ENTITRE
a tribute to physical matter in the digital age.
Penone at the Palais d’Iéna
In 2013, Giuseppe Penone’s powerful tree sculptures placed on the Royal Way’s immaculate cut grass had created a sensation in Versailles by contrasting with André le Nôtre’s controlled landscaped gardens designed more than 400 years ago.
Penone’s collaboration with Versailles commenced in 1999 when he was able to buy two dead cedar tree trunks from the remains of a thunderstorm. Cedro di Versailles and Tea scorza e scorza (Between Bark and Bark) were made from those tree trunks and highlight the artist’s intention not to shape nature and alienate it from man but rather to show how man and nature bear resemblance to one another.
In 2019 Penone later occupied the hypostyle hall of the Palais Iena which houses the French Economic Environmental Council with his monumental installation Matrice di linfa, a large scale tree sculpture cut open like sacrificial altar.
MORE ENTITRE
is life without Christo still bearable?
sketches of Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped on sale at the 2020 BRAFA
He was meant to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in September MMXX and add his touch to the grandparis but on May 31st Christo, the poetic landscape artist, sadly passed away.
We found Christo’s 2016 floating Piers installation on Lake Iseo in Italy particularly moving as it was executed a few years after his wife’s death and was a project they both had at heart to execute. After multiple failed attempts in Rio de Plata in Argentina and Tokya Bay in Japan, Christo got the permission to extend his orange fabric on the surface of the lake Iseo in 2016 to everyone’s delight, a surreal experience that attracted crowds of visitors.
Born in Bulgaria in 1935, Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff attended the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia and first started his artistic career as a portrait painter in Paris after fleeing Prague when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 broke out.
In Paris, he met his future wife and artistic soulmate Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon - with whom he later formed the inseparable artistic duo “Christo”- upon the delivery of a portrait he had made of her mother.
With Jeanne-Claude, his work took another dimension and he quickly dismissed painting to focus solely on stacking, wrapping and obscuring surfaces and objects. The couple soon began collaborating together on monumental scale environmental wrappings; Christo would sketch and conceptualise and Jeanne-Claude would enable their conception in the physical world.
By wrapping objects, and later altering entire landscapes, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work questions their very nature our relationship to them. Christo’s approach to art was unique in multiple ways, he was never signed to a gallery and was the sole commissioner of all his works which he funded by selling the sketches of his future installations.
L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped sketches on sale at the 2020 BRAFA
Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped installation is now rescheduled to September MMXXI as a posthume tribute to the late artists’ body of work.
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The Pont Alexandre III
World Exhibitions effectively contribute to the construction of cities and to their international aura. What do the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre iii have in common? They were all inaugurated in the context of a World Exhibition and still greatly contribute to Paris’ prestige by continuously attracting millions of local and foreign visitors everyday.
The pont Alexandre iii, situated between the Invalides and the GrandParis and named after the Russian Tsar Alexandre iii was completed in 1900 and was to represent the Franco-Russian alliance in a complicated diplomatic context with the German Empire.
Enjoy a casual day on the Pont Alexandre iii:
The arched bridge is not only one of the most beautiful in Paris to this day, it also represents one that required great innovative technical abilities to build at the time. The architects and engineers comissioned at the time had been instructed to find a way to design a continous river-crossing that was to follow the Champs Elysées’ axis right up to the Invalides Esplanade without obstructing its view.
Seventeen artists collaborated on the decorative programme of this splendid bridge. In the center of the arch, the nymph of Seine and Neva river continues to symbolise the friendship between the two countries, which maintained their alliance 14 years after the first World War.
Due to covid-19, the next World Exhibition: the Dubai Expo 2020 has been postponed to 2021 and will be held from October 1st 2021 - March 31st 2022.
