NEW YORK.-Moore Space, the influential Miami art institution, will be highlighting France’s new generation of up-and-coming artists during this year’s ArtBasel/Miami Beach international art show. “French Kissin’ in the USA” will mark the first time the current emerging generation of French artists is exhibited in the United States. Playfully taking its title from a 1986 hit song by Blondie, it will present the work of 19 contemporary French artists who have not yet been widely received outside of France: Adel Abdessemed, Saâdane Afif, Karina Bisch, Mircea Cantor, Marcelline Delbecq, Brice Dellsperger, Richard Fauguet, Claire Fontaine, Loris Greaud, Vincent Lamouroux, Guillaume Leblon, Mathieu Mercier, Jean-François Moriceau & Petra Mrzyk, Philippe Perrot, Christine Rebet, Tatiana Trouvé and Fabien Verschaere.

Five of these artists—Adel Abdessemed, Marcelline Delbecq, Vincent Lamouroux, Christine Rebet and Fabien Verschaere—live and work in New York, and will attend a press conference about the upcoming exhibit at the French Cultural Services on Monday November 5. Moore Space director and exhibit curator Silvia Karman Cubiñá will also be present.

The French artistic force celebrated within this exhibition resonates well beyond Europe and has always served as an inspiration to the creative world. The 90s generation of French artists was very well-known internationally and established an articulate dialogue with artists from the United States as well as other countries. In the past year or so, there have been several exhibitions in Paris focusing on French art, with particular emphasis on this new emerging generation: “Notre Histoire” at the Palais de Tokyo, “La Force de l’art” at the Grand Palais, and “Airs de Paris” at the Centre Pompidou, this last one also including artists of other generations and nationalities. The new generation is described by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéfanie Moisdon in the title of the 2007 Lyon Biennial as “The “00s: History of a Decade that Has Not Yet Been Named”. These French artists create work that reflects the visual production of the 21st Century which is largely multi-disciplinary, exploring subjects and matters as diverse as the relationship between art and philosophy, music and film, and the dependency of concept to form. Coined as “Génération Sampling” (Bourriaud), many of these artists borrow and interpret images, forms and signs from the plethora of virtual and visual resources available to them.

A 30-page, full color catalogue will be produced to document the exhibition and will include an introductory text by the Director of The Moore Space and Curator of the exhibition, Silvia Karman Cubiñá as well as contributions by Caroline Bourgeois, Director, FRAC Le Plateau and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator of the Serpentine Gallery, London.