All tagged Centre Pompidou
The first work that the visitor encounters upon entering the exhibition is Opening with rain (2018), which looks, at first glance, like a large slab of stone. It's actually painted papier maché, with traces of colorful paint – blood-orange, fluorescent yellow and deep turquoise – set into recessed spaces that appear as zoomorphic hieroglyphs, describing something between insect and totem. These markings radiate out from a stone egg suspended within a crater in the lower half of the composition.
It is more than a film but not exactly an exhibition. Not quite theatre or performance, although elements of both are omnipresent. It has Mongolian shamans, Russian orthodox priests, rabbis, imams and psychoanalysts, if you need to vent. There are meticulously detailed recreations of Soviet-era apartments inhabited by people who only speak Russian. Eminent performance artist Marina Abramović is supposed to make an appearance. (She is one of the project’s many celebrity ‘ambassadors’ who also include physicists and mathematicians Carlo Rovelli and Dimitri Kaledin, theatre directors Peter Sellars and Romeo Castellucci, artists Carsten Höller and Philippe Parreno and the designer Rei Kawakubo, among others.) And, for one euro, a stony-faced barman will serve you watery coffee or a litre of beer. It is DAU, the multimedia art ‘experience’-cum-independent Soviet state that is being hailed by its creators as the art-event of the century and by the French press as a disastrous flop.
A retrospective of Austrian artist Franz West at the Centre Pompidou in Paris begins where most biographical tales perhaps should – with his mother, Emilie West. Born to a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she espoused communist ideals and the artist’s father, Ferdinand Zokan, a Serbian coal merchant. The family lived in a public housing complex, out of which Emilie ran a private dental practice. Her clients included many artists and poets, among them Reinhard Priessnitz, a poet and theorist who would give the name Paßstücke (Adaptives) to West’s most iconic series of sculptures. This early contact with Vienna’s artistic milieu would have a profound impact on the young West’s later career, as would the sounds of whirling drills and the image of his mother creating white and pink moulds of teeth from plaster and resin.
The Centre Pompidou examines the thrilling but lesser-known story of the People’s Art School, founded in 1918 by the painter Marc Chagall in his hometown of Vitebsk.
