Here's Olaf Breuning's Art Freaks. I came across this exhibit that's currently installed at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris- one of my all time favorite contemporary galleries in the world! I wish I could see this, but unfortunately it's not in my agenda to make it to Paris by September. I'm a sucker for installations, portraiture, nudity, and blatant homages to earlier artists. As there's no such thing as new art, we might as well be flamboyant in our hat-tipping.
Take a look at the video (sorry could not find English subtitles, but you'll get the gist):
This exhibit combines all four enticing elements! Huge banners hang down, depicting naked bodies painted in the manner of celebrated artists from times past. Often grotesque, mostly humorous- a reoccurring theme in this Swiss artist's body of work. By combining the grandiose past of High Art (outsiders and historically avant garde artists) with the tongue in cheek process of body painting, Breuning admires his predecessors and mocks their celebrity en même temps. This exhibit is an awesome contrast to the overwhelming, near-debilitating mass of French museums and galleries in the nation's capital, where most people masochistically perform grand Bataan Death Marches through each wing of the Louvre til brain death.
The building of the Palais de Tokyo itself is worth seeing. A massive, open, abstracted neo-classical space divided into wings around a central courtyard, one houses the Palais de Tokyo as a contemporary exhibition hall, within the other resides the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris for 20th C. exhibits. The two huge structures are conjoined by a vast colonnade entrance and dressed in relief sculpture throughout, all built for the 1937 World Expo- the very same in which the Spanish pavilion displayed Picasso's Guernica in protest of the Spanish Civil War, but also in direct confrontation with the nearby German and Soviet pavilions in full fascist iconography.
You can also see art for free via graffiti that now adorns the exterior sculptures, keep it classy Paris!
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| (c) Brian Kyle |
