Marcel Odenbach at the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum in London is celebrating opening it's doors to the public for 25 years on the 28th July. Part of the quarter centenary celebrations include an exhibition of work by renowned German video artist Marcel Odenbach.

Odenbach started out studying Architecture in Aachen from 1974 until 1979 (planning a PhD under the art historian Hans Holländer on traveller's and explorer's images of foreign countries). He started to order his thoughts and ideas onto vast lengths of paper and he famously wrapped himself in a 22-metre length of paper, a collage of drawings, texts and sketches, that covered his body from head to toe. Odenbach has since become a well-established and internationally successful video artist, along with other German artists such as Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch.

The exhibition at the Freud Museum is titled Probeliegen, exploring European history with reference to it's murky past and experiments with the symbols associated with Sigmund Freud's famous consulting couch. It draws themes from the history of Jews in Germany and includes a study of the Majdenek Mausoleum at the Polish concentration camp. Odenbach's collages will stand against the couch, which was moved over to England from Vienna following Freud's escape during Nazi persecution in 1938. The exhibition tries to explore Germany's unconscious, in a similar way that Freud uncovered the subconscious of his patients with the use of his couch. As Odenbach explains; "Vision and the trauma, and subconscious is becoming in this work, the outside and the surface of the patient. The couch of Freud might be like a self-portrait of the artist. In this paperwork I am reflecting the art, sexuality and the colonial history of the European society in the 19th and 20th century, that is momentarily grappling with its self-image."

Images: Dazed and Confused

Kate Moss International Vogue Covers

British Vogue compiles a round-up of Vogue covers from across the world featuring Kate Moss.

Images: Vogue.co.uk

Stasus

Design duo, Stasus, consisting of Matt Ozga-Lawn and James A. Craig, have recently had the below model, Object III - Warsaw Institute of Experimental Film: Editing Facility and Object IX - Warsaw Institute of Experimental Film: Festival Hotel, selected for the Architecture room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2011 from June 7th to August 15th. 

Image: Two Two Oh Four

Goddesses by Madame Yevonde

Yevonde Middleton, known professionally as Madame Yevonde, was a photographer from the early 20th Century, who was renowned for her vibrant portraits of 1930s society girls and as a pioneer for colour portrait photography. The images posted below are from a series of photographs titled 'Goddesses' from 1935, showing well-known subjects posing as mythological characters. 

Yevonde was born in 1893 and grew up with a father in the manufacturing industry of printing inks, hence her fascination with colour. She apprenticed with Lallie Charles, the leading society portrait photographer of the time, and in 1914, at the age of 21, she set up her own portrait photography business. She slowly developed her own style of photography, moving away from the unfashionable, extravagant and romanticised Edwardian images of women in high collared gowns and big bouquets of fussy flowers, to a softened image with the sitter looking slightly away from the camera. Soon her photographs were being featured in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and her career reached a head when she was chosen for the official engagement photograph of Louis Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley, later 1st Earl and Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Frustrated by the limits of black and white photography of the time, Madame Yevonde set about mastering a new process, VIVEX, which created colour photographs with a subtractive process using three glass quarter-plates for the cyan, magenta and yellow separations.

The Goddesses series are currently being shown in an exhibition at the PM Gallery, London until July 3.

Photos: Be Original or Die

Layered Landscapes by Nobuhiro Nakanishi

Nobuhiro Nakanishi is a Japanese artist from Fukuoka, who, after studying an MA in Fine Art Sculpture, has gone on to create these intriguing layered installations, which have been exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Contemporary Art Centre in Osaka. The photographs of misty landscapes and sunsets are layered up on perspex to create an elongated panorama. 

Alexa Chung in Vogue Italia June 2011

Images: Vogue Italia

Also see her in my post on Vogue June 2011