Ropac Focuses on Performance, Beuys

The battle of the Parisian monumental art spaces is about to begin as Thaddeus Ropac opens his new venue. But Ropac has a secret weapon, according to the Financial Times, his new performance center:

Ropac has pulled off a coup by opening the performance centre with a series of works related to Joseph Beuys’s pivotal performance of 1969, “Iphigenia/Titus Andronicus”. As we chat, news comes through that a horse will be used during the performance, mimicking the original work when Beuys appeared in darkness draped in a fur coat alongside the animal. Vitrines featured in the show, including double object pieces such as “2 Samurai Swords” (1983), are priced between €500,000 and €1m.

Over in Ropac’s central gallery in the Marais district, which launched in 1990, UK curator Norman Rosenthal will organise a show dedicated to Beuys’s hugely significant “Stag Monuments” (1982), comprising the original constituents made of iron, plaster, wood and stone. Both exhibitions are momentous because, as Ropac acknowledges, “all the best Beuys material has gone”, and Beuys was a towering figure in Ropac’s life and career. After seeing Beuys’s “Wet Cloth” piece at a Viennese museum in the early 1980s he wrote to Beuys and ended up in Berlin assisting on the “Stag Monuments” piece as an intern.