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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Elliott Erwitt, Felix, Gladys and Rover, New York City, 1974
Elliott Erwitt, photographer and member of Magnum photos since 1953, has chosen his favourite images, or “personal best”, for this show. Anonymous children, picture postcard compositions (including a Frenchman with a child, baguette and beret on a bike) and a mourning Jackie Kennedy are just a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]