The winner of the Michel Nessim Boukris Prize was announced on 9 February 2023 through a press release from the French Artists’ Foundation. The winner of the 2023 edition is the artist Isabelle Giovacchini.

Working with the photographic medium through the prism of experimentation, Isabelle Giovacchini has been developing her practice for over fifteen years. A graduate of the National School of Photography in Arles, the artist focuses her attention on the material and on "aberration", a central notion found in the effects produced by the images she transforms.

The prize is issued by the Fondation des Artistes, a body created by the State in 1976 to support French practitioners both in the teaching they receive and in the dissemination of their work. The first edition of the prize—planned to reward an artist each year for twenty years thanks to the donation of Dr Sauveur Boukris—was held in 2020 and distinguished Daniel Horowitz. In 2021, two artists were nominated, Capucine Vever and Anne-Sophie Turion, who were selected ex-aequo among the fifty candidates.

Isabelle Giovacchini will be awarded the prize next spring and will receive financial support of €10,000 to produce new works. She was chosen from among the 52 beneficiaries of the foundation’s patronage, selected thanks to a commission established in 2011, the first private production aid scheme in France for which €500,000 is allocated each year.

Gradually denied access to education in Afghanistan, women are no longer able to attend the country’s art centres following the Taliban’s last ban in December 2022. The Art Newspaper took stock of the situation on 9 February 2023, two months later.

The bans began with the country’s public facilities, to which Afghan women have been denied access since 2021. Faced with the impossibility of finding work with government organisations or to go to universities, they naturally turned to private centres, which have seen their number of students increase in recent months.

The vast majority of their students were women. Since the implementation of the new law by the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, however, teachers and institutions fear for their future and that of the arts, due to lack of remuneration and students. It is also the next generations of artists that are threatened, and may disappear completely.

On 9 February 2023, the Mendes Wood DM gallery announced the opening of a branch, planned for July. It will occupy a space on the Place des Vosges in the heart of the Marais district, a stronghold of Parisian and international galleries.

The gallery will have 200 sqm of exhibition space spread over two levels in a period building whose renovation is being supervised by the NeM / Niney et Marca Architectes agency, which was notably responsible for the Bourse de Commerce project.

Founded in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2010 by Felipe Dmab, Matthew Wood, and Pedro Mendes, Mendes Wood DP saw its reach extend to Europe with the opening of a space in Brussels in 2017. In 2022, it set its sights on New York. Its new location in Paris will give it an even broader international reach anchored in a historical and tourist area. Regarding the French capital, it is increasingly asserting itself as the main cultural hub of the European continent.

At the beginning of February 2023, the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, put up for sale a painting by the Flemish painter Brueghel the Younger following its rediscovery last October. Estimated at between €600,000 and €800,000, it will be offered at auction on 28 March.

The work dates from 1615-1917 and represents a village scene, painted on a large canvas (111 x 183 cm), larger than the artist’s usual paintings. Entitled The Village Lawyer, or The Tithes Collector, it was probably influenced by the French painter Nicolas Baullery.

The painting was found during an inventory of a family’s property in France, where it had been kept for over a hundred years. It was authenticated in Paris in November and sent to Germany in December by Drouot to the Brueghel specialist Klaus Ertz, who confirmed the first analysis.

The British auction house Bonhams has been put up for sale: this was reported by the American media outlet Bloomberg on 6 February 2023. Estimated at one billion dollars, it selected the financial company J.P. Morgan to accompany the transaction.

Founded in London in 1793, Bohams is one of the leading auction houses in the world. It was acquired by Epiris in 2018, which then expanded the empire to include regional firms such as Bukowskis, Skinner, Rasmussen and most recently, Cornette de Sait Cyr in June 2022. For the time being, Epiris did not wish to comment on the sale, which remains uncertain.

This news comes on the heels of the company’s sales report for 2022. The results were very positive and unprecedented for the company, with a turnover of one billion dollars.

Will the Centre Pompidou be exported again? This is what the newspaper Le Monde reports in an article published on 6 February 2023. The museum is in the process of signing a two million euro contract with the Saudi government for the creation of a contemporary art centre named Perspective Galleries.

The project should be built on the site of AlUla, an oasis in the north-west of Saudi Arabia invested by the French Agency for Development to enhance its archaeological heritage and to make it a regional key tourist destination. The project to create the Perspective Galleries museum will be supported by the Centre Pompidou.

The Centre Pompidou will assist the Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh as a consultant and will support the project in terms of the conservation of works, the scientific programme, as well as the educational strategy for the new space. Upon Perspective Galleries’ opening, the Centre Pompidou is to lend works and participate in the development of the exhibition programme.

This new collaboration with a French museum follows the loan of the site of a statue to the Louvre last autumn and, more broadly, the cultural policy pursued by France in the Middle East with the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2017.

On February 15, 2023, Funghi Gallery will launch with the NFTs exhibition and sale, entitled “Make me dream” and dedicated to the theme of dreams.

Dedicated to the representation of digital works, Funghi will bring together for its sale five artists working with this medium, between generative art and video art. Marina Núñez, Charlesai.eth, Ivona Tau, Selay Karasu and Elina Crespi have created exclusive works for the exhibition. The event will be held online, on the Spatialio metaverse. A guided tour will be organised in the presence of the artists. The sales will be private on 15 and 16 February, then open to the public from 17 February.

Funghi Gallery was founded in 2021 by Joséphine Louis, who graduated that same year in Art Market Management from the EAC, a private school in Paris. She has also worked on digital exhibitions and NFTs sales.

“In the world of NFTs, we are supposed to operate without intermediaries thanks to the blockchain, but as a buyer, I found myself seeing a lot of everything and nothing on the marketplaces," says Josephine Louis. No one is doing any writing or valuation work. Often, in the NFTs, these are new artists, nobody has written about them yet. On the other hand, not all digital artists have taken the NFTs step. That’s why it’s important for them to be represented by a gallery, because it’s a place that somehow legitimises their work. There is a more valuable curation from a small institution that selects little but well.”

The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition on the work of the artist Edvard Munch was a historic event, and the 724,414 visitors it received did not disappoint. Entitled "A poem of life, love and death", it ran from 20 September 2022 to 22 January 2023.

Edvard Munch, a Norwegian painter born in 1863 and who died in 1944, devoted himself to creating art for almost six decades. Known and celebrated for his Scream, the exhibition aimed to show the complexity of the painter’s work, which occupied a pivotal place between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, through the presentation of some one hundred paintings, drawings, prints and engraved blocks.

Before the pandemic, the Musée d’Orsay had devoted a major exhibition to Picasso which was a real success. The record was broken by Munch, also signifying the strong comeback in cultural institutions by the public, whereas the year 2020 had seen its lowest attendance level, with only 867,274 admissions. In 2022, 3.2m people visited the museum, a result in which “A Poem of Life” definitely played a part.

Very good news for the French capital: in early February 2023, the Paris City Council announced an increase in the budget for culture of eleven million euros, which the institutions will be able to share.

Following the pandemic, the budget was cut by almost 3%, a decision that had greatly affected institutions such as the Philharmonie, the Gaîté-Lyrique and the Centquatre. This was followed by inflation in 2022, and consequent financial difficulties for these structures.

If the arrival of Aurélie Filippetti at the head of the city’s cultural affairs in November 2022 caused concern, it is here at her initiative that such a sum could be released—provided that the elected representatives validate the proposal in March and then in July this year. This increase of almost 10% in the annual sum allocated to culture would give the institutions a break, desperately needed for some.

In South London, the artists of the Zona Mista studios had occupied the space for ten years. On 3 February 2023, they were informed by their landlord, Renewal Group, that they had to leave by 10 February due to a new landlord leasing the space.

After their lease expired on 24 November, the artists and the company’s property manager entered into negotiations, with a rent increase of 68%, which the occupants wanted reduced to 22%. Although they did not reach an agreement, the demand that they leave within a week still came as a shock. A petition was launched to recognise the cultural importance of the place and to find a less radical solution.

Zona Mista itself is set in New Bermondsey, a developing area that will soon welcome three new residential towers, a metro station, and an auditorium. Hence a spot that the new commercial occupier could benefit from. On the artists’ side, their eviction could put them in great financial difficulty in the face of the economic crisis and the price of London rents.

On 1 February 2023, the filmmaker Jafar Panahi began a hunger strike to protest against his imprisonment in Evin prison in Tehran. Imprisoned since July 2022, he was serving a six-year sentence handed down in 2010 for "propaganda against the system". He was released on bail two days later, on 3 February.

His initiative was shared with his lawyers and relayed on Instagram by his wife, Tahereh Saeidi. He declared: "Today, like many people trapped in Iran, I have no choice but to protest against this inhumane behaviour with what I value most: my life. I will refuse to eat and drink and take any medication until I am released."

Jafar Panahi is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed filmmaker in Iran. Although his protests have won him a case, he remains under house arrest and is banned from directing and writing, and speaking in the media.

Far from being an isolated phenomenon, his arrest testifies to an extremely risky and precarious situation for Iranian artists as protests have raged since 2021, aggravated by the death of Mahsa Amini last September.

It will be the largest edition ever organised by Frieze in Los Angeles, from 16 to 19 February 2023, at Santa Monica Airport. At the beginning of this month, the fair is getting organised and becoming more precise: it will be 24% bigger than the 2022 edition.

Frieze Los Angeles will feature 124 exhibitors from 22 countries in a programme that extends the event beyond the booths with "Now Playing", a series of performances and artworks that will take place throughout the site, and "Against the Edge", the name given to an exhibition of works presented in historic buildings in the city, which will consist of five spaces close to the main site.

While Frieze was held online in 2021, it returned in force post-pandemic in 2022 for a third Californian edition, with one hundred galleries and an almost normal attendance level of over 30,000 visitors. A threshold that the fair undoubtedly expects to exceed through to the size of the event this year.

The axe fell on Friday 3 February 2023 for Jean-Luc Martinez and Jean-François Charnier following the case of trafficking in antiquities at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The investigating chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed their indictment.

The former president of the Louvre and the former scientific director of the France Muséums agency are respectively suspected of "laundering and complicity in organised fraud", and of "facilitating false justification". The trafficking would have taken place between 2014 and 2018 and concerns seven Egyptian art objects worth €50m. They are said to come from looted archaeological sites but were covered up under false origins.

In November 2022, the public prosecutor in charge of the case had requested the cancellation of the indictment of Jean-Luc Martinez and Jean-François Charnier during a hearing. This was therefore effectively refuted.

The Arab Image Foundation (AIF) announced the appointment of Rana Nasser Eddin as director of the organisation on 3 February 2023. She will take up her position on 1 March.

Rana Nasser Eddin was the director of the Sfeir-Semler Gallery from 2010 to 2018. She was then the administrative director of the Beirut Art Center from 2019. By joining the AIF, she replaces Heba Hage-Felder who helped the association to recover from the explosion of the Lebanese capital’s port in 2020. The new director will be in charge of the AIF’s collection, founded in 1997, and its 600,000 images dating from the mid-19^th century to the present day.

After eleven years in the historic Gemayze district of North Beirut, the AIF recently relocated to a new space in Kantari, to the west, near the Clemenceau and Hamra districts, known for their restaurants, cafés, workspaces and art galleries.

Los Angeles-based contemporary art gallery Luis de Jesus has welcomed the work of artist Hector Dionicio Mendoza. He will now be represented through this collaboration, announced on 2 February 2023.

The gallery represents mid-career and emerging artists, with a strong focus on intersectional diversity. Working since 2007, Luis de Jesus began his career in San Diego with Jay Wingate at Seminal Projects. He then opened his own space in 2010 in Santa Monica and, in 2021, moved to a large venue in the downtown Los Angeles arts district. Exhibiting primarily paintings, it allows its artists to express themselves both formally and conceptually.

Following this vein, Hector Dionicio Mendoza is a multi-media artist, born in 1969 in Mexico. Also a curator and educator based in the Salinas Valley in California, he addresses the issue of territory and environment through social practices attached: cult, faith, memory; elaborated in the form of sculptures, installations or two-dimensional works combining organic or synthetic materials. The artist received an award in 2022, has participated in several residency programmes in Europe and his work has been recognised at institutional events. His representation at the gallery will therefore allow him to further enter the art market.

On Thursday 2 February 2023, the Centquatre, a Parisian cultural space with an eclectic programmation, announced its results at the end of its Foire foraine d’art contemporain organised from 17 September 2022 to 29 January 2023. At the end of the five months, i.e. 101 days of opening, it welcomed nearly 104,000 visitors.

An "artistic amusement park" is how the Centquatre defined the fair, which brought together some 40 international artists to welcome its public under the sign of entertainment and strong sensation, rather than contemplation. The exhibition, designed to be immersive, presented works of attraction, between sculptures, paintings, photos and installations. The public could also take rides on a merry-go-round, a ghost train, play games of skill or visit an ice palace or a house of horror.

In comparison, the Nemo Biennial, a digital art exhibition organised from October to January 2021, one month less than the fair, had gathered 103,402 visitors. With its 259 artists and 28 partner venues, its scope was also broader. The Foire foraine, on the other hand, can boast of a real visibility on the networks, with more than 500,000 views of the exhibition page.

This is the most expensive Bugatti Chiron Profilée model ever bought on the auction market, sold for €9.8m in Paris on 1 February 2023 at RM Sotheby’s, an auction house dedicated to luxury automobiles.

It was estimated at between €4.2 and €5.5m. However, the bids went much higher than expected, between buyers in the auction room and those bidding online or by phone. While the base price of the model is usually around €3.5m, this was the very last new car available, produced in only 500 copies—but only one for the ’profile’ version. Hence the interest of collectors in this model.

A milestone for the company, RM Sotheby’s, born out of the collaboration started in 2015 between RM, owned by Canadian Rob Myers, and Sotheby’s. Its rapid evolution enabled it to total $925m in sales in 2022, notably through the sale of vintage cars. The previous year it raised $22m for a vintage sports Ferrari. Hence an impressive result regarding the Bugatti’s sale, but to which the house is no stranger.

Phillips announced the appointment of a new Private Sales Manager in charge of Asian customers in the person of Wenjia Zhang, with a position based in Paris.

Having joined the auction house in 2018, Wenjia Zhang had been operating out of Shanghai, in charge of Phillips’ regional management in China. She previously worked at Yuan Space in Beijing, ShanghArt Gallery as a director, before joining Christie’s as a senior sales consultant. Her move to Phillips was part of the company’s ongoing strategy to expand in Asia. In Paris, Wenjia Zhang will be responsible for developing client relationships and the firm’s network with the various players in the contemporary art market in Asia.

In March, Phillips will open its new Hong Kong office in the West Kowloon district, renowned for its galleries and museums and its dynamic transformation in recent years. The office has added 27 new positions since 2022 to support its growth. In Shanghai, Qing Shen was also just appointed as a senior consultant to support the firm’s development in the territory and expand into mainland China.

Since 1 February 2023, and until the 28^th of the same month, a call for applications opened for the tenth edition of the Rencontres photographiques du 10^e, which will be held for one month, from the end of September to October. The call is open to any photographer living or working in Paris or the Paris region, or whose work has a link with the 10^th arrondissement of the capital.

On this occasion, the arrondissement will be transformed into a photo gallery, offering exhibitions, events, screenings, meetings, and workshops. In 2021, twelve winning artists were selected to participate in the central exhibition of the biennial, based on themes echoing the life in the district. Amateurs and professionals are welcome and may have the opportunity to exhibit their work in galleries, animation centres, libraries, shops, restaurants.

Initiated by the Château d’eau library and the 10^th arrondissement town hall, the event takes the form of a biennial, organised since 2005. Fetart will hold the artistic direction and organisation, a collective of ten independent curators specialising in photography, and a permanent team. Familiar with this kind of project, they also organise the festival of young European photography at the Centquatre, which will take place from 25 March to 21 May.

In early January, the satirical exhibition "Goodbye in Seoul" opened in Seoul, featuring the work of 32 artists. However, the Korean Secretariat of the National Assembly quickly cancelled the event the week of 9 January 2023. The organisers denounced an act of censorship.

The exhibition featured 80 works, supported by 12 liberal legislators. It had been approved by the Secretariat beforehand, informed of the content of some of the themes, which were aimed at Korean political figures. It was the depiction of Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol elected in March 2022 in two of the paintings that triggered the reaction of the authorities, pointing to the lack of respect for public morals and social ethics in the country.

This case is a new milestone in the president’s policy, which already raised questions and fears for freedom of expression last year as the staff of MBC, a Korean media outlet, was denied access to the presidential plane in November because of their critical stance towards Yoon Suk-yeol.