SELECTION COMMITTEE 2013

• Bernard Ceysson, Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Geneva, Paris, Saint-Etienne, Luxemburg)
• Ernst Hilger, Hilger contemporary & Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna)
• Catherine Issert, Galerie Catherine Issert (Saint-Paul de Vence, France)
• Priska Pasquer, Galerie Priska Pasquer (Cologne)
• Barbara Polla, Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva)
• Martine Schneider-Speller, Espace Beaumont (Luxemburg)
• Bernard Zürcher, Galerie Zürcher (Paris, New York)

Bernard Ceysson, Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Geneva, Paris, Saint-Etienne, Luxemburg)

Bernard Ceysson was Director of the city of Saint-Etienne’s museums and Head Curator at the city’s Museum of Modern Art from 1967 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1998. In 1986 and 1987, he was Director of the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou. As the Artistic Director of the Foundation Museum of Modern Art Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, he launched and ran the architectural program me from 1996 to 1999. Today, he manages the Bernard Ceysson Galleries in Saint-Étienne, Paris, Luxembourg, jointly with Loic Bénétière and François Ceyssonand and their Geneva gallery is soon to be inaugurated. He is the author of numerous publications on modern and contemporary art.

Ernst Hilger, Hilger contemporary & Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna)

Austrian curator and gallery owner, Ernst Hilger has been interested in international modern art since 1945 with a particular focus on emerging artists from Central Europe and the Balkans. Extending the impact of his exhibitions through a rich publishing program and the recent opening of a private Art Center, the Hilger BrotKunsthalle, Ernst Hilger promotes Austrian modern artists like Hans Staudacher and Georg Eisler, as much as representatives of the narrative figurative movement, and younger artists such as Renata Poljak (Croatia), Miha Štrukelj (Slovenia), or Ivan Moudov (Bulgaria).

Catherine Issert, Galerie Catherine Issert (Saint-Paul de Vence)

After her debuts with Jean Fournier, and later with Aimé Maeght, Catherine Issert opened her gallery in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1975. Wishing to promote the avant-garde around a reflection both historical and international on the arts of our times, she started showing important artists of the last decades such as Varini, Verjux, Pinaud… Enjoying close ties with the institutions of the Côte d’Azur, Catherine Issert is actively engaged in promoting art in the South of France and beyond. Perpetually searching for new collaborative forms with artists, she implemented a laboratory/springboard called PLATEFORME, offering visibility to young artists in the gallery as well as opening new fields of expression for tomorrow.

Priska Pasquer, Priska Pasquer Gallery (Cologne)

After studying Art History, then German and Spanish at the University of Cologne, Priska Pasquer started working at Kicken Gallery (Berlin). She then established herself as a consultant in photography in 1996 while representing artists such as El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis or Heinz Hajek-Halke. In 2000, she opened her own gallery in Cologne, focusing on Modernist artists like August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alexander Rodchenko or Gustav Klutsis, along with Japanese photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Rinko Kawauchi, Asako Narahashi, and contemporary artists including Rudolf Bonvie or Andrei Molodkin. In September 2011, the gallery inaugurated the « Jablonka Pasquer Projects », a new space for contemporary art conceived in association with Jablonka Gallery of Cologne.

Barbara Polla, Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva)

A doctor, researcher and political figure, Barbara Polla has dedicates herself to art and literature since 1991. She promotes emerging artists in her Geneva gallery, Analix Forever, a venue that she turned into a space for human and cultural exchanges. She regularly collaborates with critics and curators whom she invites at her gallery or into her writing projects. She also teaches the links between art and fashion at IFM in Paris and creativity at HEAD (Higher School for Art and Design) in Geneva. Among her recent publications: Architecture Emotionnelle, Matière à penser, collective, edited by Paul Ardenne and Barbara Polla, 2011; Victoire (novel), 2009; Kris Van Assche, Amor o muerte, (biography), 2009; Working Men, le travail dans l'art contemporain, with Paul Ardenne, 2008. She is a regular contributor to Les Quotidiennes, Crash, Drome, and Citizen K. She founded the Swiss Association for Emotional Architecture, which organized its first international symposium on emotional architecture in Geneva in January 2011.

Martine Schneider-Speller, Espace Beaumont (Luxembourg)

Martine Schneider-Speller was born in 1943 in Luxembourg. Originally an optician, she radically changed the course of her career after discovering the German artistic scene in 1960 in Dusseldorf. She launched her first gallery in Luxembourg in the 70s where she experimented a programme articulated around visual arts and contemporary music, premiering Karl Heinz Stockhausen. She opened Gallery Beaumont in 1985 and developed a prospective programme focused on the arts of performance and video, searching actively for original productions related to the unsaid, subversive statements, societal questioning. The programme expanded, featuring some of the major figures of the last 25 years, and now aspiring to new dimensions. The new ESPACE BEAUMONT will focus on collaborations between various disciplines, intended to offer a larger visibility for projects needing a different structure than that of a classic gallery.

Bernard Zürcher, Galerie Zürcher (Paris, New York)

Bernard Zürcher is an art historian. Between 1979 and 1986 he was in charge of projects at the Musée de l'Orangerie and later at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Between 1987 and 1990 he specialized in modern art and authored several books, in particular one on Braque (Rizzoli, 1988), and on Fauvism (Hazan, 1995). In 1992 he made a clean break, moved away from modern art, and together with his wife Gwenolée, established a contemporary art gallery in Paris in 1992. They opened a branch in New York in 2009 called the Zürcher Studio.
He was Vice-president of the French Professional Committee of Art Galleries (CPGA) between 1996 and 2006. He was also one of the founders in October 2000 of the contemporary art space on the campus of the H.E.C school where he was a member of the faculty that oversaw of the Masters degree in Media, Art and Creation. Bernard Zürcher is a specialist of patronage issues and co-authored a work on the subject with Karine Lisbonne entitled "L'Art avec pertes ou profit?" (Art with profit or loss? Flammarion, 2007). He is also a founding member and Vice-President of the Federation of Professionals of Contemporary Art (CIPAC). He is actively engaged in supporting the creation of a French contemporary art centre in New York.