Chiara Parisi appointed Director

Serge Lasvignes, chairman of the board of the Centre Pompidou-Metz and Chairman of the Centre national d’art et de culture-Georges Pompidou, has appointed Chiara Parisi as Director of Centre Pompidou-Metz for a five-year mandate beginning on December 2, 2019.

Chiara Parisi’s candidacy was proposed on November 28 by Centre Pompidou-Metz’s Board to Chairman Lasvignes, from a list of candidates unanimously drawn up by a commission composed of public personalities represented on the board (the Centre Pompidou, the state, Metz Metropole, Grand Est Regional Council and City of Metz) as well as a recognized expert—Marie Lavandier, Director of the Louvre-Lens.

Chiara Parisi will therefore succeed to Emma Lavigne, appointed Executive President of the Palais de Tokyo in September 2019 and Laurent Le Bon, Executive President of the Musée Picasso, who inaugurated the institution in Metz in 2010. “Chiara Parisi proposed for Centre Pompidou-Metz a strong artistic project that unanimously delighted the jury. I am very happy to be able, on the eve of the institution 10th anniversary, to count on her experience, her dynamic and creative spirit to take further, with her very own personality, the successful path laid down by Emma Lavigne” stated Serge Lasvignes.

Art historian, Chiara Parisi holds a state doctorate from the University of La Sapienza in Rome where she taught history of modern and contemporary art as well as history of architecture and industrial design.

Appointed Director of Cultural Programs at the Monnaie de Paris in 2011 for five years, she notably devoted an important monographic exhibition to the artist Marcel Broodthaers and organised milestone exhibitions, in particular on Maurizio Cattelan and also Take Me (I’m yours) with Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Her ambitious programme was based on urban scale events such as Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market bringing together more then 80 artists, Stockhausen’s Helicopter string quartet, the video installation by Mohamed Bourouissa in collaboration with the rapper Booba, or the project by John Baldessari, Your Name in Lights, a participative lighting installation in which over 100,000 people took part. 

In 2017, Chiara Parisi was appointed curator for the exhibitions at the French Academy in Rome–Villa Medici. where she recently presented the work of Anne and Patrick Poirier and conceived the group exhibition Le Violon d’Ingres, at the crossroads of history of art and contemporary research. She started Une, a new cycle of exhibitions devoted to women artists and had for the first time ever, the famous gardens of the Villa Medici opened at night for the exhibition Ouvert la nuit (Open at Night) where amongst others Rosa Barba, Trisha Donnelly, Elmgreen & Dragset, Felix González-Torres took over the sixteen mythical garden squares.

From 2004 to 2011, she was director of the International Centre for art and landscape on Vassivière island which under her impulse, gave rise to original projects in the Aldo Rossi building as well as in the sculpture park.

Numerous other projects have been entrusted to her, she was amongst others one of the invited curators for the Nuit Blanche in Metz in 2010, and then artistic director with Julie Pellegrin, for the Nuit Blanche in Paris in 2013.

Chiara Parisi’s career path has been marked by the accompaniment of artists in their most unexpected and audacious adventures, in order to enable each one of them to achieve the intense experience of creation. She profoundly believes that art changes life and strives to convey this to the public through a close contact with the real world.