Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (1975), via Art Observed

Featuring one hundred artworks by Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeu de Paume anchors its summer offering with a show dedicated to the artist’s equally enigmatic and engaging practice, one that worked through principles of urban encounter, agency and abstraction with a unique sense of humor.  The show, titled Anarchitect explores the importance of Matta-Clark’s practice towards a rethinking of architecture after modernism. Embracing a diversity of media that include photography, film and printmaking, the exhibition features a number of works related to contemporary urban culture that further contextualize Gordon Matta-Clark’s compelling critique of architecture. (more…)

Ed Ruscha, Baby Jet, 1998. Photo by Paul Ruscha, courtesy of Moderna Museet.

Currently on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, through September 5, is Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting. This exhibition, which is a collaboration with Hayward Gallery in London, shows more than 70 paintings. It spans the period from 1958, five years prior to his debut in 1963 at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, to the present day. Curated by Lars Nittve and Ann-Sofi Noring, the installation groups Ruscha’s works in chronological order so as to allow the viewer to see the development of the artist’s various motifs and styles over time.

The exhibition’s overarching theme, of course, is words and their constantly shifting relationships with context and message. As the curators explain, “In all his paintings there are tensions and frictions at play: between foreground and background, between text and image, and between how words look and what they mean.”

Installation shot, Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years Of Painting. Photo by Ã…sa Lundén, courtesy of Moderna Museet.

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À chacun sa vérité, poster d’une exposition qui ne verra jamais le jour (2009) by Francesco Vezzoli, via Jeu de Paume

Currently on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris is Francesco Vezzoli’s “À Chacun Sa Vérité.” The exhibition is devoted to the renowned Italian film director Federico Fellini.  Vezzoli presents two new works which investigate the realms of illusion and and fiction in our everyday perception of reality.  The artist also incorporates themes which are present throughout Fellini’s work such as his love of celebrities, the ongoing presence of desire,  his continual references to the mass media, and the myths often found in social and political life.

Portrait Surréaliste d’Anita Ekberg (avant et après La Dolce Vita) (2008) by Francesco Vezzoli, via Jeu de Paume

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