Friday, October 01, 2010

london art and architecture

Busy day at London yesterday - saw the Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern on its first day:



I'm afraid I have to agree with the review in the Evening Standard - a biographical approach would have been more enlightening. Gauguin only discovered art in his 20s and became a professional painter in his 30s, then turned his back on the Parisian art scene to live in the South Pacific. Just how this unusual biography came to happen doesn't become clear in the exhibition.

I caught the tail end of the exhibition "Exposed" as well - Tate Modern offers a very affordable combined ticket for the two events while they overlap. More on that exhibition some other time.

I also visited the allegedly ugliest new building in the UK:




and still find it beautiful. What most puzzles me about the "ugly award" is that if you look round Elephant & Castle everything else (shopping centre, 60s tower blocks) is truly hideous, so the one way in which the "owl" doesn't fit in is that it is more beautiful than everything within a mile radius. (It isn't in fact substantially higher than the surrounding tower blocks.) Pleased to see that the Latin American restaurant "La Bodeguita" is still there in the Elephant & Castle shopping centre, it has in fact a perfect view onto the front side of the owl.

And I saw Anish Kapoor's mirrors in Hyde Park:



and the red pavillion at the Serpentine Gallery of which I posted a few (all-red) images on my flickr photostream.

Oh and I had a coffee that was just the right size:



Perfect day.

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