Spring is finally upon us (well Paris saw at least two sunny days last week)! And a visit to Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette offers, not only a deconstructivist landscaping masterpiece, but also another chance to see Duane Hanson’s sculptures. Hanson’s hyperrealist figures are disconcertingly life like, inspired by middle class American types.
Duane Hanson, [...]
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 [...]
Russian art and buyers make themselves known on the international scene.
Read all about it.
It is also “l’année de la Russie” in France in 2010, find the program of cultural events here.
The new shows of two artists at Galerie Yvon Lambert’s challenge the way we see, and engage with, modern life.
Micheal Brown’s first solo show in Europe consists of an installation of cheap-looking broken lawn chairs, highly polished cans, broke mirrors and pornographic imagery. Combining readymade elements and deceptively manipulated materials, Brown comments on the easy [...]
The Razzle Dazzle of thinking presents the work of American conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant. Sturtevant has built a career around appropriation – copying Warhol’s Flowers in the 1960s and continuing with duplicates of, or references to, some of the major figures in contemporary art.
As a whole this show is slightly incoherent, mixing references to modern [...]
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 [...]