Wolgang & Nouvel

Time for a little review of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition and Jean Nouvel Pavillion at the Serpentine which i recently mentioned. Starting with the newest piece first, Jean Nouvel, as i feel time is an important aspect. There are strict rules with the Summer Pavillion, but the main one is that the chosen architect is informed in January in the year of exhibition. That's not six months to figure out how to make and complete the winning design, its six months to Design the winning design, make and complete the structure. Some of my jobs take longer then that, and it may only be a kitchen! So hard and fast it is, with a towering leaning red shard, a beacon in a dry, yellowing Hyde Park, and i think it really works to start with. The enormous layered awnings, in red again, and which make up the main space house the cafe and seating, with events in the evening. But as you looks closely its starts to become an exercise in buying as many  matching red bits of furniture and materials as possible to fill the space. Red chairs, Red Twinwall, Red Glass blocks, Red table tennis tables (i want one), Red coffee makers etc that are not all exactly the same colour but not different enough either. I don't think it bad by any means, but it feels as though there was not quite enough time to get it right.

The Wolgang Tillmans show in the Gallery is an 20 year investigation of photograhy, and it shows, and it seriously works. It seems very simple, they are photograhs about surface or texture, narrative, or colour studies. But the colour studies do not look like images anymore as they have been folded in places, now resembling bent sheets of metal. The landscape photograhs look like paintings, there is small image of a mountain and glacier that appears more like a still life of  sinewy steak, or even a heart. There is technical brilliance which left me in awe, pushing the process of photograhy forward whilst elevating the mediums' artistic vocabulary. It has everything, in all the right places, in the right quantities, but still leaves you wanting more. I highly recommend.