Christine Macel has been appointed the brand new director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, changing Olivier Gabet who stepped down earlier this 12 months to take up the publish of director of the artwork division on the Musée du Louvre.
Macel has been the chief curator on the Musée nationwide d’artwork moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, since 2000, overseeing the division of “création contemporaine et potential [contemporary and prospective creation]”.
She has organised solo exhibitions on the Centre Pompidou devoted to Anri Sala (2012), Philippe Parreno (2009) and Sophie Calle (2003). In 2017 she took on the celebrated function of inventive director of the Venice Biennale.
The establishment of Les Arts Décoratifs contains two museums: the Musée des Arts Décoratifs—together with its library—and the Musée Nissim de Camondo, in addition to two colleges, the École Camondo and the Ateliers du Carrousel. Collections courting from the fifteenth century to at this time concentrate on areas corresponding to furnishings, vogue and textiles.
The appointment stunned some French commentators. Writing within the French newspaper Le Monde, Roxana Azimi says that Macel is “an authentic selection as a result of as a [specialist] in modern artwork, the overall curator of heritage [the post of museum director] was anticipated to return from the sector of design and utilized arts.”
The president of the museum board, Johannes Huth, defined why Macel was appointed, saying in an announcement: “It is crucial for us to maintain sure centuries-old works on show or in our collections as a result of they nonetheless have a lot to point out us; it’s our responsibility to review them from a decidedly modern perspective, sharing their magnificence with the viewers of at this time. That is Christine Macel’s imaginative and prescient.”
Macel was additionally the curator of the French Pavilion on the 2013 Venice Biennale, presenting works by Anri Sala, and co-organised the Belgian Pavilion exhibition of works by Eric Duyckaerts in 2007. She co-curated the present, Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in New York in 2016.
“Ever since my first brush with modern artwork, I’ve been fascinated by how its variety, its porous nature, its tendency in the direction of reciprocal contamination, all work together throughout the completely different fields of creation,” Macel says in an announcement.
