Pierre Huyghe at Centre Pompidou

Paris’ Centre Pompidou presents the first retrospective of French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe, with an eclectic show bringing together 50 of his projects spanning over the last 20 years. The works – including paintings, photography, installations, film and performance – are to be viewed in no particular order, with the viewer bouncing around the space like a pinball, guided by their own senses from pieces like Timekeeper, a hole in the wall revealing successive layers of paint left by preceding exhibitions, to L’Expedition Scintillante – Acte 3: Untitled (Black Ice Stage), a live performance of an ice-skater twisting and turning on black ice. The viewer is called upon to be a witness to the exhibition from the outset, with their name being shouted out by an announcer at the entrance of the exhibition, emphasizing the living and breathing dimension of the whole show – which also includes a live pink-legged greyhound (Human) running around between the works, a sculpture with a bee-covered head (Untilled (Ligender Frauenakt)) and an artificial micro-climate including rain, fog and snow (L’Expedition Scintillante – Acte 1: Untitled (Weather Score)). The exhibition creates its own self-perpetuating world that exists regardless of our presence, varying in time and space – but that cries out to be seen.  

Gerhard Richter "Panorama" - Centre Pompidou

The Pompidou Centre is hosting a retrospective exhibition on German artist Gerhard Richter, celebrating his 80th birthday and looking back on the career of one of contemporary art's most important figures. The 'Panorama' exhibition is arranged both chronologically and thematically, examining Richter's exploration of the relationship between photography and painting in the 60s, his abstract works of the 70s, his portraits, history painting and landscapes of the 80s, continuing right up until his digitally produced abstract paintings of today. The exhibition centres both physically and conceptually around a room displaying grey and monochrome canvases and sculptural installations made from mirrors or panes of glass, recalling the first Richter exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, held in February 1977 when the museum first opened, alongside a Marcel Duchamp retrospective - an artist by whom Richter is very much inspired. These reflective surfaces question the visual process and allow the artist to produce an image that is constantly changing. We also see Richter hold a mirror up to the history of art with his tributes to Titian, Duchamp, Vermeer and classical landscapes, with his blurred and distorted photorealistic works revisiting familiar compositions, whilst infusing them with a diaphanous atmosphere that lends them a timeless and melancholy nature. As an extension of Richter's monumental abstract paintings of the 80s, we also see the artist's most recent works, in which he uses computer software to produce a large, abstract, digital print and in so doing, reexamines the role of the painter in today's digital age - but as Richter himself says, "I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human."

Gerhard Richter - Panorama

Centre Pompidou, 75004

6th June - 26th September, 2012

Every day except Tuesday, 11am - 9pm. 

Late night openings on Thursdays until 11pm.

www.centrepompidou.fr

Photos copyright Kim Laidlaw 

Matisse at Centre Pompidou

Le Luxe I (1907. Centre Pompidou) and Le Luxe II

(1907 Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhague)

The Pompidou Centre's new blockbuster exhibition Matisse. Paires et Séries is dedicated to the series of modern art master Henri Matisse. Bringing together 60 paintings and 30 sketches from public and private collections worldwide, the exhibition examines Matisse's use of repetition throughout his career. He obsessively painted the same subject two, three, four or even more times at more or less the same time in his life, retaining the same composition and the same canvas size in order to explore questions of form and style. The artist himself described it as "Like someone who writes a sentence, rewrites it, makes new discoveries." Here the matching paintings are displayed in their pairs or their series spanning the entirety of Matisse's career from his exploration of pointillism in 1899 right up to the collages of the 1950s (with the famous Nu Bleu series of 1952). A room is dedicated to Matisse's series of line drawings and sketches which are drawn with such a spontaneity that they capture movement and the passage of time as if they were film stills. The exhibition is devoid of too much pedagogical direction, with the collection being displayed chronologically and the theme of each series - and the tension and contrast between each set of works - speaking for itself. 

Matisse. Paires et Séries. 

7th March - 18th June 2012

Centre Pompidou

Place Georges Pompidou, 75004

www.centrepompidou.fr

Open Weds-Mon, 11am-9pm