Back from Europe and overflowing with inspiration

I feel a little bad for a leaving my blog unattended for so long, but I had good reason; I was overseas taking in some culture! First on my list was France, where I stayed with an artist friend in Paris before I headed south to Provence, the Alps and the Mediterranean. I returned to Paris for another week and then headed for Berlin where I stayed with a musician friend. The gray skies and freezing temperatures were pretty dismal compared to the sun in Southern France. I was in for more of the same when I flew to London to stay with some actor/improviser friends. I created a bit of a homebase there and took small trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Totnes (a small village in Devon). I returned to London for a few last splendid days and flew to Toronto from there... more about that later.

As you might imagine I saw a lot of art in that time, I visited approximately two galleries/museums everyday for two months. There is a point when you just can’t absorb anymore visual stimuli, (I hit it a few times), though there were still a few stellar exhibitions that managed to resonate with me. Since I’ve been back a lot of people have been asking me about the best shows I saw, so here’s a list of the best temporary exhibitions I visited while I was abroad (in order that I saw them):

-Chasing Napoleon at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris
-La Subversion des Images at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
-La Biennale de Lyon hosted primarily at La Sucriere, Lyon
-Né dans la Rue at Fondation Cartier, Paris
-Elles at the Centre Pomipdou, Paris
-Thomas Demand (retrospective) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
-Kiosk – Modes of Multiplication, presented by Christoph Keller at the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin
-Anish Kapoor (retrospective) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
-Jill Magid: Authority to Remove at the Tate Modern, London
-The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing at the Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh
-Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers at the White Chapel Gallery, London


















Photos are of 2/3 of Barry McGee's installation, titled "Installation" at the Biennale de Lyon.