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Making Colour at the National Gallery
Colour is so omnipresent today that we need not worry about having to create it or search for it extensively…in fact, a main concern is rather knowing how not to use too much of it at a time. As a digital artist I can simply open Photoshop and slide a colour wheel around to obtain…
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Dark Waters at Galerie Chantal Crousel
Water has always been a fascinating subject-matter for artists, with its fluctuating nature and dangerous temperament, both a mirror of the soul in turmoil. The popularity of scenes at sea, ships and tempests, rose mainly amongst romantic artists of the 19th century. They never entirely left the peacefulness of pastoral scenes with their picturesque lakes…
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The Art of Marvel Superheroes at Musée Art Ludique
Marvel superheroes are not, at first sight, the most museum-savvy creatures. After all, their bold and brightly colored designs are more familiar in the pages of a comic book or on the big screen with blockbusters such as Captain America, Iron Man or the Avengers. Yet Musée Art Ludique hardly bothers itself with such labels.…
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Henri Cartier-Bresson at Centre Pompidou
The long wait in the queue within the Centre Pompidou betrays the exhibition’s immense popularity before I can even enter and see for myself; at any given time, there were about 300 people in the space itself, crowding around the small black and white images that established the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson as a lasting…
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Ilya and Emilia Kababov, The Strange City at the Grand Palais – MONUMENTA 2014
Museums have always been compared to churches: a sacred sphere in which contemplation, hushed voices and a slow, ambling pace around works to admire or ‘worship’ them is familiar. There is something ritualistic in the way in which we walk around an exhibition space following a specific route. And although being asked to quieten down…
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Robert Mapplethorpe, Grand Palais
Retrospectives are sometimes difficult to consider with an overly critical eye because the overview of an artist’s life and work is inevitably going to follow pathways that can only be assessed coherently by following his life within a chronological order. Yet this sometimes passes off as a formula, something that is known and rehearsed. If…
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The Glamour of Italian Fashion, 1945-2014 at the V&A (part 2)
In my first part on the exhibition The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 at the V&A it was neccessary to set the scene for postwar Italy: impoverished, the funding it received through the Marshall Plan for regional industries provided high quality material that could fuel a fashion industry about to break through onto the international…
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The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 at the V&A (part 1)
Italian fashion is a universal symbol of excellent taste and elegance. Its legacy and enduring influence on what we wear and the attitude we aspire to is infinite. But now more than ever, fashion is uprooted from the places it originates from. Influences from different countries and cultures merge, further encouraged by the internet, press…
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Claire Mead 