Born into art in 1968, Akim’s earliest childhood visual memory is a vast expanse of blue offered by an important Yves Klein painting titled “California,” against which inhabited a collection of Egyptian and Greek antiquities, all contained within the shrine of the Swiss mountains surrounding Gstaad.
Upon graduating from Cornell University with a BA in Comparative Literature & Art History, Akim embarked at age 22 on a curatorial journey, privately mounting close to 30 exhibitions starting in Switzerland with “La poésie de l’Objet -from Duchamp to Steinbach.”
After several years in New York working privately, and for legendary Picasso dealer Jan Krugier, he opened his own exhibition space in 2011, “Side by Side Gallery Akim Monet, GmbH” which was heralded by the Welt am Sonntag as “the latest and most spectacular addition to the Berlin gallery scene.”
There for seven years, he presented an exhibition program that opened with “Fertility,” featuring among others, works by Rodin, Kirchner, Grosz, Bourgeois, and Emin, and closed with “Mythology & Science” where through the language of art, he etched the case that we are living in an unprecedented moment in the history of humanity, where heralding our future, certain aspects of science and technology feel like the realization of myths from antiquity.
Pursuing his permanent quest to engage with the most relevant expressions of culture, and measuring the importance of giving his twin boys the opportunity to flourish in an environment where many pillars of the future are being built, Akim moved to back to the United States in 2018 with his French-Italian wife Anne-Marie Visconti, where he established an american hub for his businesses: Akim Monet Fine Arts.
Now living in Dallas, Akim will continue representing the Estate of Auguste Rodin with which he has been closely associated for several years, focusing in particular on expanding the narrative around “Les Inédits,” the plaster models bequeathed to the French State by the master in 1916 that have only very recently finally been cast in bronze.
In parallel Akim continues to develop his own artistic practice in the field of photography.