Air de Paris, a leading French gallery, will close its doors and declare bankruptcy after 36 years in business, the gallery’s cofounders, Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino, tell Cultured.
Bonnefous says the gallery owes money only to the landlord and the bank, not her artists. The gallery is closing, per Cultured, due to its “fragile” finances as well as the founders’ health (Bonnefous suffers from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and Mennino also has unspecified health issues).
The gallery worked with artists including Trisha Donnelly, Joseph Grigely, Pati Hill, Pierre Joseph, Allen Ruppersberg, Lily van der Stokker, Mona Varichon, and Amy Vogel, all of whom were included in its farewell exhibition, “Oh What a Time,” notes Cultured, adding that the dealers were early advocates for now-renowned figures such as Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Dorothy Iannone, Paul McCarthy, Philippe Parreno, and Sturtevant.
“Little by little,” Bonnefous told the magazine, “we realized we wanted to do things differently, and while reasons for closing are a mix of many things, it was also very important for us to distance ourselves from how the art market has developed,” adding, “What is more surprising is that we lasted as long as we did.”
Bonnefous tells Cultured that she will continue to maintain the estates of Guy de Cointet, Pati Hill, Dorothy Iannone, Bruno Pelassy, and Sarah Pucci, and will continue to work as a curator.
Named after a readymade by French artist Marcel Duchamp, the gallery was founded in 1990 in Nice, headquartered in Paris since 1994, and located in the Romainville suburb since 2019. The gallery participated in leading art fairs such as Art Basel and the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC).
Air de Paris made headlines a year ago, when it loudly withdrew from Art Basel’s June 2025 Swiss edition in protest over a change to its placement on the all-important floor plan, after it had participated in each edition of the fair’s Swiss edition since 1999 and served on the selection committee for Art Basel Paris since its first edition in 2022. In its resignation letter, the gallery bemoaned “the recent trend towards a more corporatist model,” saying it had “given priority to managerial efficiency.”
