Although we had timed tickets for a Monday morning, upon entering the Lee Miller exhibition we were met by a scrum just to get close enough to read the introductory text. This continued, annoyingly, throughout the otherwise excellent and well curated exhibition, breaking Miller’s career into 11 phases. As we wanted to see it all, it took 2½ hours, patiently waiting for other viewers to move on before we could stand, briefly, in front of each image.
We visited Charleston in Lewes to see the Vanessa Bell exhibit. It was bookended by the Quentin Bell sculpture above and the Koak exhibit, below.
“The Dreamer (2025) presents a woman in suspension – self-contained, serene, and held in a peaceful dream state. Her body is sculpted in concrete, a material often associated with foundations and stability, yet here taking on a surprising tenderness and warmth. The figure reimagines Quentin Bell’s sculptural series of levitating women, and Louise Bourgeois’s arched figures, as an embodiment of powerful vulnerability and radical dreaming.”
– Ella Slater, from the brochure accompanying Koak, The Window Set.
I was in Brighton with my former classmates and Evoke/Provoke collective members for the private view of Views in Transition, part of the Brighton Photo Fringe. I had about an hour between a truly excellent set of presentations from CRUX: Landscape of Inequality in the afternoon and the beginning of the private view to walk around Brighton for the first time. To see the pictures below larger, click on any one of them (on the web, if seeing this in email click the post title, above, first).
The painting above, with embedded video was from an exhibition about a local man who escaped the mines by becoming a flamboyant wrestler. I can’t find any trace of it on the museum’s web site.
We also saw an interesting exhibition called The Valleys, with work by over 60 artists including Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne, photographer Robert Frank, Josef Herman, photographer Bruce Davidson, and Ernest Zobole as well as introducing the work of collier artists and makers including Nicholas Evans, Harry Rodgers and Illtyd David.
Almost a year ago, I visited a delightful park in Paris called La Petite Ceinture (the little belt), created on the remains of a disused little railroad circuit. Imagine my surprise to see this photo story at the Musée Réattu taken back when the railroad still ran.
Hunting for the Transcendence show at Vague, I came upon the Réattu Museum, its courtyard and windows on the river (Rhône). I came upon a well-known French photographer with whom I was not familiar, Jean-Claude Gautrand, who documented many important stories for the latter half of the 2oth century and into the 21st. Click on images below to see them larger.
We visited the National Museum (of Art), Muzeum Narodowe. Once again I was more interested in photographing the spaces and the geometry than the art and artifacts. Click any of the images below to see them bigger.
We visited a museum dedicated to the Warsaw Rising of 1944 (not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when the segregated Jews revolted). In this case, as the Germans retreated westward and the Russians advanced from the East, the people of Warsaw rose up. As usual, rather than photograph the objects in the museum, I focused my camera on the space and, of course, found a reflection of myself to photograph as well.
I’ve photographed this stair case on previous visits to the Tate Modern – it’s hard not to want to. Here are two more from my late March visit.
Chryssa was one of the first artists to employ neon for something other than advertising. Here, Study for Gates No. 4.
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Standing Man (Uomo in Piedi) is one of his mirror paintings, allowing me to take this shot.
The moment I saw this, I thought Tower of Babel (or babble). Turns out, it’s called Babel 2001 by Cildo Meireles. You can read all about it here.
