One of the most established contemporary art galleries in Paris, Galerie Daniel Templon, which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary, will open a brand new exhibition space in the city at the end of April 2018.

The enormous three-story, 700-square-meter space (7500 sq ft) is situated in the quieter part of the Marais district at 28 rue du Grenier Saint Lazare, near the Centre Pompidou, where it will undoubtedly attract footfall from the city’s deep-pocketed collector base and tourists alike.

Gallery director Anne Claudie Coric spoke to artnet News about Templon’s expansion in the midst of a wave of galleries shuttering across Europe. “Being a middle sized commercial gallery, we’ve been doing very well over the last few years, so we have not really suffered at all the closedown of the market,” she explained. “It was a natural development for us to expand. We needed more space, and we need more staff.”

The new space will add to the gallery’s existing exhibition space in Paris (on rue Beaubourg) and its Brussels space. Blue-chip French designer-slash-architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte has been tapped to remodel the premises. “Jean-Michel Wilmotte has been a longtime friend of the gallery; he’s known Daniel for many years and we are great admirers of the work that he has done all over the world,” explained Coric.

Sketch of the facade of Daniel Templon’s new space. Image: ©JMWilmotte, courtesy Templon

Early details about the space include an impressive 12-meter façade and four-meter-high ceilings. “He knows the gallery very well and knows our constraints, so it was very natural to ask him to help with the next project,” Coric added. 

The inaugural exhibition is still in discussion phase, but is sure to be groundbreaking. Founded in 1966 when Daniel Templon was just 21, Galerie Templon is known for its precocious eye, having introduced the French market to minimalism, conceptual, and expressionist art in the seventies, through Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Willem de Kooning (among others). He was also an early champion of Pop Art, and later promoted American new figurative artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and George Condo on the European scene.

In 2008, Templon became the first gallery in Europe to represent Kehinde Wiley, who was recently tapped to paint a portrait of Barack Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. A Wiley solo show in Paris is planned for 2019, and the gallery will take a new portrait of Wiley’s aunt, inspired by Gainsborough, to FIAC this week.

“The French capital now has everything it needs to take a leading role in the international art market,” said Daniel Templon in a statement.