Akim Monet is the principal of Monet Art Advisory, the CEO of Side by Side Galley Akim Monet GmbH Berlin, and a photographer, whose work is represented by Akim Monet Photography.
“My earliest deep visual impression stretches back to my boyhood. In time, I would learn that it was a Monochrome by Yves Klein. It was two meters high by four meters long; very big for a little boy. I was engulfed and m
esmerized by the live powdery surface of the painting. At that age, I was unaware that it was the red in Yves Klein’s particular tone of ultramarine blue that explained why I was swept by warmth in an otherwise cold color. It was a purely physical experience, one that would later prove to be the core of my appreciation of art and all things visual: sight is a sense among those of smell, taste, hearing, and touch. Therefore, seeing is first and foremost sensory: an experience akin to tasting and touching.”
MONET ART ADVISORY
Since he founded a contemporary art center in Switzerland in 1990, Akim Monet has successfully conducted business in the art trade from Paris to London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. He worked in New York for a decade, privately and as the Director of Sales for North America of legendary Picasso dealer, Jan Krugier. Akim Monet has handled important works by Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Francis Bacon, as well as Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin. Most recently, he has succeeded in acquiring masterworks by George Grosz and Emil Nolde on behalf of a private European collector. Akim Monet cultivates a very personal relationship with his clients in order to identify their individual tastes, so as to develop sound curatorial directions for their collections. To learn more about Akim Monet Art Advisory, please visit www.monetartadvisory.com. SIDE BY SIDE GALLERY AKIM MONET GmbH
Side by Side Gallery Akim Monet GmbH opened in Berlin during the Fall of 2011. The Gallery was immediately heralded by Welt am Sonntag as “the latest and most spectacular addition to the Berlin gallery scene.”
The concept of the Gallery, as suggested by its name, is to show what’s new in contemporary art, juxtaposed with thematically related works of modern art. The resulting dialogue between artists from past and present illuminates the underlying themes explored in the curated exhibitions and allows the viewer to gain a richer perspective. The Gallery opened with the Fall 2011 exhibition, “Fertility,” featuring works by Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Jonathan Borofsky, Daniel Spoerri, George Grosz, Otto Mueller, Marina Abramovic, and Pablo Picasso. The Winter 2012 exhibition , “The Concrete and the Mystical,” displayed works by Andres Serrano, Wolfgang Tillmans, Yevgeny Khaldei, Susanne Neunhoeffer, John Martin, Sebastiao Salgado, Mueller, Neal Tait, Borofsky, Ross Bleckner, Katharina Otto, Joseph Beuys, and Volker Tanner. The Gallery followed with the Spring 2012 exhibition, “The Sacred Heart.” Here the conversation took place among the Maestro della Madonna del Parto (14th C.), Serrano, Rodin, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Damien Hirst, Borofsky, Brigitte Nahon, and Rembrandt Bugatti. The Fall 2012 exhibition was titled, “Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing,” after a quote by Charles Bukowsky. The interlocutors included masters of German Expressionism Erich Heckel, Kirchner, Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Schmidt-Rottluff in conversation with the British-Jamaican sculptor and musician, Satch Hoyt. To learn more about Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery, please visit www.sidebysidegallery.com. AKIM MONET PHOTOGRAPHY
Akim Monet had no formal training in photography and came to this art form from his studies in painting and literature. He had taken photographs while at Institut Le Rosey, Cornell University, and as documentation of his contemporary art center in Switzerland, but it wasn’t until he visited India in 1992 that photography became central to his life.
“Although my experience as a photographer was limited, my eye was well-trained. I grew up with art of all sorts, from different time periods, and studied art and literature when at school. Looking back on the evolution of my experimentation with the technique with reversal photography, I realize that an event in the life of Yves Klein greatly impressed me: the artist was fascinated with the carbon traces that he noticed on a wall at Hiroshima. They are the visual testimony of a man and ladder caught by an atomic conflagration. Man and ladder were vaporized, but the carbon 14 stayed imprinted on a wall.
“When I traveled through India, the first photographs I developed appeared devoid of energy compared to the monuments I had just visited. I thought about how the paper prints fell short of the majesty of the temples; they seemed like mere postcards. On the other hand, the tiny images on the negative strips seemed to burn: stone was transformed into molten lava and shadow became light. All the details in a scene are imprinted on a negative. I see a positive print as a reproduction, and a negative as the imprint of reality, the testimony of a micro-second.”
To learn more about Akim Monet Photography, please visit http://www.akimmonet.com/index.php #/
EDUCATION
Akim Monet is an alumnus of Institut Le Rosey and a graduate of Cornell University.
