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Merry Christmas - Buon Natale from Rome!

on December 24, 2014

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Piazza San Pietro - Christmas 2014

Christmas San Pietro

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Anselm Kiefer: Hortus Philosophorum at the Gagosian Gallery

I don't usually focus on private art galleries here but there's a small yet exquisite Anselm Kiefer exhibition running right now at the Gagosian Gallery on Via Francesco Crispi which is well worth going out of your way to visit. Whilst the Gagosian may present a challenge to some artists given that its principal exhibition space is an oval room, Hortus Philosophorum (a title charcoaled directly on the wall by the artist) consists of a group of eight sculptures which work perfectly in the main gallery. Each sculpture in the series is a variation on the core form of a massive, irregular stack of books made from lead and the visitor is allowed to circle around them exploring the unique attributes of the individual works which reference poetry, mythology, and diverse strands of cultural history. I particularly liked Sternenfall ( Falling Stars ) in which the stack of books is surrounded by glass shards inscribed with numbers; although it isn't immediately obvious what thes...

Gregory Porter at Roma Jazz Festival

Sala Sinopoli, Auditorium Parco della Musica - 14 November, 2015 The 39th edition of the Roma Jazz Festival began in the immediate aftermath of the recent Paris terrorist attacks, so it was perhaps inevitable that the shock waves of those events were still reverberating when the Gregory Porter Quintet took to the stage less than 24 hours later for the highly anticipated opening concert at Rome's annual Jazz fest. After a minute's silence dedicated to the victims, followed by spontaneous applause, the band appeared to cheers from the audience, cheers that transformed into an enormous roar when the man in the hat himself appeared and launched into an heartfelt Someday We'll All Be Free . Elegantly acknowledging what had happened in Paris the night before with a handful of carefully chosen words – “It is what it is...all we can do is pray...and let it be” – he swiftly moved on with On My Way to Harlem , a perfect marriage of soul and jazz that set the tone for what wou...

Aleksandr Deineka: The Soviet Master of Modernity at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni

Future Aviators © Tret'jakov National Gallery, Moscow Ever since I read Camilla Gray's The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 as a student, I've always had a fascination with Russian art and in particular, the impact of that extraordinarily creative period at the beginning of the last century which saw the abstract paintings of artists such as Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky influence the course of modern art in the Western world. Gray's wonderful book closes the story in 1922 in the early years of the Soviet regime and only mentions in passing the following generation of artists such as Alexander Deineka (1899 – 1969) who would once again embrace figurative painting in a style tagged Socialist Realism. I confess, my own knowledge of the period stopped at the end of Gray's book too, so the discovery of Deineka's work via the major retrospective currently on show at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni – the first ever to be held outside of Russia – has b...

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