Any other business

Photo courtesy of Art Basel.   When I visited Art Basel in September , I had the good fortune to share a flat with, among others, art writer Nadine Khalil. Unlike me, Nadine has written a serious, full report about the fair for Pioneer Works, an artist-run cultural centre in Brooklyn. I particularly liked this candid passage about how viewing contemporary art often turns out to be: '... the experience was abstruse and confusing. Even with my decade reviewing art, I’m sometimes left with the feeling that a secret has been withheld from me. Or like I’m in a crowd where everyone is familiar with each other but me. ' Spot on. This is a link to Nadine's article .

I've no intention of writing a blog post every time I visit a gallery, but I must say I how impressed I was by the new Fitzpatrick Gallery on the rue de Turenne - both the new space and the curating of the opening exhibition, Still Time . Even if you don't like all the works in it (and you rarely do), a well-curated group show - the choice of the artists and works and the way they are displayed together - is a pleasure in itself, as I think I implied in my earlier posts about Parallel Circuit in Tehran and Everyday in Antwerp . In this case, the exhibition was curated personally by owner Robbie Fitzpatrick, whose booth at Liste in Basel caught my eye for the same reason. I was especially glad to see a polychrome limewood relief by Mathis Collins, a favourite of mine, there; a large painting by Vittorio Brodmann - I like to see what he's up to; and a small one of peaches by Ulala Imai, whose engaging painting of bacon and eggs, similar in size, had already caught my eye at...

Paris Internationale and Asia Now were two of the main 'side-shows' during FIAC week. Crèvecoeur at Paris Internationale In my post about the FIAC , I suggested Paris Internationale was roughly 'the FIAC's Liste', and in the one about Basel , that at Liste, 'less fancy galleries can show edgier (and cheaper) work in grungier surroundings.' Paris Internationale was at its grungiest when, a few years ago, it took place in a disused garage and all the works ended up covered in dust. This year, the location was anything but grungy: an empty mansion of vast, labyrinthine apartments ('block of flats' would be too lowly a term) on the avenue Victor Hugo, in in the 16th arrondissement. Two exhibits in particular stood out, to me: Crèvecoeur's spacious installation, including painted walls, of works by Ad Minoliti and Naoki Sutter-Shudo, whose little sculptures had already tempted me at the Ménilmontant gallery; and Delgosha, from Tehran, who'd gone o...

Hopping in September from the Greek Islands to Basel and back, like hopping straight from summer to winter without passing 'Go', was already disorienting. Getting used to Paris again after two months reading a Kindle on the beach has been hard. Life here is what the French call ' sportif ': climbing up and down Métro stairs and squeezing into trains, leaping on and off buses, shopping, walking into town and back... all these things drain energy. Even wearing shoes and bearing the weight of warm clothes is tiring. Now I'm an old-age pensioner, it takes time to get back into the swing. And then, there were people to see, exhibitions to catch up with (those I hadn't missed altogether by being away in September), the opera season starting up again post-Covid, in Paris and Brussels, even Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs' 1977 piece  I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating  at the Théâtre de la Ville, no less, to see... ... and F...

On my way back from Basel to Naxos to continue my holidays, I had a day to while away in Athens before the ferry. As it happened, it was the opening day of this year's Athens Biennale, so I went along to take a look. This year is the Biennale's seventh 'edition', called Eclipse and co-curated by Omsk Social Club and Larry Ossei-Mensah, under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio. It's centred on three disused locations, all in the heart of Athens, between Omonia and Syntagma. The main space is a former department store, Fokas, that shut down as a result of the economic crisis in 2013. The installations continue across the street in a totally different building, Athens' first post-independence courthouse, dating from the 1830s. From the looks of it inside, the building must have been practically a ruin. But it's been renovated, with the rough stone walls left bare and new, cement staircases with contemporary steel handrails. The Biennale is the first event to t...

As I said in my last post, I'm taking a brief break from my ' Art fatigue ' articles to take a look at Mamali Shafahi's new Heirloom Velvet works, featured by Dastan at Liste in Basel this year alongside some of Reza Shafahi's sketches. I've already written about Mamali's work with his dad, Reza, in a post entitled Reza Shafahi: from retired wrestler to 'outsider' artist,  focusing on Reza's work, rather than Mamali's. Here, I'll be looking at Mamali's own recent work. As I explained in the earlier article, as a part of his long-term Daddy Sperm project, Mamali asked his father Reza, a former wrestler then 72, to start drawing. The idea was basically to see if any genetic link emerged in their work. Since then, Reza has developed his own artistic practice, following his own inspiration. Meanwhile, Mamali has developed the project through successive stages and various media: an exhibition of paintings: Occidental Icons (2012), a vid...