The webzine for English speaking Parisians
“Japonisme” is a word coined in 1872 by French art collector and critic Philippe Burty describing the French craze for all things Japanese. With France’s 1867 Exposition Universelle Parisians saw their first major exhibition of Japanese art inspiring such artists as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Continue reading “Paris Celebrates “Japonisme””
“Light Matters” is an immersive room-size light installation by Austrian artist Erwin Redl at the Fondation EDF where visitors enter a labyrinth of LED lights spread over two floors and whose tones vary slowly between red and blue (to February 03, 2019). Using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as an artistic medium Redl’s works redefine interior and exterior spaces by exploring architectural volumes. From floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, the work fills the EDF gallery space with a grid of phosphor LEDs, creating a visual web of light. Continue reading “Erwin Redl’s Light Labyrinth”
The exhibition “Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia” at Paris’ Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain revisits the vibrant styles in geometric art of Latin America made by over 70 artists from the Pre-Columbian period to the present (to February 24, 2019). Continue reading “Southern Geometries at Fondation Cartier”
Art meets science meets technology with the huge “On Air” exhibition —devoted to a selection of major works by Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno— at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (until Jan 06, 2019). The exhibition has been described as an ecosystem in motion hosting a polyphonic choreography between humans and non-humans. From jamming with spiders to walking on air, Saraceno’s immersive installations challenge viewers’ to consider such improbabilities as spiders playing music and cities floating in the air. Continue reading ““On Air” at Palais de Tokyo”
Following his denial of access by Google, artist John Gerrard hired a helicopter and produced a detailed photographic survey of one of the key physical sites of the internet, a Google data server building in Oklahoma known as a “data farm.” This survey was the starting point for “Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma)” featuring a slow pan portrait of a simulated “twin” of the squat building flanked by diesel generators and powerful cooling towers. Continue reading “Surveillé-e-s”
Paris’ Maison de l’Amérique Latine hosts an exhibition by fifteen international artists—photos, installations, holograms, video projections— inspired by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’ science fiction novel “Morel’s Invention or The Image Machine,” published in 1940 (to July 21, 2018). The book—a contemplation of image, reality, immortality and love— has influenced generations of artists from Garcia Marquez to Robbe-Grillet’s scenario for “L’Année Derniere à Marienbad (1961). Continue reading ““Morel’s Invention” Paris Exhibition”
Art meets technology with “Artistes & Robots” at the Grand Palais (until July 9). The exhibition, featuring mostly European artists, opens with Jean Tinguely’s mid-1950s “Metamatics” (machines that make paintings). Among the techno pioneers the exhibition includes Nam June Paik’s iconic pseudo robot, “Olympe de Gougs,” an assembly of 12 wooden television sets, 12 color monitors and a laser videodisc player. It was commissioned by Paris for the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989. Continue reading “Robots & Artists at Grand Palais”
Paris’ Museum of Modern Art revisits French artist Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) with a major retrospective of his paintings, drawings and sculptures (to May 20, 2018). He is not well known outside France. But in Europe he is considered one of the most important precursors of “art informel,” a style which developed parallel to American abstract expressionism. In his famous series – Hostages (1943-1945), Objets (1955), Nus (1956), Partisans (1957) – the painting material itself becomes a major subject of the work. Continue reading “Jean Fautrier, Matter and Light”
Vincent Van Gogh in a letter from Paris to his friend Horace Mann Livens in 1886 said: “Paris is Paris, there is but one Paris and however hard living may be here… the French air clears up the brain and does one good.” Similar words have been spoken many times by countless artists past and present. “The Dutch in Paris, 1789-1914” —an exhibition at the Petit Palais—revisits the Paris sejours of nine Dutch artists attracted to Paris tracing their interactions with “La Ville-Lumière” (to May 13, 2018). Continue reading “Dutch Artists in Paris…”
The Grand Palais revisits the work of Czech painter and graphic artist František Kupka (1871–1957) one of the pioneers of abstract painting and Orphic Cubism. Kupka’s abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstraction. The retrospective traces Kupka’s career from his early Paris press illustrations of the 1890’s to his symbolist experiments to his final abstract paintings during the 1950’s (until July 30, 2018) The exhibition will be presented at the National Gallery in Prague next fall and then at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki in 2019. Continue reading “Kupka …Pioneer of Abstraction”
Paris’ Centre Pompidou hosts a sampling of work by American artist Jim Dine (until April 23). The title of the exhibition —translated as Paris recognition or gratitude— reflects the artist’s love for the city he has been visiting since the sixties. He maintains an art studio in Montrouge. The exhibition consists of 28 works that make up a recent donation by the artist to Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne. A gift he says to repay his “personal and cultural debt” to France. Over the past years Dine has also donated selections of his art to museums across Europe and the US, including the British Museum, the Albertina in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Continue reading “Jim Dine Paris Reconnaissance”