Posts mit dem Label La Defense werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label La Defense werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen

Samstag, 30. Juni 2012

Not the Jeans...


Good Morning,

I think it‘s really important, especially for galeries, that they have an interesting display or poster or some sort of eyecatcher in their windows or doors. If you don‘t notice something special about a place, or don‘t even notice that it‘s a galery, the galery is doing something wrong.
So when I was walking through the city and I noticed these wonderful photographs in the window, I was instantly intrigued. Maybe also because the name next to the photo was a name I knew. 
But it wasn‘t a name I came across in my endeavors in art, but in my other field of study - social anthropology. 
The name Lévi-Strauss, for most people, means a famous brand of jeans-wear. But every anthropologist associates something else with that name. Claude Lévi-Strauss was a famous sociologist and ethnologist in the 20th century, who died recently in 2009 at the age of 101 years. 


In this lifetime he undertook many explorations, mostly to southern America. Brasil was frequently visited by Lévi-Strauss and his associates for research where he also took the photographs which were on display at the „Defacto la Gallery“- Galery. The title of the exposition was „Mondes Perdus“ and it displayed all pictures he took during a reserach trip where he tried to find out, how the technical progress and urbanisation influences and changes the life and agriculture of the indigenous farmers in Brasil. All the pictures were taken by a Leica camera and most of them are portraits of indigenous people living in the rainforest.


The photos were beautiful and very expressive, an effect that was enhanced through the black and white-styled pictures. My dad would have loved the exposition. Simple, expressive photos. 

Montag, 25. Juni 2012

The Moretti - No, it's not a drink.

Hey there,
One thing I hadn‘t done until now (shame on me) was visit La Défense. It is a businessquarter in the north-east of Paris. It is the elongation of the Champs-Élysées and it end with the modernist huge Grande Arche. La Défense consists of lots of Skyscrapers, Bureaubuildings, Shopping- and Businesscenters. It has, in contrast to the old parts of Paris, a very modern and steril feel to it. But it was worth the trip! 
In the middle of the busy lunchhours something caught my eye. From far away it looked like one of the skyscrapers but as I went closer, I saw that it was a huge cylindrical sculpture. It was made out of a lot of different colored and sized pipes and fit perfectly into the line of skyscrapers. 
























It was called „The Moretti“ after its inventor Raymond Moretti. He created it in 1990, especially for La Défense - and besides it being a wonderful piece of art, it also serves as an industrial chimeney. Brilliant! Moretti was a french painter and sculpturer friends with famous artist of his time, like Picasso and Cocteau, with whom he shared close personal and professional relationships.


„The Moretti“ was a wonderful splash of color in the otherwise grey Défense. I enjoyed it quite alot.