There is no such thing as outside, Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2019 “There is no such thing as outside” is an installation by Kaari Upson, an American artist born in 1972 who lives and works in Los Angeles. An important part of Kaari Upson’s earlier career relates to The Larry Project, a series which includes installations,…
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MAXXI, Rome, 17 April – 30 June 2019 It may seem slightly odd to post an article on Paolo di Paolo, a photographer born in 1925 who never presented himself as an artist, and mostly took pictures of Italian life in the 1950s and 1960s for the well-known current affairs magazine Il Mondo where he…
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Gely Korzhev, retour à Venise , Ca’ Foscari, Venise, 10 mai – 3 novembre 2019 L’université Ca’Foscari accueille à l’occasion de la Biennale de Venise une exposition du peintre russe Gely Korzhev (1925 – 2012) dont le moins que l’on puisse dire est qu’il est peu connu en Europe, et d’autant moins connu qu’on l’associe avec…
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Ca’ d’Oro, Venice, May 2019 There is a tendency to organize contemporary art shows in historical settings, such as palaces, churches and museums. This sometimes provides an interesting opportunity to alter our viewpoint on the work of a particular artist, or to engage into a fertile dialogue which reveals aspects of the work we had…
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…and the rebellion against the straight line Exhibition curated by Alistair Hicks, Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, 16 March – 25 May 2019 The idea of the exhibition is particularly interesting, and to some degree provocative as the title suggests. The well-know 1908 essay of Adolf Loos, “Ornament and crime”, identified simplicity, “purity”, as the key…
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Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, 16 March – 9 June 2019 The National Gallery of Umbria presents an original exhibition on the iconology of soap bubbles, a hitherto rather neglected topic of art history. The first meaning of the soap bubble is that of a vanitas, a symbol of the frailty of life and constant proximity…
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National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2019 The ambition of the exhibition is contained in the museum’s statement: “From early mechanised human forms to today’s cutting-edge technology, this major exhibition reveals our 500-year quest to make machines human.” There is more to this than it appears: why on earth should robots be human-like, if their purpose…
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Sans feu ni lieu, at Eleven Steens, 25 April 2019 – 29 June 2019 I visited by chance rather than by design the show of Rachel Labastie, at Eleven Steens, and have no regrets: this young artist with a nomadic background of yéniche origin is moving, convincing, and remarkably articulate. A youth of many hardships,…
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Bruxelles, Musées Royaux, 22 mars – 21 juillet 2019 L’exposition Wim Delvoye qui se tient actuellement aux Musées Royaux de Bruxelles concerne supposément un artiste conceptuel. Or ce dernier n’a de sens que si l’art de l’artiste se donne comme un concept dont la transcription visuelle est possible, sans être en rien nécessaire, mais à…
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