Laith Al-Amiri, Symbol of Courage, 2009
Pergola, the Palais de Tokyo’s spring exhibition, unites the work of five artists: Laith Al-Amiri, Valentin Carron, Charlotte Posenenske, Serge Spitzer and Raphäel Zarka. A piece of advice: DO NOT READ THE WALL TEXT. I did and it marred my exhibition experience. While I was looking for “poltergeists” and “the [...]
Cy Twombly’s ceiling, Louvre
The Louvre yesterday unveiled the newest contribution to its collections: a ceiling painting by contemporary artist, Cy Twombly. The painting is in the Salles des Bronzes, housing classical bronzes. Predominantly blue, it is reminiscent of Renaissance and Baroque ceilings depicting the heavenly skies, albeit in a more paired down aesthetic.
Twombly, American-born but residing [...]
Crime et Châtiment (Crime and Punishment), opened last week at the Musée d’Orsay. The idea for the exhibition came from Robert Badinter, politician and criminal lawyer famous for his campaign for the abolition of the death penalty in France in the 1970s. The show boasts a variety of striking art, grisly documents [...]
The Fondation Cartier is exhibiting Beat Takeshi Kitano’s work in an exclusive exhibition Gosse de Peintre (“Painter’s kid”). Kitano – best known for his arthouse films or cult TV show Takeshi’s castle – is a filmmaker, actor, comedian, presenter, and now artist. This is his first solo show in a gallery [...]
Jeff Wall, Search of Premises, 2009
New works by Jeff Wall, Canadian photography heavyweight, are on show at Marian Goodman Gallery. Famous for his cinematographic style, Wall’s new work shows this same interest in meticulously constructed compositions and have what the artist describes as a “Neorealist quality”. Works like Siphoning Fuel, where [...]
The idea behind the Pinacothèque’s current exhibition, Edvard Munch ou l’anti-cri , is to show Munch’s oeuvre without including The Scream, his most famous work (seen reproduced in all good student poster sales, next to the Dali).
Despite the premise, The Scream is still all over this show – in the sharp vanishing points of [...]
Lucian Freud, Two Plants, 1977 – 1980
Lucian Freud: l’atelier is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in France since 1987. The four sections of the exhibition are centred around the theme of the studio and include his large interiors, self-portraits, copies of old masters, etchings, drawings and his signature large-scale fleshy nudes.
Although dominated [...]
Last week saw an alternative to the official offerings of the “year of Russia” events. A small show France-Russie, l’art en liberté – dessins d’une Cour d’(In)justice, opened just a stone’s throw from the official opening of the Sainte Russie exhibition at the Louvre (more on that soon), in the presence of Monsieurs [...]
Esther Shalev-Gerz, Les Inséparables, 2000-2010
Upstairs at the Jeu de Paume is a survey exhibition of Lithuanian born artist, Esther Shalev-Gerz. Unfortunately the projects on show – carried out in Germany, Sweden, France and England – are telling of the dubious nature of publicly commissioned art projects. Each project in the show deals with the appropriate [...]
Lisette Model, Lower East Side, New York, 1950
Lisette Model, photographer and teacher (1901 – 1983), encouraged her students to take a visceral approach to photography. This is at the heart of her own practice and evident in the immediacy of her subjects – from rich corpulent ladies in Nice to caberet drag queens and down-and-outs on [...]