PARIS — I have never particularly admired French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s overly familiar and obvious Nanas (French slang for “broads”) — the gaudy, plump, joyous everywoman figures that made the artist’s case for female affirmation.
Grand Palais
The Darkness Behind Niki de Saint Phalle’s Colorful Beauties
PARIS — Niki de Saint Phalle was half French, half American, and bilingual, but who was she? Certainly not merely the sculptor who made those fat girls, the Nanas, though they remain her most famous works.
Striving for Utopia on a Grand Scale in the Kabakovs’ Strange City
PARIS — Beneath the bombastic Beaux-Arts dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have installed an explorable city of white arches and curious pavilions dedicated to attempts and failures to reach a mystical plane.
Bill Viola’s Moving Void
PARIS — Free-floating habits are often hard to abandon. The term “video” as a definable medium — and thus “video art” — is now essentially archaic, due to the convergence of all capture technologies into post-media computer manipulated moving image/sound files.