The Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont specialises in contemporary art, focusing on the primary market, and intends to promote the French and foreign artists it represents. All living artists - either already internationally-renowned or emerging talents - from various backgrounds, they are painters, photographers, sculptors, video and performance artists, working with a very wide range of supports:
Shoja AZARI - Valérie Belin - George Condo - Claudine Drai - Anh Duong –
Eva & Adele – FUTURA 2000 - Keith Haring - Fabrice Hyber - Jeff Koons - McDermott & McGough - David Mach - Brigitte Nahon - Shirin Neshat –
A.R. Penck - Pierre et Gilles - Benjamin Sabatier – Marjane SATRAPI - Yi Zhou.
The gallery genuinely cares about building an exclusive, ongoing, long-term relationship with these artists, supporting them in their creation, getting involved in the production of their works or large-scale projects, in representing them internationally by organising exhibitions of their work in museums all over the world, and in helping them to widen their audience by placing the works in major private or public collections.
Again with the aim of improving the artists’ visibility, the mainly solo exhibitions which the Galerie holds in its own premises are noteworthy by their length (a month and a half / two months), and are supported by numerous catalogues created in close relation with the artist and published by the gallery, which is also editor.
Besides, the gallery has shown the work of artists it believes in and of whom it permanently holds some works, through in-situ and out-of-walls exhibitions, such as:
Jean-Michel Basquiat – Ben - Francesco Clemente – Jean-Pierre Raynaud - Bettina Rheims – Tseng Kwong-Chi– Bernar Venet - Andy Warhol…
The gallery was opened by Jérôme and Emmanuelle de Noirmont on October 6, 1994 and aimed initially at offering people a chance to discover world-renowned artists whose work was then either totally or partially unrecognised in France. It has been notably exhibiting the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat since 1998, the German artist A.R. Penck since 1996, and also the American artist Jeff Koons – indeed it held his first solo exhibition in France back in 1997!
The gallery very soon decided to promote also major French talents such as the duo Pierre et Gilles (since 1998), and Fabrice Hyber (since 2005), who was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Valérie Belin (since 2007) representing now all of these artists exclusively worldwide.
As the gallery has a desire to represent the art of today with an open-minded approach to new talents, it has also been supporting the French Benjamin Sabatier (since 2002) and Claudine Drai (since 2005), the Iranian Shoja Azari and Marjane Satrapi (since 2010/11), and the American street-art leader Futura 2000 (since 2010/11).
This first market activity is characterized by a number of key events that contributed to the reputation of the gallery throughout the years. To mention just a few:
In 2008, the gallery initiated the famous Jeff Koons Versailles exhibition at the Château de Versailles, a few years after commissioning the artist to produce his largest artwork to date, the floral sculpture Split-Rocker which was unveiled at the La Beauté exhibition held at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 2000 and exhibited again in Versailles.
The artist Shirin Neshat joined the gallery in 1998, a year before being awarded the Golden Lion for her video Turbulent at the Venice Biennale 1999, as Jérôme de Noirmont had decided to finance her then-new project Rapture, which became later a worldwide hit. More recently, the Galerie co-produced her videos Munis, Faezeh and Farokh Legha (2008), from the Women Without Men series.
The gallery has also organised and supported major museum exhibitions, including all of Pierre et Gilles’ retrospectives worldwide, since the show held at the New Museum in New York in 2000 right through to their 30th anniversary exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2007, the retrospective showing the photographic work of McDermott & McGough in Dublin and Paris in 2008/2009, which led to the publication of a major reference work, and by the fall 2012, the trilogy of Fabrice Hyber solo shows in France, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, at the Fondation Maeght in St Paul-de-Vence and at the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine.
Following a personal decision of its founders, the gallery closes its doors on March 13, 2013, at the end of Marjane Satrapi´s exhibition. Thus putting an end to the gallery´s continuous exhibitions program and to its permanent representation of artists, Jérôme and Emmanuelle de Noirmont have decided to devote themselves to new projects. These future commitments will put Art and contemporary creation at the heart of a social project drawing new paths through focused actions, both professional and charitable.