Céline Fribourg

Céline Fribourg

Associated Researcher

Introduction

Céline Fribourg’s career has been a long journey centred on books. After studying political science and economics at Sciences Po Paris, she worked at Gallimard, then took a specialised master’s degree in publishing at ESCP. After a few months at Hachette in Paris, she moved to New York to work at Independent Curators International (I.C.I.) on the catalogue of the Meret Oppenheim exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.

With two Parisian partners she then founded Éditions Coromandel, which she developed from New York, publishing artists’ books with Vik Muniz and James Casebere among others. On settling in Geneva, she founded Éditions Take5 to continue publishing artists’ books that bring together leading talents in contemporary art, literature and design. The books are held in the collections of many museums around the world, such as the Centre Pompidou, the Reina Sofía and the Fondation Bodmer, to name only a few, and are regularly exhibited in public institutions. She has also published a book for MoMA (Library Council) with Annette Messager and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

A case study of Éditions Take5 was written by Harvard Business School and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as part of their joint Cultural Entrepreneurship programme. Céline Fribourg has spoken several times at conferences on contemporary artists’ books, at the IBM Center in New York, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and Ivory Press in Madrid with Hans Ulrich Obrist, and has written entries on books, most recently for the catalogue of the exhibition Uniques at the Fondation Bodmer.

One of her aims as a publisher is to open her work to interdisciplinarity. Having followed the “Visual Thinking Strategies” programme at Harvard, she wishes to collaborate more extensively and regularly with scientists, building bridges between art, literature and science to engage in a broader reflection on the problems of our time.