London and Paris Exhibition Highlights
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PERHAPS SOME ART WITH YOUR GAMES?
By Ann Fensterstock
For those of you planning to be in London this summer for the Olympics, here are three excellent opportunities to temper all of that physical with a little of the aesthetic and cerebral.
Summer Exhibition 2012 at The Royal Academy
4 June – 12 August 2012
Now in its 244th year, this annually juried show attracts over 11, 000 entries of which this year more than 1,000 were selected for exhibition (and sale) in the venerable halls of the Royal Academy just off Piccadilly. The number of works, hung salon style, can seem daunting but the galleries are well numbered and the wall notes explaining the principles of the curators’ hang at the entrance to each room provide an enlightening navigational tool. While it was tempting to home in on the contemporary pieces that might draw my attention in New York, I took advantage of looking at more traditional and, well, English work and exercised my eye and mind on deciding just what it was that had appealed to the jurors.
Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012 at the Hayward Gallery
12 June – 5 August 2012
This at once demanding but strangely soothing show at the Hayward is well worth the effort it at first requires. A gathering of works that take as their premise absence and what is not seen as opposed to presence and the concrete, Yves Klein’s legendary Void Room shares space with a Tom Friedman pedestal previously cursed by a witch. Rooms containing nothing but chilled air currents and a wall drawing that pushes itself out to the extremities of the room that occupies it will leave you both challenged and bemused. There is wall text to help – but you will need to look hard to see it.
Grayson Perry at Victoria Miro
7 June – 11 August 2012
The 2003 Turner Prize winning transvestite potter delights again with The Vanity of Small Differences, a series of six tapestries partially inspired by William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1732-33). At once witty, biting, tender and art historically learned, the show is even more rewarding if you first watch the three part BBC series called All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/in-the-best-possible-taste-grayson-perry/4od
Tackling that great British bugaboo The Class System head on, Perry delivers a modern day twist on the endlessly fascinating course of upward mobility, treasured arrival and ultimate demise for those with hubris enough to take on the gods of the social divide.
A bit of a jaunt and best done in a taxi, the Victoria Miro gallery is an icon on the London scene and with an excellent Sarah Sze exhibition installed at the ground floor level, the trip is well worth the effort.
Summer in Paris
By Lucy Bamman
Eugène Atget, Paris, Musée Carnavalet
25 April-29 July 2012
The Carnavalet Museum presents the Parisian work of Eugène Atget, featuring a selection of 230 prints created in Paris between 1898 and 1927. This retrospective, which brings together some well-known images and others previously unseen, paints an unusual portrait of the capital, far from the clichés of the Belle Époque. Visitors will discover the streets of the Paris of old, the gardens, the quays of the Seine, the former boutiques and the travelling salesmen. Atget’s photographs also reveal the changes in his processes: when he started out, this self-taught photographer tried to bring together landscapes and motifs and then images of Paris streets, in order to sell them to artists as models. It was when he dedicated himself to the streets of Paris that he attracted the attention of prestigious institutions such as the Carnavalet Museum and the National Library, which were to become his main clients until the end of his life.
Misia, Queen of Paris, Musée d’Orsay
12 June- 9 September 2012
Misia Godebska (1872-1950) was a legendary figure of the French art scene from the Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties. At first she became known for her talent as a pianist. Her marriage in 1893 to Thadée Natanson, the editor of the journal La Revue blanche, propelled her to the centre of a group of creative artists who were champions of Symbolism and the decorative arts. At the height of her influence, she became one of the most sought-after portrait models of her time, sitting for Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. She was a friend of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau and Chanel, and financed the Ballets Russes for over ten years. This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together portraits of Misia and her entourage, works, documents and accounts by contemporary artists that illustrate the prolific creative activity at the time Misia was the Queen of Paris.
Gerard Richter, Panorama, Centre Pompidou
6 June- 24 September 2012
The exhibition “Panorama”, a retrospective itinerary, demonstrates how this figure of contemporary painting was able to reinvent himself by reinventing the history of art itself; “Photo-Paintings”, gestural abstractions, coloured and monochrome charts. The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou devoted to Gerhard Richter brings together nearly 160 works and offers a chronological and thematic itinerary of the oeuvre of one of the major figures of contemporary painting. From the beginning of the 1960s to the present day, it shows the brilliant experiments carried out by the painter through a wide variety of pictorial styles. From “photo-paintings” to abstraction, from grisaille and monochrome works to coloured charts, he reinterpreted the genres of history of art: portraits, history paintings and landscapes.