White Bird is a concept store exclusively dedicated to designer jewellery, featuring creators from all horizons with very diverse styles. From Victorian England to naturalism and Japanese simplicity, there is a piece for each woman. On top of trendy designers such as Pascale Monvoisin, Dorette and Karen Liberman, there are future stars there waiting to be discovered.
A tearoom Jugetsudo in Saint-Germain-des-prés, another one in Tokyo, both guardians of the Japanese values and traditions, in such a harmonious décor that it would almost bring you to meditation. The tea ceremony is here like a Zen experience.
The address of Cyril Lignac used to be in the 1960s Claude Saint-Louis’s famous restaurant. Regular customers were Serge Gainsbourg, Maurince Ronet, Alain Delon or François Mitterrand.
Cyril Lignac has chosen to keep the flowered wallpaper on the walls, the antique tiled floor or the lights. On the kitchen side, we can find on the menu the great classics, of course reinterpreted by Cyril Lignac.
To this day, Raoul Hausmann’s photography has not had a dedicated museum exhibition in France. As a photographer, Hausmann has long remained underrated and unheralded. However his key position in 20th century avant-garde photography has continually been re-evaluated and his importance is widely acknowledged these days.
We know Hausmann as the prominent artist of Dada Berlin, as the author of assemblages, collages, lautgedichte, etc, yet the vicissitudes of history caused the obliteration of his photography, an essential facet of his œuvre. From 1927 onwards Hausmann became an avid and restless photographer. His photographic practice quickly became a cornerstone of his multi-faceted reflections and activities, pushing him in a new direction which culminated in his forced departure from Ibiza in 1936.
Considering Hausmann’s clandestine crossing of the century, it is no surprise that his photographic œuvre was forgotten. Labelled a ‘degenerate‘ artist by the Nazis, he hastily left Germany in 1933. As an exile, Hausmann suffered the dispersion, and sometimes the destruction, of his work. His photography was seldom displayed and survived unnoticed until the late seventies. It was long supposed to be lost, until an archive (now at the Berlinische Galerie) was almost miraculously discovered at his daughter’s home after her death.
The retrospective devoted to the American photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948, Baltimore) brings together a selection of works from the 1970s to the present day.
A member of Magnum Photos since 1976, Susan Meiselas questions documentary practice. She became known through her work in conflict zones of Central America in the 1970s and 1980s in particular due to the strength of her colour photographs. Covering many subjects and countries, from war to human rights issues and from cultural identity to the sex industry, Meiselas uses photography, film, video and sometimes archive material, as she relentlessly explores and develops narratives integrating the participation of her subjects in her works.
The exhibition highlights Susan Meiselas’ unique personal as well as geopolitical approach, showing how she moves through time and conflict and how she constantly questions the photographic process and her role as witness
Swedish artist Markus Åkesson returns to the Galerie Da-End for his third solo exhibition, titled Let me sleep through the night, on the occasion of which he unveils a body of recent paintings and a new engraved glass sculpture.
A painter of the imaginary, Åkesson meticulously documents his compositions thanks to the photographic tool. His studio is the theater of perfectly orchestrated posing sessions during which he dresses his models up with various costumes and richly printed accessories. Thanks to these elaborate mises-en-scène, he gives to his work a visual tone and light reminiscent of cinema, and infuses his canvases with a disruptive narration, moments fixed as clueless enigmas.
In the same surrealist vein as previous series exploring themes linked to sleep and the unconscious, Markus Åkesson invites us to dive into mysterious scenes that makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and invention of the mind. «In preparation for this exhibition, I have been inspired by internal rooms, physical and mental,» he explains. «The spaces in which we sleep and dream. It is where we store the things that we want to protect, it is where we are safe to explore the phantasmal dimension, the dreaming state. In this pursuit, I nod to William Morris and his novel, The Wood Beyond the Worlds. This, and later C.S. Lewis’ reference to Morris in his novel The Magicians Nephew, create a childlike picture of the shared fantastical space in which we travel from one reality to the next. In this mystic Wood, with its various pools, we are in a state of sleepless dreaming.»
Within portraits of a great plastic intensity, Åkesson multiplies the use of symbols and dual readings, inviting us to decypher both the tangible emotions of his charismatic characters and the stories hidden in the patterns of the fabrics and tapestries that invade the space all-over. The psychological dimension of the works is no longer only embodied by the subject but also by the decor that amplifies the impression of mental imprisonment.
Certain figures therefore appear completely concealed underneath the fabric, whereas before the artist only used masks. There is something troubling about these faceless portraits, as if the human was devoured by the decor, grabbed by the motif with his own complicity. Nevertheless the exoticism of the prints defuses the threat, as if the painter amused himself underlining the artificial and theatrical nature of the action.
On the centenary of his death, the Musée d’Orsay pays tribute to Edgar Degas (1834-1917) with an exhibition based around the little known work by the writer, poet and thinker, Paul Valéry (1871-1945).
The friendship between Degas and Valéry lasting more than twenty years resulted in an essay published by Editions Vollard in 1937, Degas Danse Dessin. Both intimate and universal, it conveys a poetic, fragmentary image of the painter’s personality and his art, and a kind of meditation on the creative process.
In the exhibition, documents on display and archival documents show these men and their social interaction. Degas’ numerous drawings and Valéry’s famous notebooks reveal the importance of these works, which were, for both, the crucible of their art.
The main themes explored in the exhibition Degas Danse Dessin are expressed by linking extracts from Valéry’s essay to the graphic works, paintings and sculptures of Degas. This resonance between text and images offers an insight, by turns, into the artist’s drawing and his fondness for the worlds of dance and horseracing, which Valéry links to his own search for line and movement.
