The Tamesis
France’s leading gallery Air de Paris will close its doors and declare bankruptcy after 36 years in business, its co-founders Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino said. literate.
Bonifus said the gallery only owed money to landlords and banks, not her artists. The gallery will be closed soon. literatedue to its “fragile” financial situation and the health of its founders (Bonnefous suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Mennino also has unspecified health issues).
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The gallery collaborated with artists such as Trisha Donnelly, Joseph Grigely, Pati Hill, Pierre Joseph, Allen Ruppersberg, Lily van der Stokker, Mona Varichon and Amy Vogel, all of whom participated in its farewell exhibition “Oh What a Time,” noted literateadding that dealers were early advocates of now famous figures such as Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Dorothy Iannone, Paul McCarthy, Philippe Parreno and Sturtevant.
“Gradually,” Bonifus told the magazine, “we realized we wanted to do things differently, and while the reasons for the closure were multifaceted, it was also very important for us to distance ourselves from the way the art market was going,” he added. “What’s even more surprising is that we persisted for so long.”
tell kindly literate She will continue to uphold the legacies of Guy de Cointet, Pati Hill, Dorothy Iannone, Bruno Pelassy and Sarah Pucci and remain a curator.
Named after the ready-mades of French artist Marcel Duchamp, the gallery was founded in Nice in 1990 and has been based in Paris since 1994 and in the suburb of Romainville since 2019. The gallery participates in leading art fairs such as Art Basel and FIAC.
Air Paris made headlines a year ago when it loudly pulled out of Art Basel in Switzerland in June 2025 in protest at a change in its position on the all-important floor plan. It has participated in every edition of Art Basel Switzerland since 1999 and has been a member of the selection committee for Art Basel Paris since the first edition in 2022. In its resignation letter, the gallery lamented the “recent trend towards a more corporatist model”. It said it “prioritizes management efficiency.”
