Art and Culture, London

A.A. Murakami at Superblue – Beguiling Bouncing Bubbles

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Ellie & I recently visited A A Murakami’s Silent Fall at Burlington Gardens at the rear end of the Royal Academy building complex. Timed with the beginning of Frieze Week 2021 the installation will be running until summer 2022. FLOATING BUBBLES You enter a giant, relatively dark room where bubbles are being released from tube-like dispensers above you. Because of the mirrors spread all over the walls, the space seems like an infinite forest. The bubbles look relatively heavy like honey or jelly. However, they turn out to weigh next to nothing. This is why they float towards the ground very slowly. CATCH THEM WITH YOUR HAND You can catch them with your hand. The gallery provides you with a glove for that purpose, as you are not supposed to touch the bubbles with your bare hands. You can make the bubbles bounce up and down on your glove-covered palm […]

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Art and Culture, London

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2021 – Best one in many years!

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We’ve visited the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition religiously almost every year since we relocated to London from Munich respectively Sydney more than 15 years ago. It used to be our cultural highlight every year. We almost measured each year in art & culture as before-the-Exhibition and after-the-Exhibition. We’d say “Oh yes, that exhibition starts just six weeks before the Summer Exhibition’s deadline for submissions, doesn’t it,” or “We’ve got tickets for this show for a Friday night a month after the Summer Exhibition will have finished.”   WE ABSOLUTELY LOVE THE ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION With few exceptions we visited each Summer Exhibition several times, each time discovering new aspects of some of the artworks that we had previously missed. A painting that might have seemed merely shrill and hard on the eye suddenly revealed a political message. Sculptures that we might have deemed boring turned out to have required […]

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Art and Culture, London

Moments Exhibition at Moyse’s Hall in Bury St Edmunds – Banksy, Hirst, Emin and more

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Ellie recently dragged me to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, near Cambridge, to visit a sunflower field nearby. After we’d enjoyed a sea of yellow, we went back into town to look for a place to have lunch at. This is when we saw a random banner spanning over the main pedestrian zone. It advertised Moyse’s Hall’s Moments exhibition. Moreover, it advised that the artists on display included Banksy, Damien Hirst, and Tracy Emin. We normally don’t go to a lot of art exhibitions outside the bigger cities, but this caught our attention.     World-class art at the Moments Exhibition Bury St Edmunds While we were waiting for our food to arrive we did some googling. There were various enthusiastic reviews of the Moments Exhibition Bury St Edmunds. We learned that Banksy himself is thought to have visited the exhibition just a week earlier, before going on a spraying […]

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Art and Culture, London

Selfie to Self-Expression – Saatchi Gallery – our Review

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We’ve just returned from a visit to this fabulous exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. According to its brochure, “From Selfie to Self-Expression” is “the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day, and celebrates the creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity”. The first room shows self-portraits of Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Matisse and many of the other greats on i-Phone shaped large electronic displays with actual i-Phones to their bottom right-hand side, showing the Greats’ made-up Instagram profiles with 34,146 likes on the Picasso selfie, and so on. Hilarious. The whole things spreads over three floors, and it gets even better, the further you progress through the many rooms filled with exhibits.                                  We were particularly fond of the exhibit in Gallery 3: “Hello World! […]

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