Sigalit Landau: "Soil Nursing" at the Kamel Mennour Gallery

Good morning contemporary art lovers!

The Kamel Mennour Gallery - one of the most famous and well known galleries in Paris - is pleased to announce its latest exhibition which choose to show the new work of Sigalit Landau, an Israeli-born artist (1969) who lives and works in Tel Aviv. As you may know Kamel Mennour is a French self-taught art dealer who became one of the best because of his passion for art and his relation with the artists. Their collaboration started a few years ago and its new exhibition is focused on three videos and several photographs that basically show the viewer the work done by the workers in the olive groves. 

After a very warm welcoming, Kamel explained us and told us about Sigalit work, her inspirations, her goals… Palestinians workers are working on Israeli lands. The tone is set. It's difficult to pay attention to the intensity of her work if we only look at the pictures. the sizes of the videos are huge, monumentales and they reprensent the collect of olives. At the first sight, it seems to be a very calm and peaceful day and suddently the machines are setting off. All the serenity of the scene is gone... We think about the duality between Israelis and Paslestinians. The small farmers, who used to get in the harvest hardly and with their own hands, are suddenly stumped by the arrival of those new machines. The first rom is though : the duality between Israelis ans Palestinians ; the calm of a harvest and the harsh sound of the machines, the sunlight that one can see through the branchs and the sound of the olives falling down from the trees…

In the second room, she decided to show another side of her work. She's one of those women who got the chance to become a mother later in life. This room is dedicated to her maternity, to her fears, to her apprehensions. Her sculptures, all made out of different types of marble, are the perfect representations of pillows that help women to breast-feed their babies.

Once again one can feel the contrast between the unbearable noise of the other room and the serenity of this one. One wants to talk in a low voice !!

Exhibition runs until July 25 and I really encourage all of you that are in Paris to go to see this exhibition ! 

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan at the MoMA

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
For those who may have missed the opening a few days ago, on July 1^st, it’s one of the most interesting exhibition in New York this summer. Indeed this retrospective is the largest exhibition outside Italy of works by Italian-born artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994). This wonderful show was organized by the MoMA in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London.

Alighiero Boetti was a conceptual artist often related to the art movement Arte Povera which is an art movement that was created at the end of the 60s in Italy. Artists used to attack the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether art as the private expression of the individual still had an ethical reason to exist. They are well known for using found objects in their works. Antoni Tapies, Alberto Burri, Pierro Manzoni and Lucio Fontana can also be involved in the Arte Povera but Boetti was one of the leading artists. 

The exhibition is organized according to a chronological order. The first pieces to be seen are his sculptural works, his objects, made in wood, cardboard and aluminum. He gave priority to natural materials… At the beginning of his career his works were essentially made to experiment materials and measurement. Time after time he started to explore notions of duality and multiplicity, order and disorder… Each gallery hidden a trap, a trick, that symbolizes the indissoluble link between the artist and his admirers.

"This exhibition will celebrate the material diversity, conceptual complexity, and visual beauty of Boetti’s work, bringing together his ideas about order and disorder, non-invention, and the way in which the work addresses the whole world, travel, and time, proving him to be one of the most important and influential international artists of his generation." Exhibition is on view until October 1^st.