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Martial Raysse, Rétrospective at Centre Pompidou (Café Powell)
Hello readers! As you may know from my About page I am French and British…which means that French is another language that I love to use when I write about exhibitions I have seen. Having recently joined Café Powell, a French webzine that specializes in cultural reviews, I am glad to say that I am…
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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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Martin Creed at the Hayward Gallery
The walls are painted in bright fearless stripes, a huge neon sign swings overhead, a piano is patiently played key by key and a few bemused yet exhilarated visitors fumble out of a room filled to the brim with white balloons. Welcome to Martin Creed’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, whose title seems to think…
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Miroslaw Balka at White Cube Masons’ Yard
I read the Interpretation of Dreams by Freud a few years ago and became completely obssessed with this apparent all-encompassing keys that could unlock our hidden motives and desires throughout our dreams. I then made the naive mistake of sharing this enthusiasm with a Jungian who berated me on liking one of “the greatest impostures…
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Alex Katz at Timothy Taylor Gallery
Fashion, glamorous images and movie icons. The inspiration and appeal is universal, whether in order to expression fascination, criticism or even rejection.So universal that it could sometimes become tired or repetitive…so I was reassured to encounter a refreshing perspective during the Alex Katz exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery, at its opening last week. This was…
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Claire Mead 