Christine Macel

Christine Macel was born in Paris in 1969. Following her studies in art history, she was a curator of the heritage and inspector of artistic creation for the “Délégation aux Arts Plastiques” of the French Ministry of Culture (from 1995). Since 2000 she has been Chief Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, where she is responsible for the Department of “Création contemporaine et prospective”, which she founded and developed. She was the curator of the French Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2013 (Anri Sala) and the Belgian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2007 (Eric Duyckaerts).

For the Centre Pompidou she curated and co-curated many collective exhibitions, including Danser sa vie, art et danse aux XX et XXIème siècles (2011); Les Promesses du passé. Une histoire discontinue de l’art à l’Est de l’Europe depuis 1956 (50 artistes) (2010); Airs de Paris, mutations dans la ville et la vie urbaine (2007); Dionysiac (2005). She also curated the solo exhibitions of artists such as Anri Sala (2012), Gabriel Orozco (2010), Philippe Parreno (2009), Sophie Calle (2003), Nan Goldin (2002) and Raymond Hains (2001).

At the Pompidou she also conceived and created “Espace 315”, a gallery dedicated to young artists on the international scene, for which she curated eight exhibitions between 2004 and 2013: Koo Jeong-A, Magnus Von Plessen, Xavier Veilhan, Jeppe Hein, Pawel Althamer, Damian Ortega, Tobias Putrih, L’Image dans la sculpture (Navid Nuur, Nina Beier, Simon Denny, Yorgos Sapountzis). In 2002 she was responsible for the concept, organization and programming of “Prospectif Cinéma”, which spotlighted film production by young French and international artists.

She also served as artistic director of the Festival du Printemps de Cahors for two years (ExtraetOrdinaire, 1999; Sensitive, 2000), and curated the exhibitions by Jeppe Hein at the Moore Space Miami (2005), by John Bock at the FRAC in Marseilles (2006) and by Ziad Antar at the Sharjah Foundation (2012).

In 2015 she curated Nel Mezzo del Mezzo. Arte contemporanea nel Mediterraneo, Museo Riso in Palermo; What We Call Love, from Surrealism to Now, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin; Une histoire, art, architecture, design, des années 80 à nos jours, Centre Pompidou, which was also inaugurated at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in March 2016. She is the curator of Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner with Elisabeth Sussman, inaugurated at the Whitney Museum in New York in November 2015 and opened at the Centre Pompidou on June 2016.

In 2016 she has also curated Dear Friends, donations of the last 5 years (March 2016) and Melik Ohanian, Marcel Duchamp Prize (May 2016) at Centre Pompidou. She opened on October 19th 2016 the show Polyphonies: Franck Leibovici, Oliver Beer, Mariechen Danz in the new Espace Prospectif of Centre Pompidou Galerie 0.

She contributes to several magazines such as Artforum, Flash Art, Art Press, Parkett and Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne. She is the author of many essays, books and catalogues, including the essay Le Temps pris/Time Taken (French, English, Monografik/Centre Pompidou 2008) on the theme of contemporary art and the concept of time in art works. She recently published an essay on Lygia Clark in the catalogue of the MoMA in 2015 and one on Anri Sala in the catalogue of the New Museum of New York (Phaïdon, February 2016). She taught contemporary art at the École du Louvre in Paris from 1997 to 2002, and created or participated in the creation of various associations dedicated to contemporary art (Espace Blank, Paris), to art and neurosciences (AoN, Berlin), to art and techno music (Faste, Paris).