Manchester Street Art

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, London

Highly recommended. It is a great exhibition about the Spanish fashion designer at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

On now until February 18, 2018

Have a look!

The Worker Bees, Manchester

Riviera Style, London

A review by guest author Tanja Russell.

Fashion and Textile Museum London
Until August 30, 2015When in London, step away from the well-trodden tourist path and visit Bermondsey, an unassuming part of town just a short walk from London Bridge, Borough Market and the Shard. The current exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum is a must for all lovers of fashion and glamour, for historians, social historians and anyone interested in the development of the modern world.

„Riviera Style – Resort and Swimwear since 1900“ celebrates ‘fashion at its most fun’ showcasing the changes in fashion since the late nineteenth century, when bathing became a recreational pastime, as well as being a social history of holidays in Europe.

The exhibits range from very modest knee-length dresses made from woven flannels worn in the early twentieth century to the speed-enhancing Stella McCartney design for the 2012 London Olympics and everything in between. The influence of the French and Italian Riviera can be seen in the British designs of the 1920s and 30s, when Butlins holiday camps and Lidos opened up across the country. Adorned by British travel posters of that era, the main room of the exhibition uses as a backdrop the famous ‘Saltdean Lido’, famous for its beautiful Art Deco design and modelled on an ocean liner of that bygone glamorous era. Coco Chanel’s monochrome designs, inspired by Normandy fishermen, stand out as the most exquisite of designs. However my personal favourites will always be the fashion of the 1940s and 50s where the cuts and built-in support became much more sophisticated to emphasize and flatter women’s figures resulting in cute corset-cut swim-dresses and halterneck or strapless playsuits The 1960s and 70s were dominated by psychedelic prints and patterns and Emilio Pucci’s design is as recognisable to the keen fashion eye as an E-Type Jaguar is to the car enthusiast, whilst the 1980s designs had all structuring removed to enhance cleavages and high-cut legs, reflecting the Jane Fonda era of exercising and diet.A truly fabulous exhibition, „Riviera Style“ celebrates not only fashion, but lifestyle, holidays, social convention and morality in a quirky and light-hearted way that is bound to brighten up anyone’s day. It can be visited until the 30^th August 2015 at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London.

Photos: Tanja Russell

Windsor Street Art

London Street Art

Saatchi Gallery, London: Art from Russia

21. NOVEMBER 2012 – 9. JUNE 2013

„Gaiety“ is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: Art from Russia is the first exhibition of contemporary Russian art at the Saatchi Gallery. This large survey show features 18 artists working in diverse ways across the mediums of painting, photography, sculpture and installation.

Most of the artists in the exhibition, which takes its title from a speech delivered by Joseph Stalin in 1935, are young and emerging, and have rarely shown their work internationally; the exhibition will also present Boris Mikhailov’s highly acclaimed photographic project, Case History, which documents his hometown of Kharkov following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Witnesses to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the perestroika years, the artists in this exhibition have absorbed the complexities of life in Russia and created a wide variety of works in response. Some of them play on Russia’s long and rich tradition of jokes and a distinctive sense of humour which also find its way into political satire. Others draw on the influential wave of modernist art in Russia, particularly Malevich and Rodchenko, as well as important contemporary Russian artists such as Ilya Kabakov.

As Dimitri Ozerkov, director of the Contemporary Art Department of The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, says about the artists in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “Their art is multifocal and transcendent, poetic and hypocritical, politicized and romantic. It is probably the most global art in the world but still very much related to its origins.”

The works in this exhibition will play a key role in shaping our understanding of recent Russian history as well as contemporary Russian art.
Artist: Sergei Vasiliev, Russian Criminal Tattoo

Sergei Vasiliev worked as staff photographer for a newspaper in Chelyabinsk for thirty years, during which time he was also a prison warden. From 1948, a fellow worker, Danzig Baldaev, had begun cataloguing the extensive range of designs made by prisoners onto their skin. These homemade tattoos, scraped and inked into skin with melted book heels, urine or blood, contained a range of coded messages against the Soviet regime and about the prisoner’s crimes.

Although this kind of tattooing was illegal, the KGB realised what a resource Baldaev’s project could be for their criminal files and eventually brought in Vasiliev to supply a hard evidence of the designs’ authenticity. Thanks to their combined efforts, the secret police, and now the public, know more about the iconography of this underground artistic phenomenon. Far from being isolated illustrations from a catalogue in a tattoo parlour, Vasiliev’s photographs, taken between 1989 and 1993, are a humanizing record that places the faces and bodies of the owners (at one point one in five of the Soviet population) right at the centre of the project.

Artist: Vikenti Nilin, From the Neighbours Series, 1993 – present

The stars of Vikent Nilin’s “Neighbours’ series may come from all walks of life but they have one thing in common: they are staring into the abyss, in the form of the commonplace Soviet tower block. Yet they don’t seem in the least bit worried. The expressions on his subjects’s faces, as they perch on the edge of windowsills and balconies, are phlegmatic, unimpressed, relaxed and almost bored. Nilin’s images suggest a state of passivity and suspension, perhaps alluding to the state of politics in his home country.

Artist: Boris Mikhailov, Case History 1997 – 1998

Boris Mikhailov, probably the most influential photographer working in Russia today, has spent decades documenting the social condition off individuals living in the Soviet Union and the aftermath of its collapse. Case History comprises 413 photographs of people in his hometown of Kharkov, in the Ukraine, taken between 1997 – 98, ten years after the dismantlement of the Soviet system. 15 years on, it is still a startling chronicle of the extremes of life on the streets for suddenly destitute members of society – the abandoned working class, young and old, chronically poor and newly homeless individuals who fell through the cracks of a system now without a net, failed by the promises of Perestroika and capitalism.

A carnival of desperate characters, whether under the influence, lost or larking about, his Goya-like players put a face to the anonymous despair of a public ideology gone bankrupt. It is one of the most frank documents of the human condition in times of desperation.

More installations at Saatchi’s

Valery Koshlyakov, Grand Opera, Paris, 1995

Dasha Shishkin, What Does It Matter To Her Ever Creating Womb If Today Matter Is Flesh And Tomorrow Worms, 2012

Large Images (5): Courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London
Other Images: sl4artglobal