Jean-Pierre Criqui
Jean-Pierre Criqui is a French art historian, critic, and curator. He is conservateur au service de la collection contemporaine du Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, and has served as editor-in-chief of Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne since 1994. Before joining the institution, he worked as a contemporary art advisor for the French Ministry of Culture and as an independent curator. He also directs the "Vues" collection at Éditions Macula.
His critical and historical writing concentrates on European and American art since 1950, extending to music and to the history of exhibition. His book Un Trou dans la vie. Essais sur l'art depuis 1960 (Desclée de Brouwer, 2002) gathered his major essays of the preceding decade. He subsequently edited and introduced in French the collected writings and interviews of Barnett Newman (Macula, 2011) and of Ed Ruscha (JRP/Ringier / Maison Rouge, 2011), and compiled On and By Christian Marclay (MIT Press / Whitechapel Gallery, 2014). His essays range across Robert Smithson, Gabriel Orozco, Wim Delvoye, Gerhard Richter, Katharina Fritsch, Albert Oehlen, and Monet in relation to American abstraction. He contributes regularly to Artforum and other international publications in both French and English.
His curatorial work includes Dionysiac (Centre Pompidou, 2005), Cindy Sherman (Jeu de Paume, 2006), and L'Horizon chimérique: Ed Ruscha — Jean-Marc Bustamante (Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, 2007). At the Centre Pompidou he has more recently curated exhibitions devoted to Pierre Bismuth (2021), Christian Marclay (2022), and Tatiana Trouvé (2022). The most significant of these projects remains his exhibition Charles Ray (Centre Pompidou, 16 February – 20 June 2022) — the first presentation of the American sculptor in a French public institution, developed in close dialogue with the artist and including Hinoki (2007), Ray's monumental carved cypress tree, shown outside the United States for the first time. The exhibition ran simultaneously with a complementary presentation at the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, and Criqui co-directed the joint scholarly catalogue with Caroline Bourgeois.
