alison saar: salon (2024) - paris, france
To mark Olympic Day on 23 June, Los Angeles-based visual artist Alison Saar unveiled her work of art, Salon (2024), now permanently installed in the public garden on the Champs-Élysées.
Alison Saar was selected by the IOC and the City of Paris to create the sculpture installed in the French capital to honour the legacy of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The work serves as an invitation to the public to meet others and engage in dialogue in a spirit of shared humanity, illustrating the Olympic ideals of a peaceful and inclusive society.
The name of Saar’s sculpture, “Salon”, refers to the comfort of a private living room and to American poet Gertrude Stein's salons in Paris, where artist, writers, intellectuals and musicians were invited to come and share their ideas and work.
The bronze work consists of a larger-than-life figure of a woman seated on volcanic rock, holding olive boughs in one hand and a polished gold flame in the other. The flame represents inspiration, illumination and the use of the flame in the Olympics.
The figure is seated in a circle of six chairs, each representing a different region in the world, and points to variety of industries, occupations and interests. The seats, positioned in a circle around the Olympic rings, include an honorary stool from West Africa, a hand-hewn child's chair from Central America, a rustic milking stool from France, a ceramic garden stool from China, a classic European bentwood chair and a curule seat symbolising the origin of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece.
The installation invites visitors to engage with the work, to sit in the chairs, to think, to share, to sing, to read, to generate friendships and encourage collaboration. To mark this intention, a first poetry reading was delivered at the inauguration by Haitian poet Jean d'Amérique as part of the Jeux Poétiques de Paris.
Gallery
The Artist
Born in 1956 in Los Angeles, California, USA
Alison Saar is an American sculptor, born into a family of artists. She has spent most of her life sculpting.
Her rich body of work examines issues of justice and compassion, focusing on people who have been underrepresented and marginalised in the past and the present.
Saar’s numerous pieces have been exhibited in prominent museums and art venues across the United States, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Brooklyn Art Museum. Among her highly regarded works is the first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, in New York City. She also recently unveiled a new piece at the Montgomery Freedom Park in Alabama as part of the Equal Justice Initiative.
"I am deeply honoured to have been chosen to create the Olympic sculpture. I hope that this work of art, a gift to Parisians, will become a unifying place and a symbol of the spirit of friendship and interconnection between cultures and across borders.”
Alison Saar
“Your art is an invitation to take a seat – and reflect on the beauty of diversity of humankind.”
Thomas Bach, IOC President
"I wanted to represent the multicultural nature of France and Paris. It's this diversity that particularly appeals to me."
Alison Saar
