Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection – For Your Eyes Only exhibition

 

Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection – For Your Eyes Only exhibition. The un-missable exhibition For Yours Eyes Only – A Private Collection, from Mannerism to Surrealism at the Peggy Guggenheim  Collection, until August 31, is curated by Andreas Beyer and presents for the first time to the public the private Collection of Richard and Ulla Dreyfus-Best, in Basel. On view are approximately 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings and artefacts ranging from the Middle Ages to the present including works by Arnold Böcklin, Victor Brauner, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Gustave Moreau, Heinrich Füssli, among many others. The exhibition is co-organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Kunstmuseum Basel where it will be on view from September 21, through January 4, 2015.

Above. René Magritte (1898 –1967) - The Ready Made Bouquet, 1956 - Oil on canvas - Private collection.

 

 Curator Andreas Beyer

 

Gabriella Codognato, Ulla Dreyfus-Best, Charly Herscovici and Attilio Codognato

Photograph courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection

For Your Eyes Only. Austrian master, 18th century - Vanity Portrait of a Lady - Oil on copper - Private collection.

 

For Your Eyes Only. Circle or follower of Faustino Bocchi (1659-1741) – Master of the Fertility of the Egg – Scene of Witchcraft – oil on canvas.

Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Philip Rylands

 Photograph courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection

For Your Eyes Only.  Hans Baldung Grien - Study of Seven Heads, Including Death’s, ca. 1513 –15 - pen and brown ink on paper - Private collection.

 

For Your Eyes Only.  Andy Warhol (1928-1987) – Skull – 1976-77 – synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas.

 

For Your Eyes Only.  Anonymous – 18th century – Death’s Head – Fayence.

 

For Your Eyes Only.  Salvador Dali (1904 –1989) - Flying Giant Demi-Tasse with Incomprehensible Appendage Five Meters Long, 1944 – 45 - Oil on canvas - Private collection.

 

Manfredi Bellati, Barbara Foscari, Adalberto Cremonesi, Helene de Franchis and Tonchi Foscari

For Your Eyes Only

The End

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London: Restaurants – Ottolenghi’s Nopi

 

London: Restaurants – Ottolenghi’s Nopi.  With three deli’s, an online store, the Soho-based restaurant Nopi, his column in the Guardian, on-going cookery books and programs for television Yotam Ottolenghi is a busy chef. In his Nopi restaurant customers are greeted with fresh baked bread and his trademarks platters full of salads, which celebrate the bold flavors, he is so well known for. “We wanted an all-day brasserie. An urban, busy place, yet a place where you can relax and enjoy the food, service and view, both of the premises and of the people.  But, we didn't want to go down the root of creating yet another brasserie in the French style. So we dissected the brasserie elements: marble, tiles, wood and brass. These elements are conjured to create new, surprising and very modern combinations.”   The restaurant was designed by Alex Meitlis, one of the leading architects and furniture designers in Israel.

Nopi. Sami Tamini, “With a cooking style that is as inimitable as it has always been, vibrant and bold yet simple and honest, Sami holds the helm in the heat of the Ottolenghi kitchens since the first day we opened. Head chef, mentor to many, visionary behind so many of the longstanding and latest dishes, Sami’s precision, palate and panache is the heart and soul of the food we are renowned for. He and Yotam have co-authored the Ottolenghi Cookbook and Jerusalem cookbooks."

 

Simple yet elegant table setting; big brass O napkin rings hold crispy ironed napkins whilst the white paper tablecloths are store in especially designed holes in the wall by the bar.

Freshly baked bread, olive oil and water are brought to the table.  The Sparkling water is stored in a bottle with 3 Os on it’s front whilst the flat water has a simple O gold motif.

Mixed beetroot, pickled daikon, sweet miso yoghurt

Nopi. All the table and chairs are designed by architect Alex Meitlis.

Nopi’s menu changes according to the seasons but signature dishes from head chef Ramael Scully include courgette and manouri fritters, coriander seed-crusted burrata with slices of blood orange, above, and twice-cooked baby chicken with lemon myrtle salt and chili jam. Nopi serves breakfast, lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menus.

 

The brass lamps are replicas of an old lamp found in Jaffa’s flee market and, are reproduced by Iris Design Studio in Israel.

 

 

Nopi.  The more formal design of the ground floor gives way to the informality of the basement, where two long canteen tables look on to the theatre of the open kitchen.

 

The bar sculpture is by artist Tamar Blum Zidon, she brings a unique approach to a mundane and usually discarded material; using cardboard as her medium, she has developed a specialized technique in which she lets her personal artistic style flourish.  Her sculptures organic forms seems to have originated from nature itself, they emulate the work of nature yet do not characteristically imitate it.

 

The Valdeon cheesecake, pickled beetroot, hazelnut, thyme honey comes in a copper pan; the hot handle is wrapped with a napkin which is held together with string.

 Lemon sole, burnt butter, ginger, nori

Plum and Marsala trifle, blackcurrant and liquorice sorbet

Nopi.  The painting is by artist Josephine King who makes ink paintings on paper, framed by text, which documents the often-traumatic experience of her life.  Her debut exhibition “Life so Far” at Riflemaker, documented her bipolar illness, from which she has suffered since age twenty, but which ironically has been the catalyst for her paintings and their subject matter.  The painting above entitled “I told him I was an artist.  He said “can you cook?” is on loan from the Riflemaker Gallery.

 

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Venice: Palazzo Grassi - Irving Penn, Resonance Exhibition

Venice: Palazzo Grassi - Irving Penn, Resonance Exhibition.  The exhibition “Irving Penn, Resonance”, at Palazzo Grassi, until December 31, curated by Pierre Apraxine and Matthieu Humery, brings together on the second floor of the museum 130 photographs, taken between the end of the 1940s and the mid-1980s.

Above: Irving Penn – Woman with Roses (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in Lafaurie dress) – Paris – 1960.

 

Palazzo Grassi - Irving Penn, Resonance. The exhibition  tackles the themes dear to Irving Penn and which, beyond their apparent diversity, all capture every facet of ephemerality. This is true of the selection of photographs from the series “small trades”, taken in France, England and the United States in the 1950s. It is also the case for the portraits taken between the 1950s and the 1970s of celebrities from the world of art, cinema, and literature. Exhibited alongside ethnographic photographs of the people of Dahomey and of tribesmen from New Guinea and Morocco, they strongly underline the brevity of human existence, whether affluent or resource-less, famous or unknown.

Above: Irving Penn – Barnett Newman – New York - 1966  - And - Truman Capote - New York – 1965.

 Photograph courtesy Palazzo Grassi

Palazzo Grassi - Irving Penn, Resonance.  The exhibition path, which encourages dialogue and connections between works that differ in subject matter and period of time, gives prominence to still life photography from the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s: they are composed of cigarette ends, fruit dishes, vanitas as well as animal skulls photographed at the Narodni National Museum in Prague in 1986 for the series “Cranium Architecture”.

Above:  Irvine Penn – Poppy: Showgirl – London – 1968 - Copyright by Conde Nast Publications, Inc. – And – Ripe Cheese – New York – 1992.

 

 

Palazzo Grassi - Irving Penn, Resonance.  I Visiting the Narodni Museum in Prague in 1985, Penn came across a collection of animal skulls.  The following year he photographed twenty-eight of the skulls, selecting twenty-one to print in selenium-toned gelatin silver.  He considered the technique more appropriate to the subject than platinum, the smooth surface of the print echoing the texture of the bone.  Of animal skulls, Penn wrote: “An exquisite edifice and living machine.  Hard chambers of bone to guard soft organs, protected conduits and channels.  Smooth working mechanism of jaws and teeth.” Irving Penn, December 12, 1988.

Above: Irving Penn – Cranium Architecture – 1986.

 

Palazzo Grassi - Irving Penn, Resonance.  A selection of Penn’s work for Vogue is showcased from the collection of Vince Aletti.

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