Life Blood is the first solo show in France of Irish artist Claire Morgan. The nine large-scale sculptures and thirteen works on paper are all unique but consistently fascinating. The Great Exposition caught up with Claire at the opening.
Mixing invisible threads with lead, plastic, dead insects and taxidermy, the sculptures hover at eye-level as if [...]
Reset, a show of young artists curated by Christophe Kihm, aims to begin at the beginning. Instead of bringing together different completed works under one conceptual framework, and potentially limiting the individual expression of each, Reset is more of a starting point from which the art and the artists can interact with the exhibition space.
Bertille [...]
In Conjunction with Personnes at the Grand Palais, Mac/Val (Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne) presents Après by Christian Boltanski.
Elements of Après in Boltanski’s studio
While Personnes reflects on death and loss, Après (after) meditates on what might happen after death. An installation of dimmed lights, black architectural masses and mirrors (to the soul?) plunge the visitor [...]
Christian Boltanski’s monumental installation Personnes opens today in the immense, drafty nave of the Grand Palais. Boltanski’s installation follows Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra as part of the Monumenta programme.
Part flea market, part memento mori, piles of old clothes are lined up to form a grid across the cold floor. These are dwarfed by a [...]
Soulages takes us on a journey through the career of French abstract painter Pierre Soulages, the famous “painter of black”.
The exhibition is like an exercise in minimalism. Soulage’s large scale compositions are themselves minimal: all abstract and untitled. On top of that, the trajectory shows the “evolution” of his work, which is so subtle as [...]
Exhibition-goers in London are having their abstract notions of God challenged by old Spanish masters at the National Gallery exhibition, The Sacred made Real. In their fight to beat back the Lutherian challenge of protestantism, with its rejection of religious imagery, these artists stripped down their work into a direct, vivid form.
Two weeks left to [...]
Guatemalan artist, Dario Escobar, represented Latin America last year at the Venice Biennale, with his installation Kulkulkan. Kulkulkan has now taken residence chez Kamel Mennour, where a mass of undulating slashed and woven bike tires hang like a forest of snakes from the gallery ceiling.
Dario Escobar, Kukulkan, 2009, courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour
As [...]
Photographer, Roger Ballen’s recent series Boarding House was taken in a warehouse in Johannesburg. Squatted by impoverished families, witch doctors and fugitives, the volatile warehouse space is, fleetingly, home to many. Ballen’s black and white, square compositions are tragi-comic: snakes, hands, toys and cat’s tails are seen against a backdrop of graffiti, child’s drawings and [...]
Art Nouveau Revival is an atypical show. It avoids trying to define the nebulous character of the Art Nouveau movement, which was both geographically and conceptually disparate (no manifesto was ever drawn up between the likes of Antoni Gaudi, William Morris, Alfons Mucha, Rennie Mackintosh), and reevaluates reincarnations of the style throughout the 20th century, [...]