir Bernard
Ruiz-Picasso, Rech fell in love with art as a child, painting alongside with
her father on the weekends. “He would paint landscapes, with no intention of
showing his work to anyone except his kids and my mother. It was really for
pure pleasure.” For Almine, it was all about people, and she painted many
portraits of her mother and two younger sisters. Family friends began
commissioning her to make portraits of them too, in her trademark Hockney-esque
style. At the weekends, she would stroll around the museums of Paris, eyes
wide. “My parents were always bringing us to the Jardin des Tuilerie at the Louvre, and they have the most beautiful Impressionist
paintings at the Musée de l'Orangerie there. We used to
live close to the Musee Marmottan near the Bois de Boulogne, dedicated to
Monet. All my childish first discoveries about great paintings happened in
Paris.”
Art is in her blood on both sides: her great-grandfather, Mai
Trung-Cat, the Regent of Vietnam, was a renowned calligrapher at the beginning
of the 20th century, and you can still see his work in the
region of Haiphong, in northern Vietnam, where the ancestral home is. Her
grandfather’s brother was Mai-Trung Thu, another renowned painter. It came as no surprise to anyone when she decided to attend art
school, at ESAG Penninghen, in
Paris, but within just
a year, she realized that the artist’s life was not for her after all. “I very
quickly noticed how lonely it is to create. To be in your studio, alone, all
the time. What a life. Truly, I don’t believe good artists decide to become artists. They have no other
choice. Because it is not an easy life.” So she turned her focus to cinema.
After three years studying French and German film, she pursued art history at
l’Ecole de Louvre, and then a brief stint working at Drouot auction house. By then, her
extensive formal education was complete. Rech was ready to explore her life’s
calling—the discovery and distribution of great art.
She opened her first gallery, Galerie Froment-Putman, in rue Charlot in
the Marais, with Cyrille Putman, son of design legend Andrée Putman, who would
later become her husband. Oddly enough, despite her early
love for figurativism, she found herself most strongly drawn to minimalist and
conceptualist artists. “I was most attracted to very radical artworks. Perhaps
because I had had my fill of painting. When I discovered Donald Judd, John
McCracken and James Turrell, it was such an aesthetic shock. This radicalism of
perception. I had already been interested in the way that minimalism and
Bauhaus had influenced theatre and film. And when I discovered its application
to art, it was like falling in love. So powerful.”
For the gallery’s inaugural show, in November
1989, she placed the work of visionary California light artist James Turrell in
a commercial gallery setting in Europe for the first time. She had seen his
work at an exhibition at a
museum in Nîmes, and spoken with Turrell, telling him her plans to open a
gallery in Paris. So full of enthusiasm was she, Turrell agreed to show his
work with her even though at that point, there had been no
major light-based artworks shown in European galleries, (although there had
been a few museum exhibits). Rech hoped to create, or tap into, a completely
unknown market. She hired an architect to prepare the space based on the few
images and notes given over the phone by Turrell. Shortly before the opening,
Turrell himself came and looked over the gallery. He said it was perfect,
and Rech felt confident ahead of the
opening. “It wasn’t until I had an interview with a small radio channel that I
started to feel worried. They asked me, ‘aren’t you afraid about going bankrupt
after this show?’ and I said ‘oh my God. I hope not’.” She and Putman went
ahead and launched their gallery with one piece by James Turrell and hoped that
a buyer would share their brave vision. “In those days, people liked art that
you could hang on walls,” she points out. Luckily, there was a buyer -- The Centro Televizo Mexico’s museum bought the Turrell piece,
its director, Bob Littman, traveling all the way to Paris to buy it. “That was my very first
sale,” she reminisces. “And it taught me everything I needed to know about the
art world.”
Nearly 25 years later, Turrell is still
represented by Rech in Europe. And the gallery has held important solo shows by such
luminaries as John McCracken, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Liu Wei.
Rech now has three more galleries—a new space
in Paris, one in Brussels (where she also lives, in a three-story brick villa, which was designed in the ’30s by
Adrien Blomme, and naturally
boasts many Picassos, as well as Martin
Szekely coffee tables, a James Turrell light piece, an Ed Ruscha 1974 word
painting (in which “actress” is spelled out on moiré silk),
and a half-ton Jeff Koons sculpture of
inflatable pool toys in trash cans). When
we speak she is in London, where she has just opened her latest space upstairs
from one of the most esteemed bespoke tailors on Savile Row, Huntsman. “The
owner is a major collector, too,” says Rechs. “It’s perfect.”
She is still
possessed by the same passion for radicalism that motivated her in the first
place. And she still admires those artists, both young and established, who are
brave enough to remain uncompromising. Like London-based Ayan Farah, whose work
was presented by the Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels in October 2014. The
exhibition, entitled “Notes on Running Water”, included Eldfell (2011),
a piece made from the polyester–cotton lining of a sleeping bag, buried
for six months at the foot of the Icelandic volcano that gives the work its
title, and Eylon (2014), a work stained by mud and clay
from the Dead Sea. Before that, Almine Rech
Gallery exhibited photos by Saint Laurent designer Hedi Slimane. Her
remit, while extending beyond typically conceptual art, still remains firmly entrenched
in the cutting edge.
Artists have changed in that they are acutely
more aware of the market and are therefore perhaps more cautious than they used
to be, she says. But those artists are not interesting to her. “Art that is
that purely commercial will not remain in art history,” she says. “It’s maintaining
their conviction that is the most difficult thing,” she says. “Those are the ones
that will remain.”