Interview : Stephane Aquin is the Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. He previously served as Chief Curator of the Smithonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC from 2015 to 2020. He has been a part-time faculty member in the Masters of Fine Art Studio Art program at Concordia University in Montreal since 1996, and has acted as advisor to the acquisition committee of the art collection of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec since 2010.
Survey : Stefan Banz (1961-2021) was an artist, curator and writer based in Cully, Switzerland, where he xwas the co(founder and Artistic Director of the Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp since 2009. In 1989 he co-founded the Kunsthalle Luzern and served as its artistic director until 1993. From 1994 to 1997, he was the artistic consultant and curator of Hauser & Wirth in Zurich. In 2005 he was curator for the Swiss Pavilion at the 51st Biennale in Venice.
A recipient of the Manor Art Prize and the Recognition Award from the City of Lucerne, Banz often collaborated with his partner, artist Caroline Bachmann. Focus : Ali Subotnick is a curator, writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Previously a curator at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, Subotnick was one of the co-founderof The Wrong Gallery in New York with Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni and a co-curator of the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006.
She has contributed to many exhibition catalogues and writes regularly for magazines such as Artforum and Frieze. Artists's choice ; Melissa Hyde is associated professor of art history at the university of Florida in Gainesville. Her work focuses on the art and culture of eighteenth-century France, with particular interests in gender and identity. She is the author of François Boucher : Making up the Rococo (2005) and Nicolas Party : Pastels (2021), and the editor of Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2004).
Artist's writings : Some of the ideas and thoughts Nicolas Party has outlined over the years are presented here for the first time in the form of a series of photographs of his sketchpads, illustrating the journey his most successful paintings and sculptures took from conception to realization.