Spending the holiday in Paris? Finally have a bit of time to see the big autumn shows before they end in January? Here’s a round up of what’s on (but not for much longer).
For painting head to the Louvre for voluptuous Venetian masters in Venetian Rivalry, and for a more Northern flavour The Brukenthal Collection [...]
James Ensor, Squelettes se disputant un hareng saur, 1891
Don’t be fooled by the first room of the James Ensor exhibition, his skillfully rendered portraits and still life paintings belie the weirdness to come.
The show includes drawings, etchings, painting, which taken as a body of work, allude definition. While some canvases are clearly avant garde, Ensor [...]
Robert Frank, The Americans, first published in Paris by Robert Delpire, 1958
Delpire & Cie is a show dedicated to the career of Robert Delpire. It feels a little disorganised, is due in part to the nature of the exhibition space and in part to the varied nature of Delpire’s career.
Starting out as a publisher he worked [...]
Philippe Cognée, Le Grand Hall, 2009
Passages is an exhibition of French artist, Philippe Cognée’s recent paintings. His panoramic canvases hazily depict uninhabited spaces – airport lounges, empty supermarkets and hotel lobbies, “non places” as defined by anthropologist Marc Augé. Working from low quality photos taken with a mobile phone, Cognée further distorts the image to [...]
Chantal Akerman, Maniac Summer, 2009
Marian Goodman Gallery is hosting a new exhibition by acclaimed experimental filmmaker, Chantal Akerman. Somewhere between gallery and cinema, the spacious environs are ideal for absorbing the viewer into Akerman’s challenging films.
Maniac Summer is a film triptych made up from snippets of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer [...]
Michael Kenna’s black and white photographs, 200 of which are on show in his retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Richelieu), are almost too good to be true. His unpopulated landscapes and cityscapes have an ethereal quality, which is so consistent that, taken as an ensemble, his work can appear excessively romantic. Often working at night [...]
It’s been a good year for Israeli artist Keren Cytter. As well as appearing in New York’s New Museum exhibition Younger than Jesus, a show of contemporary artists born after 1976, and this year’s Venice Biennale, she also made number 2 on Flashart’s most promising artists list and won the 2009 Absolut Art Award. Her [...]
Henri Mauperché, Landscape, 1686
There seems to be a bit of a thing for French academic art in exhibitions at the moment. Souvenirs d’Italie (“Memories of Italy”) is a small exhibition exploring the Italian landscape in French art between 1600 and 1850.
Italy loomed large in the French imagination and Rome in particular was a destination for [...]
Everyone knows the French love to strike. It’s a national stereotype that is often gets a laugh, especially from the British. Not so funny for tourists (or anyone who wants to see an exhibition or do research for that matter) now that strike action has struck Paris’s main museums.
The Pompidou Centre’s staff have been on [...]
Contemporary German artist Stephan Balkenhol is exhibiting new works at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. His technique of figurative wood-carving can be seen as a response to the Minimalist approach he encountered at the Hamburg School of Fine Art where he studied under Ulrich Rükriem. Although descriptive there is still something fairly minimal about Balkenhol’s blocky wooden [...]