With more than 120 years of tradition, the Galeries Lafayette founded by Theophile Bader was the first department store in Europe and, even so, manages to remain an obligatory stop in Paris until today. Whether to buy an item from the more than 3,500 renowned brands that appear there or just to visit what is a true historical and architectural heritage of the light city.
Until June 30th, visitors get one more reason to visit the store. South Korean artist Kimsooja gives a new light to the century-old architecture of the traditional Galeries Lafayette with the project To Breathe.
The artist, who represented her country at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998), covered the famous glass dome of the Boulevard Haussmann with a special film diffracting natural light in all the colors of the rainbow.
Centered around the store’s historic glass dome, designed by the architect Ferdinand Chanut, the installation creates an unprecedented dialogue with this iconic element of Galeries Lafayette’s architectural heritage. When it was built, in 1912, the dome flooded the store’s interior with an infinity of tones thanks to the stained glass windows designed by Jacques Gruber , later removed and replaced by white glass. By cleverly bringing back colored light to the heart of this historic art nouveau building Kimsooja pays poetic homage to the original project.
Kimsooja first conceived To Breathe in 2006, when he conceptually transformed the bottari, a Korean cloth-wrapped package, into an architectural form. Using diffraction film, she envelops entire spaces to sublimate their architecture and reveal their stories through beams of light.
A work in motion, To Breathe reacts to its natural environment, taking advantage of the way light changes over time, according to the weather and as the sun moves across the sky. When light rays pass through it, the diffraction film creates ephemeral rainbow spectra that change as people move through space.
Noticeable throughout the store, it has its best viewing angles on the eighth floor and on the fifth floor terraces (right under the dome).
About Kimsooja
Born in 1957 in Daegu, South Korea, Kimsooja is an internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Paris and Seoul. In her artistic career, she represented her country at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998) and at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). She has also been invited to participate in more than 40 biennial and triennial contemporary art exhibitions.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in prestigious venues such as MoMA PS1, Palacio de Cristal of the Reina SofÃa Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Bern, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon, Museum of Modern Art Saint Etienne, Guggenheim Bilbao and Center Pompidou-Metz. Kimsooja taught at Beaux-Arts in Paris (2008-2009) and was appointed Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Ministry of Culture in 2017.
In September 2022, she unveiled the stained glass windows she designed for Metz Cathedral, which were commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to mark the 800th anniversary of the church. Kimsooja gained worldwide notoriety by adopting a contemplative aesthetic approach based on perception and observation. By focusing the viewer’s attention on a particular object or phenomenon, the artist paves the way for appearances that question the forces in art and life, inviting everyone to feel and experience the world through all its surfaces.
Source: CNN Brasil
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