Madrid: Mario Testino - Todo o Nada @ Museo Thyssen Bornemisza

Maybe this is not real for everyone, but there is something special at looking at pictures, family albums. You can, up to a certain point, uncover the relationship between the object of the picture and the photographer by the way they are staring at the objective.

Todo o Nada is the exhibition that the Museum Thyssen Bonrnemisza does in Madrid to celebrate Mario Testino, the Peruvian photographer known as one of the main portrait artist in the last decades. After a über recognized photo shoot for Princess Diana, the pictures of Testino - before mainly celebrated in the realm of fashion - went global in a different way. He was not only a photographer of fashion but of character.

The exhibition - 54 large prints of portraits of ladies with either high fashion (TODO) or no clothes at all (NADA)- is a good choice of this kind of intimate vision of his subjects.

There are all time favorites specially in the nude section, where it seems like the most important part of the picture is not what they choose to show, but what they hide. The eyes of the models some how also translate the mood in which the shoot was taken - or trick you into believing you know.

It's a short but nice exhibit, with no-nonsense in the design. Everything should be as clean as possible to let the ladies talk from their pictures. It can be a good combination with the great selection of the museum, or just a nice ride into the realm of beauty.

(The minipicture is Natalia Vodianova, photographed by Mario Testino in Cannes in 2007. It is the main image of the exhibition)

Todo o Nada (21.9.2010 - 9.1.2011)
Museo Thyssen Bornemisza
Paseo del Prado, 8. Madrid
5€ only for this exhibition. 3.5€ for seniors, students and fine art teachers. 10/6€ for the exhibition + permanent collection.
Opening hours – Tuesdays through Sunday, 10:00 to 19:00 hours.
Webpage

Barcelona: Domestic @ Espai Cultural Caja Madrid - Last call!

Some people – like myself – enjoy seeing pictures of people in their “private” environment. In their house. For my is a mixture of voyeur-ness and also a new line to imagine their lives and how they related to yours. For the last two months, the Espai Cultural Casa Madrid in Barcelona has open to the public “Domestic”, a photography and new media exhibition that means to give a new reading n the contemporary house – on what we call home (or family) and why we do it.
Situated just by Plaça Catalunya, it's a nice stroll in a quiet and shadowy place when you're tired of walking, And in the walls, all the pictures to people eating, sleeping, getting married, denouncing abuses or just posing for the photographer seem like small windows to other lives (attention to a specific series, “Through the window” of Giorgio Barrera”).
There are also four quite eye-catching video work about the capturing of such image: what kind of story each ones tells about their own photography, how do you live according to the country you are in and a interactive game of pre-conceived ideas: you must matched the videos of some houses with people (a butcher, a policeman, an opera singer...).
Other interesting thing are some small books scattered through the exhibition with special collections of pictures: the giving birth of a girl in her parents house, the wedding of a gay couple from San Francisco in Barcelona, the domestic pictures that you can do in the intimacy of your house for a year. There is also an online project where people can upload their own “Domestic” images. Take a peak here.
Maybe some of the walls are too much – with too many pictures to see – but overall you get the feeling at the end of the show that it is always worth to look a little bit further and try to understand what else is behind that quiet or silly neighbor of yours.
(The image in this post is the first very big picture of the exhibit called “False appearances” (2005) from Frédéric Nauczyciel)

Domestic (29.4.2010 - 27.6.2010)
Espai Cultural Caja Madrid
Plaça de Catalunya, 9. Barcelona
Free entrance to the exhibitions.
Opening hours – Monday through saturday, 10 to 21hrs. Sundays and holidays, 10 to 14 hrs.
Webpage

The Hague: A Room for Art @ Mauritshuis-Last Call!

Don't be fooled: the Mauritshuis is not a museum – it's a Royal Gallery designated with the best possible taste. As a Gallery – and a little bit as a museum – the curators program small exhibitions like this one “A Room for Art”, that will end next Monday (that is, the last day to visit in Sunday June 27th, 2010).
When I talk about small exhibitions I mean one or two small rooms with at the most three master works in the theme that they're talking about. In this case, it goes about the rooms that very rich collectors and sponsors of artists in the XVIIth century had to keep all the works they patronized. They could very well be rooms in their own houses or in the houses of the artists that used to work for them.
The exhibition is, as customary in Mauritshuis, small and enough. You have only seven works of art to carefully lay eyes in that idea of mega-painting , that many times was made as a concert: a lot of painters working in such portrait of the extraordinary collections of work sponsored by those who also where extraordinarily rich.
That's what I liked the most: the idea of a group of painting agreeing in painting in the same canvas, to portrait as many masterpieces as they could as a group, trying to portray that reality of richness hidden in such “Rooms for Art” in the old Antwerp.
(The image that illustrates this post is one of the paintings, made by W. van Haecht and entitled "Alexander the Great visiting the studio of Apelles".)

Mauritshuis-The Royal Picture Gallery
Korte Vijverberg 8, The Hague.
Adult entrance price: 12,00€ (2010)
Opening hours - visit web page, they change through the year. In summer they open everyday.

Amsterdam: Anne Frank Huis Museum

One of the first books I remember reading was the Diary of Anne Frank. I must have been 12 years old and it was easy for me to relate to the girl: in a very different way, I also felt misunderstood and didn't quite understand why the world had to turn the way it did. It was a discovery, the building up of an hero: also, the way to get me very interested in history. The whole WWII and Holocaust information came to me in a very different way after reading such book.

I daydreamed about going to the place where Anna had been hiding so many times... and then I forgot. To the point that I went three times to Amsterdam without including it in my day plans. Until one day I decided to get up early, make the trip and start the day with the line outside the very renovated house. It was not such a long wait until a thin rain. By the time I was out - around two hours later - the people waiting for an entrance will make a like almost a block long.

The site museum is very internationally oriented: you can read or hear the information in six or seven languages. It's always filled with people, so it's important that one has enough patience to go room to room without getting nervous from the extra noise. International students fill the place - not always happy with the choice that their teachers made.

What actually surprised me the most is that I always imagined that house even smaller. I know, is an awful place, but it looked like somewhere that you could actually survived on... I guess then it was fear what made it so oppressive and what is so clearly exposed in the book.

However, it also made me think about the person, the lady Anna Frank. She had a very cold view of everything that was happening and was very goal oriented: she understood Kitty (or the public) as somebody that must want to read or hear this. The diary - shown there - is written with such a clear hand writing, as a transparent desire of latter publication. One of the last areas of the visit shows an interview with Otto Frank, her father. He says how amazed he was when he learned all that she thought while in "captivity": "my only conclusion is that parents never get to know well their children".

All in all, it's a beautiful and comprehensive site museum, very much worth the visit and the not-so-cheap entrance.

Extra: Apart from the site museum, there are usually temporary exhibitions, including one related to "current issues". In September 2009, I saw an interactive project called "Free2Choose" about the possible limits to basic human rights in the contemporary world. Visitors were invited to see a video and then vote against or for certain limitations of freedom dictated by law in our world. It's a pity that is no longer there: it was quite fun.

Anne Frank Museum
Prinsengracht 267, Amsterdam.
Adult entrance price: 8,50€ (2010)
Opening hours - visit web page, they change through the year.

Barcelona: John Baldessari - Pure Beauty @ MACBA

There is something appealing about going to MACBA: the enormous white figure in the middle of downtown Barcelona chaos, surrounded by skaters and lost tourists... it still looks a little bit like a piece in itself.

But it makes you feel something. That's the main reason for me to go exhibits - to unveil a feeling or a thought that was hiding. The exhibition "Pura bellesa" (Pure Beauty) of John Baldessari in MACBA makes you think in so many way. Being an art teacher, many of his pieces seem to have this didactic interest - as of to make you think what are you making (or what do you care for art).

For me it was specially interesting for many straight-forward pieces with "literal information" like the one displayed in this post, and also for the process of the artist. I'll try to make myself clear: you can see Baldessari discovering and using new media to express his ideas. It's possible to perceive the change of shapes of similar reflections along the exhibit. He is so keen on finding new ways that he even decided at a certain point to burn most of his paintings, finding them not faithful to what he wanted to communicate (there is proof if this in the first piece shown in the exhibit).



A not to be missed opportunity. The exhibit will be on @ Macba until April 25th, before traveling back to the California of Baldessari.

Pura Bellesa / Pure Beauty - John Baldessari
MACBA (web)
Plaça dels Ángels, 1
Barcelona.
Tuesdays closed.
Adult full ticket: 7,5€