RETO SCHMID
The Los Angeles gallery Freedman Fitzpatrick will open a new location next month in Paris with a solo exhibition of Matthew Lutz-Kinoy. The new location will be at 8 Rue Saint-Bon in the city’s 4th Arrondissement, a couple blocks south of the Centre Pompidou.
The gallery’s owners, Alex Freedman and Robbie Fitzpatrick, had been interested in opening a space in Paris for a little over a year. Like Los Angeles when the gallery first opened, in 2013, Paris has been closely watched by the art world, Freedman and Fitzpatrick said. “Paris is really similar to L.A. in that way,” Freedman told ARTnews by phone. “A lot of artists are moving there from all over. It’s manifesting itself as a dynamic city that has a lot of possibility to explore, on top of already being an incredibly important city for culture, historically.”
When they first started the gallery, none of their artists were based in Los Angeles; now, about half of the roster lives and works there, and Lutz-Kinoy himself recently decamped from Los Angeles to Paris. This renewed focus on Paris is an effect of Brexit, Freedman said, “revitalizing [the city’s] relationship, role, and dynamic with the rest of Europe,” Freedman said. “It’s very much a city in transition.”
The new gallery, which Freedman described as having a “typical Parisian storefront” air to it, will officially open on February 8 with an exhibition of new work by Lutz-Kinoy, who will have his first solo institutional exhibition this February at Le Consortium in Dijon, France. His latest paintings will be inspired by a room of François Boucher works at the Frick Museum in New York. “The works are very much looking at Boucher from American eyes,” Freedman said. “They have an American in Paris quality to them, as Matthew’s work is very inspired by the place he’s in.”