High Art, a taste-making Paris gallery that brought artists ranging from Lucy Bull to Julien Creuzet into the eye of the broader art world, will close its physical space after 12 years in operation. Its last exhibition closed in July.
“Entering a new chapter, we will reform and transition toward collaborations, offsite exhibitions and individual artworks,” the gallery wrote on Instagram on Friday. “How this will take shape in the coming years is still to be determined, but we remain very much so excited about the future of contemporary art and its enduring relevance.”
Founded by Romain Chenais, Jason Hwang, and Philippe Joppin in 2013, High Art became one of Paris’s most closely watched small galleries. Its program was defined by a willingness to indulge art that was challenging and occasionally downright weird. Many artists who passed through High Art went on to achieve fame.
Rachel Rose, an artist known for her video essays dealing with climate change and space travel, had her first solo exhibition ever at the gallery in 2014. She went on to mount acclaimed shows at the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Whitney Museum in New York the next year. Matt Copson, an artist known for his light sculptures, had one of his first solo shows at High Art in 2017. He is now directing a feature film, with Mubi set to distribute it.
Lucy Bull exhibited her abstract paintings here in 2019, making High Art the first to exhibit her internationally. Her paintings now regularly sell at auction for six figures or more. Creuzet, an artist based in the commune of Montreuil, also had his first solo show with High Art in 2019. He was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s highest art prize, in 2021, then represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Countless others of note held shows at High Art, including Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Max Hooper Schneider, Bracha L. Ettinger, Dena Yago, Maryam Hoseini, and Mélanie Matranga. The gallery’s program led Artsy to write that High Art had successfully made “Paris’s gallery scene hip again” in 2018.
High Art had by then come a long way from its start in 2013, when the gallery “didn’t have backers, we didn’t have anything, we just pooled money together and opened a small gallery,” as Hwang told Artsy. The gallery was launched in Belleville, a neighborhood known at the time for playing host to a scrappy set of young art spaces, and later moved to the Pigalle district. High Art also opened an Arles branch in 2020, taking over a 12th-century medieval chapel.
Having started small, High Art went on to become a regular at editions of blue-chip fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze.
It is only the latest gallery to close in the past year, with many others of various sizes shuttering in other cities across the globe. Among those to wind down this year are Blum, Clearing, Sperone Westwater, and Galerie Francesca Pia. The factors precipitating these closures have varied significantly, though each case has in its own way fueled concerns about the fragile state of the art market.
High Art did not specify why it was closing in its Instagram post, which stated that the gallery would would “transition toward collaborations, offsite exhibitions and individual artworks.” The gallery did not provide details of that transition.
“High Art was founded in 2013 from a desire to draw together distinct voices—those capable of shifting the frameworks through which contemporary art is seen and understood,” the gallery wrote. “Since then, our aim has been to provide artists with a space of both support and possibility, exploring established modes of art commerce while responding to an ever-expanding field. That spirit remains with us as we embrace what comes next.”
