Above the earth from the air

Wandering around Kensington today and came across the outside exhibition of Earth from the Air next to the Natural History Museum. Now putting aside the irony of setting any kind of outside photo exhibit in England this is a must see, just make sure you bring an umbrella. Seeing these wonderful photos from around the world printed large really brings them to life. Amazingly they were only taken on 35mm (using a Canon EOS-1N) and from a helicoptor, which can’t have been the easiest platform to get a non-blurry photo from but Yann Arthus-Bertrand has done an outstanding job. Go see.

Continuing on the subject of artists (as in ‘successful’ rather than ‘struggling‘ and other such words beginning with ‘s’) I went along to the new Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Lisson Gallery. The Lisson is Kapoor’s normal show ground when he’s not filling the Tate Modern with wonderful red PVC mega-structures. Consequently this was a return to his post-Marsys forms of reflective cones and columns of varying shades. This is, to my mind, a shame as the metallic structures never seem to have the impact of his more organic, earthy works. So it was good news to see a pile of the familiar klein blue dyed rubble illuminated by strobe lights. The highlight of the trip had to be having the door opened by Anish himself while he chatted away on the phone to someone in French. So stunned was I that couldn’t think of a thing to say to one of my favourite artists, combined with the fact of his self-imposed anonymity means I’ve only ever seen one picture of him and so was unsure whether it was him until someone called his name as he left.