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Alighiero Boetti at Tornabuoni Art Paris
You might be forgiven for considering that many commercial gallery spaces look the same, however the perfect antidote might be a venture down to Tornabuoni Art in Paris. Like many Parisian galleries, it has perfected the art of hiding itself in plan sight. This one in particular can be found in the Passage de Retz…
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Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection at Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Louis Vuitton exhibition on the Shchukin collection reveals the ambiguity of art collecting in its form as well as its content, through its attempt to reconcile the personal quirks, contradictions and passions of a Russian collector with the immense role his collection came to adopt within modern art history.
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Mexico 1900-1950 at the Grand Palais
The Grand Palais is an exhibition space of the monumental, usually meant for retrospectives of established names rather than new discoveries. While the momentous title “Mexico 1900-1950” promises headliners such as Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo, it also allows for the opportunity to discover artists and works rarely seen in France, with a crystal-clear agenda:…
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Politics over the Public
This piece was originally written for the Courtauldian December 2016 issue. In June, the MA Curating class of 2015-6 I was part of organised a debate within the Courtauld Institute’s Research Forum, ‘Politics over the Public: The Role of Museums’. With director of MIMA Alistair Hudson, Wendy Earle from Birkbeck University and artist Peter Kennard…
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Picasso/Giacometti at Musée Picasso
Two stern avant-garde gazes in black and white overlook the stubborn queue forming outside the Musée Picasso in Paris on a cold autumn morning. In the newly refurbished Musée Picasso, which opened once more to the public a few years ago, the new permanent collection alone is usually sufficient to draw loyal crows. Add the name…
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Persona at the Musée du Quai Branly
This is a fair warning and confession: I am not the bravest person as far as the “horror” genre or at the very least the uncanny is concerned. The latest embarrassing example dates from just this Halloween when I finally decided that one of the oldest horror films of all time, Nosferatu by Fritz Lang, could…
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Georgia O’ Keeffe at Tate Modern
Georgia O’ Keeffe must be spinning in her grave: even though she actively protested against the interpretation of her close-up flower paintings as sexual organs, the easiest way to make someone’s face light up with recognition at the mention of her work is usually by adding “you know – the vagina-flower painter”. Tacky, perhaps, but…
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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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Falsehood & Fiction
Exhibition essay part of East Wing Biennial ‘Artificial Realities’ catalogue, January 2016 Within the notion of Artificial Realities, the problem of authenticity and trust inevitably comes into play. Due to the deceptive nature of illusions, materials and space, we are forced to re-evaluate the reality we evolve within, leading to the creation of a false…
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The Mouse in the Auction House: The Collection of Disney Animation Cels
Twenty-four images. In the context of art collecting, this number would already raise some questions. What is the relation of the images to each other? What is the collector’s intent and choice of display? Yet the idea of a coherent whole in a collection never replaces the idea that we can contemplate one of these…
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Claire Mead 