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Seydou Keïta at the Grand Palais
“You look beautiful like that.” The sentence that accompanies the visitor through a richly patterned door into the Seydou Keïta exhibition was the Malian photographer’s proclaimed tagline, one he perhaps repeated to countless subjects that posed for him from the 1940s onwards in his studio in Bamako, in the space of a few decades in which…
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Misery and Splendour: Images of prostitution 1850-1910 at the Musée d’Orsay
Opening Misery and Splendour: Images of prostition, 1850-1910 not so long after a large exhibition on the artistic influence of the Marquis de Sade could inspire accusations of the Musée d’Orsay creating provocating subject-matter to draw in the crowds. Yet this seems hasty: I’m actually surprised such a display was not shown sooner. Indeed, the…
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Beauté Congo Kitoko at Fondation Cartier
If I had to be quizzed about artists from the Democratic Republic of Congo a few months ago, I would have to admit that I would not have been able to list many off the top of my head. On a wider level, the lack of exposure of arists from the African continent in terms…
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Goya: The Portraits, at The National Gallery
What we make of an artist’s career after he is long gone often, inevitably, is at odds with the artist’s own intentions. Goya wanted to be known for his portraiture, and in his particular his ambitious role as a court portrait painter. He could hardly predict that the vision we have of him mainly conjure the…
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History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain at the Southbank Centre
The Southbank Centre‘s Changing Britain festival is just about to end. It focused on the ways in which social, political and cultural events have changed Britain as a nation since 1945. On paper this may sound like quite a textbook essay question, and lead to quite a dull diorama of an exhibition oscillating between Tories…
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Bruce Nauman at Fondation Cartier
Time can shape both the content and the format of a work and the way it is visited. On my way to the Bruce Nauman exhibition I had a slight time constraint and already drew up a rough estimate of the moment I would finish the visit. However as I left the exhibition I found…
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Femina at Pavillon Vendôme
Women artists have come a long way within the art world, amidst erasure, exclusion and stereotyping. We have come a long way since women were forbidden to draw male nude models (resorting to tasteful sculptures instead), lived in the shadow of their male counterparts while receiving no credit for their own work for years (Camille…
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Tatoueurs, Tatoués at Musée Quai Branly
Tattoos have had tumultuous and multi-faceted histories as objects of admiration or contempt. From a symbol of pride and honour in many civilizations, a brand of shame and criminality in others, the tattoo is now seen as a globalized aesthetic trend while retaining some of this “mysterious” edge and ambiguity. Popular but still largely alternative,…
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Conflict Time Photography at Tate Modern
Images of war and conflict invade us more than ever before. The constant presence of them in photographs and videos, on television, in press, on the internet, is both an eye-opener to the horrors of wars far away from us yet strangely desensitizing when we become “accustomed” to them. 2014 has been rife with these…
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Niki de Saint-Phalle at the Grand Palais
Niki de Saint-Phalle is the type of artist that can bring to mind not necessarily one work in particular but a type of composite image, or iconic aura, that is instantly recognizable. This phrase cropped up in my conversations about her: “You think you don’t know her but you actually do: you know, these large, colourful women.” In…
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Claire Mead 