LUCIAN FREUD @ THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

LUCIAN FREUD, today aged 88, stands among the most important living artists in the world and he hasn't been exhibited in France since the last retrospective exhibition presented by the Centre Pompidou in 1987. This exhibition presents an exceptional overview of his masterpieces and pays an unprecedented tribute to one of the greatest contemporary painters.

Composed of around fifty large-sized paintings, accompanied by a selection of graphic works and photographs of the artist's London studio from special collections (for the majority of them), the exhibition is organised around the theme of the artist's studio, a place behind closed doors which paved the foundations for Lucian Freud's painting and activity. Within a space of just over 900m2, the exhibition brings together the painter's main full-size compositions, known as Large Interiors, as well as his variations on former masters, his series of self-portraits and the recent and imposing portraits of Leigh Bowery or Big Sue, the painter's masterpieces.

The uniqueness of Lucian Freud's work lies in his meticulous and almost obsessional treatment of the portrait and the nude, based on an absolute approach to the art of painting. "I want the painting to be flesh (…)". The model is observed in the closed world of the studio, the painter's laboratory.

The theme of the artist's studio bears the metaphor of painting: the one-to-one between the painter and his model (from Rembrandt, to Courbet and Picasso), the space of painting – representation of the real, the process of creation -, the figure of the artist – self-portraits and rereading the masters.



LUCIAN FREUD @ THE CENTRE POMPIDOU
March 10 2010 - July 19 2010
11h00 - 21h00


☁ LUCIAN FREUD @ THE CENTRE POMPIDOU

MONSIEUR QUI

MONSIEUR QUI : French illustrator who loves cats, dogs, handmaded works, brass bands and paste big posters in the streets of Paris…


☁ MONSIEUR QUI
☁ MONSIEUR QUI @ FRENCH BLAST

I LOVE YOU (MAGAZINE)

These are pages from the I LOVE YOU MAGAZINE. I liked what the sayings were saying(!)... made me smile.


☁ I LOVE YOU MAGAZINE

PAUL BÉLIVEAU

(Acrylic on canvas)

New works by artist PAUL BÉLIVEAU

Born in 1954, PAUL BÉLIVEAU attained his Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from Laval University in 1977. Recognized for his expertise in drawing, engraving and painting he has since then had more than sixty solo exhibitions across Canada and the United States. The recipient of numerous prizes in visual arts and of multiple grants from the Canada Council as well as the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles du Québec has taken part in several commitees and juries as specialist in the visual arts.

"By openly integrating into the compositions an iconography from the past and proceeding through citation and retrospection, he reveals the phenomenon of metamorphosis upon which imagination itself is based. In this way he brings to light the very principles of the mechanics of creation. Imagination, which consists as it were in the transfer of a perceptible representation onto an image belonging to another reality, thus sees itself in the presented. Consequently it is not the images themselves but the unique process of creative development which accords Paul Béliveau's works their originality." (Dany Quine, L'oeuvre du temps)


☁ PAUL BÉLIVEAU
☁ PAUL BÉLIVEAU @ GdB
☁ PAUL BÉLIVEAU PREVIOUSLY ON LE ZÈBRE

MELVIN SOKOLSKY

(shown here, some pictures of the 1963 Bubble series and the 1965 Fly series)


MELVIN SOKOLSKY was born and raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1938. At age ten he began taking pictures using a box camera, though he was frustrated by his inability to create prints that had the "nice pearly finish" of his father’s old photos. "It was then that I realized the importance of the emulsion of the day," he recalls. Never satisfied, always questioning, and fiercely creative, young Melvin Sokolsky began to live from one private epiphany to the next.

With no formal training, his photographic education came purely from instinct, desire, and careful observation. Upon learning that photographers could make $4000 for "shooting a box of Jell-O," Sokolsky was seized by visions of a previously unimaginable career path. "The idea of escaping from my tenement dwelling and living by my creative inspirations became a powerful motivator," he notes. He took up an all-consuming regimen of photographic experimentation with a singular focus and determination that have since become his trademark process.

At twenty-one these efforts paid off when he was invited to join the photo staff of Harper's Bazaar by Henry Wolf, the magazine's visionary art director. Though he was learning on his feet, Sokolsky was rebellious by nature and would couple his street smarts with his deeply vivid imagination to challenge the aesthetic conventions of the advertising and editorial worlds. He was friendly but equally competitive with fellow star-photographers of his day, Art Kane and Richard Avedon. This tension contributed greatly to what is now considered the golden age of the American magazine.

The work that put Sokolsky on the map was his 1963 Bubble series in which impeccably dressed models float dreamily over urban land and waterscapes. "I’d have to credit Hieronymus Bosch for those images," he notes, "if you look at his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights you will come across a nude couple in a bubble. That image stayed with me from childhood." This and other wildly inspired fashion editorials caught the eye of many advertising creatives, and soon he was shooting much more than Jell-O. The Digital Journalist states that he was the most successful advertising photographer of the 1960s.

As most advertising work goes uncredited, Sokolsky became known primarily for his groundbreaking editorial work and celebrity portraiture. Drawing upon his fascination with Surrealist art (and encouraged to do so by a visit to his studio from Salvador Dalí), Sokolsky was fearless in upending all notions of scale, proportion, visual rationality, and the laws of physics. Not one to be pinned down to a single style, he was equally comfortable shooting elegant, minimal studies against white backdrops. Regardless of context, Sokolsky’s work always pops and provokes. "Really, I'm only interested in photography as a tool for exploring and visualizing psychological and emotional conditions," he says.

In the 1970s Sokolsky expanded his visual repertoire to film and, fittingly, he moved to Los Angeles. He became a prolific shooter of striking television commercials that bore all the innovation and grammar of his photographic work. He has continued to shoot fashion photography and other editorial assignments, and his work has moved towards an increasingly cinematic style. Sokolsky thinks in big questions that inspire a visceral visual narrative. One hopes that he will bring this skill to the big screen in the form of a feature film, for yet another chapter in his creative evolution.

Melvin Sokolsky is one of the great pioneers in the creation of visual imagery. Admired, awarded, and relentlessly copied, he remains steadfastly ahead of the curve and thoroughly ignited in his seventies. His legacy cemented, Sokolsky is left with a seemingly limitless well of creative energy.

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☁ MELVIN SOKOLSKY

TIM EITEL

In TIM EITEL's emotionally complex and stirring paintings, the artist conflates fragments of images and memories of everyday life with print and film media, as well as the history of art. Using formal, realist painting techniques, Eitel creates disconnected worlds extracted from time. The artist isolates his anonymous subjects from their contexts, profoundly elevating the significance of every gesture and nuance. Past and present, memories, feelings, and associations converge, evoking ambiguous narratives which force viewers to reexamine their own perceptions of society and to see that which they often allow to become invisible.

The new works (Invisible Forces) are based on pictorial elements isolated from photographs that Eitel takes on city streets as part of an ongoing investigation of the world surrounding him. Eitel uses ambiguous settings and distills out all reference to motion or change, allowing the works to become a lens into the viewer's own contextual references and associations. -There is a saying that we only see what we know, and sociologically, this notion might explain why it is so easy to ignore the homeless, the cardboard boxes, and the pigeons, that are all over the streets,- Eitel explains; -If you don't -know' these things, they become invisible. But in front of a painting, you bring so many things you know already-your expectations, taste, opinions-that you can't help but look at the subject with other eyes. A painting is much like an invitation to go and see things differently.-

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TIM EITEL was born in 1971 in the southern German city of Leonberg, near Stuttgart. He graduated with a degree in painting from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig in 2001. Eitel first gained recognition as a co-founder of the collective art gallery, Liga, in Berlin. He joined PaceWildenstein in 2006 and his first solo-exhibition at the gallery, Center of Gravity, was mounted the same year.

Eitel has participated in more than fifty exhibitions worldwide since 2000. He has received a number of prestigious scholarships and awards throughout his career, including the Marion Ermer-Preis (2003) and the Landesgraduiertenstipendium, Saxonia, Germany (2002). He was granted an artist's residency in the International studio programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2002. His work is part of numerous museum collections and important private collections worldwide. The artist lives and works in New York City. (source)

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☁ TIM EITEL @ PACE WILDENSTEIN
☁ TIM EITEL @ EIGEN + ART
☁ TIM EITEL @ ARTNET

DEBORAH TURBEVILLE

Born and raised in New England, DEBORAH TURBEVILLE moved to New York at the age of twenty to work for designer Claire McCardell and later became an editor for Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle before turning to photography.(source)

DEBORAH TURBEVILLE is an internationally acclaimed photographer, who is credited with changing the face of fashion photography. She established her reputation with highly original work that is both visionary and immediately recognizable.

An influential and prominent figure in contemporary photography, her evocative images are published in numerous books and feature regularly in major fashion magazines. In 1999, she was recipient of the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography for the Fashion Single Image and Photo Essay. Recently, she was recipient of the 2005 Infinity Award for Applied Photography.

Turbeville's photographs are widely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world. Her signature style, of creating unique narratives is poetic and timeless. (source)

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☁ DEBORAH TURBEVILLE @ ARTNET
☁ DEBORAH TURBEVILLE @ STALEY WISE
☁ DEBORAH TURBEVILLE @ FRIEZE MAGAZINE
☁ DEBORAH TURBEVILLE

LILLIAN BASSMAN

LILLIAN BASSMAN (June 15, 1917 in Brooklyn) is an American photographer.

Her parents were Jewish intellectuals who emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1905 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Textile High School, with Alexey Brodovitch, in Manhattan and graduated in 1933. While there, she met the photographer Paul Himmel and they married in 1935.

Bassman worked as a textile designer and fashion illustrator before working as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper's Bazaar, where she promoted the careers of photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer and Arnold Newman. Under the guidance of the Russian emigrant Alexey Brodovitch, she began to photograph her model subjects primarily in black and white. Her work was published for the most part in Harper's Bazaar, between 1950-1965.

In the early 1970s Lillian Bassman, among the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, made the decision to dispose of her career, quite literally. Artists do this all the time without the intent — giving themselves over to excess, retreating to ashrams — but Ms. Bassman’s approach was aggressive and determined. Disillusioned by the costuming of the late 1960s, she had had enough of fashion and expressed her disdain by destroying decades’ worth of negatives and placing others in a trash bag in the coal room of her Upper East Side carriage house. Her era of furtive eroticism was over, and there was no point in scrapbooking it.
Miraculously over 20 years later, a forgotten bag filled with hundreds of images was discovered. Bassman’s fashion photographic work began to be re-appreciated in the 1990s.

Presently in her 90s, she is now working with digital technology and abstract color photography to create a new series of work. The most notable qualities about her photographic work are the high contrasts between light and dark, the graininess of the finished photos and the geometric placement and camera angles of the subjects. (wikipedia)


☁ LILLIAN BASSMAN
☁ LILLIAN BASSMAN @ ARTNET
☁ LILLIAN BASSMAN @ FARMANI GALLERY

PAOLO ROVERSI

Born in Ravenna in 1947, PAOLO ROVERSI’s interest in photography was kindled as a teenager during a family vacation in Spain in 1964. Back home, he set up a darkroom in a convenient cellar with another keen amateur, the local postman Battista Minguzzi, and began developing and printing his own black & white work. The encounter with a local professional photographer Nevio Natali was very important: in Nevio’s studio Paolo spent many many hours realising an important apprenticeship as well as a strong durable friendship.

In 1970 he started collaborating with the Associated Press: on his first assignment, AP sent Paolo to cover Ezra Pound’s funeral in Venice. During the same year Paolo opened, with his friend Giancarlo Gramantieri his first portrait studio, located in Ravenna, via Cavour, 58, photographing local celebrities and their families. In 1971 he met by chance in Ravenna, Peter Knapp, the legendary Art Director of Elle magazine. At Knapp’s invitation, Paolo visited Paris in November 1973 and has never left.

In Paris Paolo started working as a reporter for the Huppert Agency but little by little, through his friends, he began to approach fashion photography. The photographers who really interested him then were reporters. At that moment he didn’t know much about fashion or fashion photography. Only later he discovered the work of Avedon, Penn, Newton, Bourdin and many others.

The British photographer Lawrence Sackmann took Paolo on as his assistant in 1974. « Sackmann was very difficult. Most assistants only lasted a week before running away. But he taught me everything I needed to know in order to become a professional photographer. Sackmann taught me creativity. He was always trying new things even if he did always use the same camera and flash set-up. He was almost military-like in his approach to preparation for a shoot. But he always used to say ‘your tripod and your camera must be well-fixed but your eyes and mind should be free’”. Paolo endured Sackmann for nine months before starting on his own with small jobs here and there for magazines like Elle and Depeche Mode until Marie Claire published his first major fashion story. A Christian Dior beauty campaign brought him wider recognition in 1980, the year he started using the 8 x 10” Polaroid format that would become his trademark. Not only because of the large camera, Paolo has always preferred working in studio. In his first years in Paris, the studio was very often a room from his own different apartments, all on the left bank, until he found in 1981 the studio located in 9 rue Paul Fort where he is still working.

In the middle of the ‘80s the fashion industry was very keen to produce catalogues which allowed photographers to express a very creative and personal work: Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Romeo Gigli... gave Paolo that opportunity. During his travels to India, Yemen... Paolo took many portraits; we can see some of them in his books ANGELI and Al Moukalla; a book about India is in preparation. Paolo has also realised some commercials. Since the middle 80’ his work has been subject to many exhibitions and books and many awards have honoured his work. Today Paolo has a regular collaboration with the most interesting fashion magazines and fashion designers.


☁ PAOLO ROVERSI

MARY McCARTNEY

I discovered Mary McCartney with this picture of Tracy Emin as Frida Gallo. I thought the picture was fantastic and that the Tracy vs Frida comparison was interesting and amusing. Then on McCartney's website, I discovered her series off pointe, picturing ballerinas off stage. You see them eat chips, smoke and bathe their difformed feet in sinks. Again interesting and beautiful. This series is not pictured up here, but you can see it all on McCartney's website under the section EXHIBITIONS / OFF POINTE.


"MARY McCARTNEY (b.1969, London) started her career as a photographer in 1995. Since then Mary’s work has spanned the worlds of portrait and fashion photography. Her style lies in finding a moment that gives us a new insight on the subject.

Mary’s assignments have led to her work appearing in editorial titles such as Harpers Bazaar and Interview Magazine as well as high impact advertising campaigns for clients such as Gossard, Stella McCartney, Adidas, Aga, Bucherer and Mandarin Oriental. “Mary is the new creative spirit behind Mandarin Oriental’s He’s/She’s a Fan campaign, taking over from the late Patrick Lichfield”.

In May 2000 Mary took the first official photographs of Tony and Cherie Blair with their newborn son, Leo. Mary has a number of pictures in the National Portrait Gallery Collection, along with a commission entitled ‘Gay Icons’, to be hung in the NPG from Spring 2009.

Mary’s first solo exhibition was in October 2004 entitled ‘Off Pointe - A Photographic Study of The Royal Ballet After Hours' in which she was invited into the private world of the elite Corps De Ballet. This series of black & white photographs reveals an intimate unseen aspect of the world of ballet capturing the prestige and the chaos of life behind the scenes and the contrast between the sometimes gruelling, painful lifestyle of the dancers and their fairy tale performances.

Mary’s time working in fashion photography led to her first American solo exhibition at the Goss Michael Foundation in Dallas, 2007. This body of work entitled “Playing Dress Up” shows a collection of photographs that chronicle a unique view, both on the catwalk and backstage, of the rarified world of high fashion.

Mary has built up an extensive catalogue of portrait work, some of which was included in her exhibition “British Style Observed” which was exhibited at The Natural History Museum in September 2008 as part of Thirty Days of Fashion.

Currently working on a book with Thames and Hudson due for release in September 2010."


☁ MARY McCARTNEY