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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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Goya: Visions of Flesh and Blood
In my last review on Goya: The Portraits, I wished that I could visit these portraits again due to the sense of familiarity and intimacy that they provoked. Of course, I was lucky enough to do so in the first place in London, but not everyone is able to see the exhibition at least physically,…
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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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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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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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Claire Mead 