Olivier Zahm

Olivier Zahm (born 25 September 1963) is a French magazine editor, art critic, art director, curator, writer, and photographer He is the co-founder, owner, and current editor-in-chief of the bi-annual art and fashion magazine Purple. In addition to his innovative print publishing, he is a recognized pioneering cultural influence at the dawn of the electronic era during the Digital Revolution.

His early blogs garnered notoriety, and featured highly stylized photographs taken by him, that took his audience on daily tours of his fantasyland populated by the artists, intellectuals, designers, filmmakers, socialites, models and celebrities who regularly appeared in his magazine.

His aesthetic has been described as anti-fashion, counterculture, and unfettered by the constraints of the mainstream publishing world.

His online activity served as an early electronic precursor to popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

His magazine remains one of the only independent and privately owned publications of its kind.

Much of his early childhood was spent in academic settings, particularly- during the volatile period of civil unrest in France that broke out in May 1968. The protests reached such a point that political leaders feared civil war or revolution.

The unrest began with a series of student occupation protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism, and traditional institutions, values and order.

Many of the new and radical ideas surrounding Zahm, immersing his youth in tumultuous generational discord, stayed with him, shaping his views on art, philosophical ideas and lifestyle choices.

He leveraged his profound formative experience using it as a tool to build aspects and themes that remain prevalent in his personal and professional life in adulthood.

It was the 1970s, the decade of sex revolution and Zahm's parents were committed to free love, nudism and polyamourous relationships.

"My parents had a lot of lovers, they had a lot of affairs. At the time, my parents were really part of this alternative movement in Paris but quite bourgeois too. It wasn't San Francisco or New York. It was the French way."

Zahm's love of magazines began when he was a teenager in the Paris suburbs.

"We used to steal porn magazines in the bookstores and shops and look at them during school," he says.

"It was fun and secret. This is where my obsession for magazines comes from. Magazines used to reveal and give us access to sex, fashion, music and art. TV never did that, and books are mostly academic. Magazines were a symbol of freedom."

He studied philosophy, history, semiotics and literature at the Sorbonne.

His father, Claude, taught philosophy, and Zahm was on track to do the same, before realizing, at 25, that he preferred life outside "la tour d’ ivoire."

In responding to the superficial glamour of the 1980s, Zahm co-founded Purple Prose magazine.

"'Freedom for me came from the art world because it was a place where I could meet the artists. I wanted to be a social critic. I was more interested in the category of intellectual, involving art and politics and writing sometimes. But I didn't want to be a writer necessarily, I just wanted to be part of an intellectual world.'"In 1989, while working at Artforum, Elien Fleiss, then a young gallery curator received a phone call from Zahm.

She was looking for an art critic to write a manifesto against a journalist from a daily newspaper who she felt was writing insanities about contemporary art in general.

Zahm agreed to do it, and that was the beginning of the encounter, which then became a love story.

Their romance was short-lived, but their professional relationship was fruitful.

Created in the beginning of the 1990s – it still remains a major reference for other alternative magazines today.

Olivier Zahm was born and raised in Paris, France.

He was the eldest of three children born to two university professors.

His parents, who were both students at the time of his birth, raised Zahm and his other siblings in student quarters that were designed by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé, located at Résidence Universitaire Jean-Zay in Antony.

In the introduction of Purple Anthology, Zahm shares why he chose to create Purple Prose: "'We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that no one else supported, much less talked about. It would be a form of opposition of our own'."

During the beginning of the 80s Zahm started to observe and take an interest in the art world.

He liked the notion of "being everywhere and on the move", following art fairs, meeting artists, educating himself in the universe of contemporary art while immersing himself into its social landscape.

Zahm's gift of being a charismatic intellectual and having an eye for contemporary art made itself apparent early on.

He found himself penning for the three leading art titles at the time Art Forum, Art Flash, Texte zur Kunst and Art presse and introduced a then unknown Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger, and Larry Clark to the European art world.

He started traveling to the United States and Japan, realizing he could set up his own operation and work agenda, 24/7.

Over the next decade they continued to curate several shows together around the world, including "June" in 1993 at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris,"BEIGE" in 1996 at Saga Basement in Copenhagen and "La Voie Lactée" in 1998 at Alleged Gallery in New York City.

These housed the likes of many renowned creatives across disciplines, including Maurizio Cattelan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, and Claude Closky.

Zahm's youngest sister committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 20.

Before entering the world of fashion, Zahm worked as an art critic with widespread recognition for his work as a curator as well as his participation in over 150 exhibitions featuring international contemporary art.

In 1994, they curated "The Winter of Love," a hit show for the Museum of Modern Art in Paris that they later took to P.S. 1 in New York City.

Notably in 2000, Zahm and Fleiss curated the exposition "Elysian Fields" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and printed a subsequent catalogue publication under the same name, displaying works from the likes of Gerard Richter and Richard Prince to Rei Kawakubo and Andrea Zittel — artists that have continued to collaborate with Zahm in exhibitions and within Purple's magazine publications.

More recent shows included "La Force de L'Art" in 2006 at Le Grand Palais in Paris, and "To Paint is to Love Again" at Los Angeles gallery Nino Mier, addressing the state of art in the digital age with works from prominent artists like Urs Fischer, Vanessa Beecroft and Paul McCarthy.

He told The New York Times in 2010 that he, "remembers summers spent vacationing in the South of France with his parents in a community of like minded free spirits" – who he labeled hippies.

He told I-D magazine in 2010: