Vincent Honoré, a French curator whose exhibitions gained him the respect of many young artists across Europe, has died at 48.
The French publication Le Quotidien de l’Art reported that Honoré had died on Wednesday and that the cause of his death was still being investigated by the police. The report cited several relatives who said that Honoré had died by suicide.
MO.CO Montepellier, the French museum where Honoré served as head of exhibitions, confirmed Honoré’s death on Friday morning. In a statement posted to social media, the museum wrote, “Today we lose an extraordinary and inspiring colleague who will leave a huge void in our community. His legacy will live on through all the exhibitions he designed, like the current one by Huma Bhabha, and the young artists he mentored and supported. During this difficult time, our thoughts are with his family, loved ones and everyone else who had the privilege of working alongside him.”
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Across the past two and a half decades, Honoré amassed a reputation for staging exhibitions of cutting-edge art, much of it by women and queer artists. “I consider exhibitions as open systems and I think that is something that can definitely be read in my work,” he said in an interview with This Is Tomorrow. “Overall, I like proposing introductions, rather than conclusions. I like things that are unresolved.”
He started his curatorial career in 2000 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and would go on to hold positions at London institutions, like Tate Modern, the David Roberts Arts Foundation, and the Hayward Gallery, before joining MO.CO Montpellier in southern France.
Among the celebrated exhibitions that he mounted was “DRAG: Self-Portrait and Body Politics,” which he curated in 2018 for the Hayward Gallery, where he was senior curator at the time. Featuring works by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sin Wai Kin, and others, the show sought to show how artists—both queer and not—had incorporated drag into their work. “This timely exhibition examines how the way we look, at ourselves and at others, has been conditioned by a series of gendered, racial, class and colonial structures,” Apollo wrote in its review.
“Kiss My Genders,” a show Honoré staged the year after at the Hayward Gallery, sought to explore gender fluidity through works by Juliana Huxtable, Kent Monkman, Catherine Opie, and more, and also received positive reviews. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones awarded the exhibition five stars, writing that it “touches, in profound ways, on what it is to be human, and why we need this great river of the unfixed.”
He also organized solo shows for artists such as Neïl Beloufa, Hans Haacke, Ana Mendieta, Pierre Huyghe, Jeff Wall, Fiona Banner, and many more, as well as the 13th edition of the Baltic Triennial in 2018.
In addition to curating, Honoré wrote criticism, contributing to Mousse regularly, and started his own journal, Drawing Room Confessions, which enlisted artists such as Miriam Cahn and David Lamelas for drawing-oriented projects.
“I really believe an art museum should be a stage on which events are happening,” he said in an interview for the website Art Map London. “It should not be a temple and it should not be an amusement park. Displaying an artwork is an event, a talk is an event, and they create memories. Therefore, a museum is made of memories and when we leave it we should be filled with these memories.”