Renowned Gallery Air de Paris Bankrupted, Closing This Week
5May 13, 2026
Air de Paris, the Paris gallery known for its punk ethos and for its prescient and enduring commitment to cutting-edge Conceptual art, will close this week amid bankruptcy proceedings,Culturedmagazine reports. The gallery presented more than four hundred shows during its thirty-six-year run. Its last exhibition was a group show titled “Oh What a Time,” featuring work by Trisha Donnelly Joseph Grigely, Pati Hill, Pierre Joseph, Allen Ruppersberg, Mona Varichon, Lily van der Stokker, and Amy Vogel.
Founded in Nice, France, by Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino in 1990, the gallery was named for Marcel Duchamp’s50cc of Paris Air.Its now-legendary inaugural exhibition, “Les Ateliers du Paradise,” comprised “a film in real time” by Pierre Joseph, Philippe Pareno, and Phillipe Perin: The three artists, attended to by a team of professionals including doctors, chefs, and sports instructors, resided at the toy-strewn gallery for weeks, living out fantasies such as diving into a steaming jacuzzi or listening to parts of a favorite record over and over. The show would figure heavily in critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of “relational aesthetics.”
Among the other artists Bonnefous and Merino showed in the gallery’s early years were the Americans Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, and Rob Pruitt. “At the beginning, we were violently criticized,” Bonnefous told Flash Art in 2015. “People said we were doing ‘art for surfers.’”
Decamping for Paris in 1994, Air de Paris would play a key role in elevating the careers of such current-day art stars as Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Dorothy Iannone, and Sturtevant. The gallery moved to the Paris suburb of Romainville in 2019.
Bonnefous and Merino cited health concerns—she suffers from COPD and he from various ailments—as one reason for the closure, but pointed to the increased corporatization and commercialization of the art world as a major factor. The pair made waves in 2025 when they withdrew from Art Basel’s flagship edition after the fair moved Air de Paris’s booth to a more remote position than it had previously enjoyed, leading the gallery to decry “the recent trend towards a more corporatist model” in its resignation letter.
“Little by little,” Bonnefous told Cultured, “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 said that she will continue to work as a curator and that she will maintain the estates of Guy de Cointet, Pati Hill, Dorothy Iannone, Bruno Pelassy, and Sarah Pucci.