Exhibitions

Victoria Miro Gallery - Photography 2005

I advise everyone to go and see this exhibition, it's on until the 12th of february 2005. Idris Khan's photographs are innovative. He "creates multi-layered photographs, often of appropriated art and books, in a way that both augments the aura of the original and reveals the idiosyncratic trace of his own hand. Khan's work explores the history of photography and literature, the beauty of repetition and the anxieties of authorship." His series is entitled "every...". On each photograph he has superimposed every pictures of works from other artists: every Turner postcard, every berndt and hilla Becher, every partitions from a certain music composer (I think it's beethoven, but can't be sure).
Another photographer is Stephen Gill whose documentary photographs, covering everyday events so "normal" that they often go unnoticed. His series "invisible", shows us workers in the street wearing high-visibility clothing. His assumption is that although the function of their flashy piece of clothing is to make them more visible, they often tend to disappear from view because, paradoxically, they are wearing these. As usual, the work contains a certain humour, which often caracterizes Gill's photography. Gill himself says that he has been wearing such high-visibility clothing when he wanted to go and photograph un-noticed.
Bettina von Zwehl's photographs are portraits of young women. Very formal in their presentation, they bring a questionning of the sitter's psychologic state of mind. All the girls are looking down, as if they felt guilty of something.
Dan Holdsworth's work is almost abstract. He is interested in "sensory deprivation" and this series, thus, is about the absence of sound, as he photographed industrial accoustic chambers.
Florian Maier-Aichen's photograph's are large format landscapes. They appear "surreal". He has spent hours in the dark-room to achieve a result close to perfection, with minute details.
Brandon Lattu creates a space out of advertising signs and billboards. He cut out hundreds of negatives. The result is large photographs, with flashy signs on a black background.

Whitechapel Art Gallery - Faces in the Crowd

"Taking Edouard Manet and key post-Impressionist masters as its starting point, Faces in the Crowd traces the story of modern art through representations of the individual and society.
The exhibition’s title is taken from a one-image poem by Ezra Pound: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough’, inspired by a journey on the Paris Metro in 1913. It gives a powerful evocation of the individual immersed within the modern metropolis. Moving through modern masters such as Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon and Jeff Wall, Faces in the Crowd maps social and individual relationships through a history of avant garde figuration.
Transformations of the city through architecture and technology created public spaces of leisure and spectacle, which are explored in the works of Eugene Atget, Walter Sickert and Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec. The reduction of private identities to social type became the defining work of August Sander, while in more recent years Cindy Sherman has used different guises and identities to reinvent a sense of self.
Artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Edvard Munch and Andy Warhol have used the figure to express sensations of speed, alienation or celebrity in modern life. Work on show by Eve Arnold, Robert Capa and Andreas Gursky documents the epic and the everyday. Whereas for artists including Alexander Rodchenko, Joseph Beuys and Chris Ofili, the figure becomes an agent of social change – revolutionary, transgressive or symbolic.
Including painting, sculpture, photography and the moving image, this major art historical survey traces a story of modernism through its defining artists.
Featuring Acconci, Ackerman, Alÿs, Arnold, Atget, Bacon, Balkenhol, Beckmann, Bellows, Beuys, Boccioni, Boltanski,Bomberg, Brassäi, Broodthaers, Buckingham, Burri, Cahun, Capa, Calle, Carrà, Cardiff & Bures-Miller, Cartier-Bresson, Deacon & Fraser, Deller, DiCorcia, Dittborn, Doherty, Song Dong, Dubuffet, Duchamp, Durant, Ensor, Export, Evans, Fast, Giacomelli, Gilbert & George, Goldblatt, Goldin, Gordon, Grosz, Gupta, Gursky, Guston, Guzman, Hamilton, Heartfield, Hopper, Huyghe, Jonas, Katz, Keita, Kentridge, Kirchner, Klucis, Kollwitz, Leckey, Léger, Levitt, Magritte, Manet, Man Ray, McCarthy, McQueen, Modotti, Munch, Muñoz, Nauman, Ofili, Paolozzi, Pfeiffer, Picasso, Piper, Pistoletto, Prince, Richter, Rodchenko, Sala, Sander, Schad, Schütte, Sherman, Schneemann, Segal, Sickert, Sidibé, Singh, Strand & Sheeler, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vertov, Wall, Warhol, Wearing, Weegee, Wikström, Winogrand, Yeats.
Organised by the Whitechapel Gallery, London and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin"
The exhibition is on until the 6th of march 2005. The works that have been put together are impressive in standards. Personally, I was happy to see Sophie Calle's Suite Vénitienne, which had had only seen in book form. Allow a few hours for the whole viewing.

Whitecube - Mika Kato (b.1975) and Masoko Ando (b.1976) and Martin Kobe...
21.01.05 - 19.02.05

Interesting set of paintings from two young japanese artists. Kato's portraits of young girls are strange, disturbing. They look like dolls, in the manga style, with an impressive rendering of the eyes. The canvas are sometimes round which, associated with the distorted faces, give the impression of looking through a fish-eye. Ando's drawings and painting seem traditional and are extremely precise. They feature young girls with motherly attitudes and animals. I loved the perverse eyes of some of the birds he drew. His paintings' atmosphere is lyrical and fairy tale like.
Inside the White Cube (ie upstairs) is exhibited the work of Martin Kobe, a german artist whose paintings depict strange "virtual" architectural spaces. I thought they looked a bit like the halls of the Barbican Arts Centre... I wasn't enthralled by his work, I have to say, and for all I know they could have kept Sam Taylor Wood's photographs for longer... You won't stay upstairs too long, I think.