Acne Studios unveils Acne Paper Palais Royal, its first permanent gallery space, nestled beneath the iconic arcades of the Palais Royal in Paris. A manifesto project that blends heritage, artistic experimentation, and contemporary aesthetics. For its opening, the gallery makes a bold statement with an exhibition by Dutch photographer Paul Kooiker, whose singular world questions bodies, gazes, and the conventions of representation.
Located at 124 Galerie de Valois (75001 Paris), the new Acne Paper Palais Royal gallery stands as a natural extension of the creative universe of Acne Studios. The Swedish brand, founded in Stockholm in 1996, has never limited itself to fashion: design, photography, publishing, and contemporary art have always been at the heart of its approach.
With this Parisian space, open Thursday to Saturday from 11am to 20pm and Sunday from 12pm to 20pm, Acne Studios physically anchors its cultural vision in a legendary location. Beneath the neoclassical colonnades of the Palais Royal, a stone's throw from the Comédie-Française and the historic gardens, the gallery strikes a subtle balance between heritage and avant-garde.
The gallery takes its name from Acne Paper magazine, a publication launched by the brand in 2005 that quickly became a cult classic. At the crossroads of fashion, literature, art, and photography, Acne Paper has cultivated a cross-disciplinary, elegant, and often audacious perspective for nearly 20 years.
Paul Kooiker: the eye of the unsettling, the poetry of the bizarre
To inaugurate this space, Acne Studios chose the artist Paul Kooiker, a singular figure in the contemporary photographic scene. Born in the Netherlands in 1964, Kooiker is known for his simultaneously unsettling and poetic approach to body photography. His images, often anonymous, blurred, fragmented, or framed in disturbing ways, overturn traditional codes of nudity, beauty, and sexualization.
For Acne Studios, whose campaigns regularly flirt with the subversive codes of fashion photography, this choice of artist is highly symbolic: a way of proclaiming, from the outset, that this gallery will be nothing like a classic showroom but rather a place for free aesthetic experimentation.
With Acne Paper Palais Royal, Acne Studios is not simply creating a new Parisian showcase. This is a strong cultural gesture, a declaration of artistic intent.
And if we trust the reputation of the house, this new space will undoubtedly become an essential meeting place on the Parisian creative scene, between art, fashion and contemporary visual thought.
