11/02/2013

Ettore Spalletti, Sol LeWitt

Ettore Spalletti, Sol LeWitt

The works of artists Sol LeWitt (b.1928 Harford, Connecticut-2007 New York) and Ettore Spalletti (b. 1940, Cappelle sul Tavo) have never before been engaged in direct, exclusive dialogue at the Massimo Minini’s gallery in Brescia. At first sight, this juxtaposition of the two oeuvres certainly comes as a friendly reunion. LeWitt and Spalletti are among the most widely influential and most important artists of their generation. From the 70s their works have been included in numerous international collections and are exhibited in renowned museums and institutions.

LeWitt’s objects are marked by a reduction to simplest geometrical shapes and surfaces in neat colours. With his large sculptures and wall paitings he belongs to the group of artists who, in mid-60s America, started developing the basis of the american Minimal Art inspired by the aesthetics and culture of the early 60s. That was the era when he coined the term “Conceptual Art” in his pivotal essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” published on Artforum, in June 1967. From that day on, the influence of this great master can be found in great many series of artistic expressions: from the younger generation of artists as well as in architects and designers who took inspiration from Lewitt’s work.
 The art displayed in this exhibition includes his “structures” and paintings in a close and intense dialogue with Spalletti’s works.

Since the mid-70s, Ettore Spalletti has created a language that is suspended between painting and sculpture, focusing on light and space, an approach which is reminiscent of both Minimal Art and the geometry of the purest tradition of the Italian history of art: from Giotto until the present day. 
His chromatic backgrounds cover essential forms which, through the apparent containment within their geometric outlines, become evocative due to the quality of the painting they are imbued with. 
The forms are drawn, then transferred to wood, paper or stone, and finally painted. The drawing is therefore simply the support for the work, which only comes into being when the paint materializes. 
The thickness of the paint is obtained by applying successive layers of mixtures of plaster and pigments, a slow process which takes account the varying times required for the paint to dry. The colour is only revealed in the final moment of this long process when abrasion causes the decomposition of the pigments, making the surfaces powdery, like velvety skin, with an infinite range of shades and slight 
variations.

In both artists there is no “painting” in the traditional sense of the term, but identification between paint and support, between colors and pure structure; there is no “sculpture” in the sense of shaping, because everything here seems to be a projection of one idea or concept more than a result of artists’ gestures or attempts. 
Both Spalletti’s and LeWitt’s works are painted in delicate and precise colours that cancel all signs of emotivity: the result is a visual ambient of purity and contemplation, oscillating from an open relation to a definitive structure, 
giving each surface a breadth that alludes to life and its figurativeness without figures.

The exhibition will run until the end of March 2013.

Riccardo Conti

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05/02/2013

Gianni Berengo Gardin at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice

Gianni Berengo Gardin at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice

If you use the Internet in your everyday life, then you are inevitably and constantly immersed in a world made of images. As thousands of images are poured in front of us day by day, we have somehow forgotten that they aren’t just made of electronic impulses. There are still images that possess a material quality which makes them particularly special. Hence, if you look up on the Internet Gianni Berengo Gardin, hundreds of black and white snapshots will appear, but nothing might impress you as much as seeing them printed and hung on a wall.


Gianni Berengo Gardin, born in 1930 in Santa Maria Ligure, is one of the most influential Italian photographers. Since he took his first shot in 1954, Berengo Gardin has never left the camera and has also never changed his tool: all of his photographs are rigorously in black and white and never digitally manipulated, maintaning an extremely unpolished and realistic sensibility of a true photojournalist. If you think, though, that he is a formalist, you are completely wrong. For Berengo Gardin using a raw language isn’t an issue of style, but about the process of documentation, capturing the reality, telling the truth.


Gianni Berengo Gardin’s truth is currently being told in the most complete anthological exhibition dedicated to his work titled “Stories of a Photographer” and held at Casa dei Tre Oci, in Venice. More than 130 photos were meticulously selected for this show with the idea of telling the story of his journey as a photographer: photos that are as sublime as they are real, as delicate as they are severe. But looking at the photos displayed at Casa dei Tre Oci one may also feel estranged. The beauty and reality of those images make them strangely surreal, as if they were taken on a set of an old movie, depicting the world where time has stopped and the genuine enthusiasm for life has finally emerged.



“Gianni Berengo Gardin. Stories of a Photographer” runs until 12th of May at Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice.

Rujana Rebernjak

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04/02/2013

Manet: Portraying Life

Manet: Portraying Life

Capturing the Paris of his day and legitimizing ‘modern life’ as an artistic subject, Edouard Manet, with his candid approach and stunningly subversive use of paint and subject matter, is seen as the father of modern painting. So, it’s rather fitting that London’s wonderfully atmospheric Royal Academy of Arts is currently staging its first major Manet exhibition.


Arranged thematically, ‘Manet: Portraying Life’ explores the lives and loves of Manet’s nineteenth Century Paris through 50 portraits, that themselves redefine traditional ideas of portraiture. Vibrant, intimate and challenging, these works have a unique, photo-like feel and effortlessly blur the line between staged, carefully constructed portraiture and scenes of everyday life. This makes them as captivating now as they were in Salon days gone by.

A highlight is ‘Music in the Tuileries Gardens’ (1862). At first it appears to be nothing but a hypnotic and colourful sea of humanity, yet you soon discover that the painting brings together Manet’s cultural world. This artist, theorist and musician-filled piece, considered compositionally daring at the time, was designed to reflect Charles Baudelaire’s definition of modern beauty, and by extension Modernity – something Manet was particularly fascinated by. By showing these elegant Parisians in a blurred, chaotic manner, Manet is able to reflect modern life – a chaos, a constant, overwhelming experience filled with people and ideas, known and unknown, that gradually, when given the appropriate attention, become recognizable. Hanging alone in an Academy room, you find yourself just standing and staring at this piece. It’s busy, beautiful and utterly enthralling.


The intimacy of the works is astounding. None of the portraits feel posed. Rather it’s as if you’ve stumbled upon the sitters going about their daily business. ‘Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets’ stares at you as Manet would have stared at her. Unblinking, unapologetic and genuinely stunning. She seems completely unaware that she has been captured in time – or that she became the poster girl for the exhibition itself. This only seems to make her more alluring. In ‘The Luncheon’, Manet’s young, nonchalant sitter is actively walking out of the painting. Seeing these natural, seemingly spontaneous works you begin to understand Manet’s artistic significance. He captures what most modern artists still strive to – a truthful, seemingly natural image of the sitter and their own unique world.

As his paintings would imply, Manet was a fairly colourful and contradictory character. He once dueled with critic Edmond Duranty over an article (affable relations were quickly reestablished) and refused to be exhibited with the Impressionists; despite considering Degas and Monet close friends and going down in history as a central figure in the transition between Realism and Impressionism. Artists, and art for that matter, were never meant to be simple.

Manet: Portraying Life is on at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 14 April 2013. It has previously toured to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

Liz Schaffer

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28/01/2013

Paola Revenioti – Paola

Paola Revenioti – Paola

If the antidote to world-wide economic and social crisis is achieved through investigating itself inside the cultural roots of every state, it is interesting to discover that at times these roots are not so distant from present. So happens that in Athens, the symbolic city for economical defeat and the worrisome rise of Nazi-inspired parties, from a closer inspection, the signs and the seeds of a more open and less hostile culture are not relegated to the classical world but also to most recent past.


The simple title of the exhibition at Breeder Gallery, Paola, reflects a sense of familiarity and intimacy as addressing to a friend or someone known for a long time. Since Paola Revenioti is not a well-known personality outside national borders, she is actually a central character as well as a cult figure in Greek LGBT scene from the beginning of the 80’s. Paola is one of the most eccentric and revolutionary authors in an undefined territory between personal life and representation: gay rights activist, anarchist, transvestite, prostitute, photographer and film maker, above all creator of the magazine “Kraximo” that first approached with simplicity the environment of prostitution and street life of hustlers including “high” contents as the famous interview to philosopher Felix Guattari.


Kraximo has been a real archetype; free, brave and passionate in order to narrate the desires and the revolutionary spirit of a generation on topics such as politics, trans-gender and transgression through words and images, deeply focused to melt well the issues, clearly that the real social and political “revolution” can not be separated by a sexual revolution.
 The first intense exhibition at Breeder Gallery curated by artist, architect and teacher Andreas Angelidakis, interprets cleverly the versatility of this peculiar figure by right selections and setting.

Furthermore, what is exhibited inside the Athenian gallery is not a proper photography exhibition but something even more fascinating: between a historical archive and an intimate diary loaded with feelings, the spectator can be penetrated sliding around from the industrial metal shelving for the simple photo frames emerging pictures and memories of queer environment described by Paola in many years of her “career” as precious relics. Touching photographs loaded with beauty, desire, social emancipation, friendship at the same time a witness of willingness to build an identity and a common lifestyle, marvelously lapped by the Mediterranean light as well as the Aegean Sea.

Besides the photographs, the exhibition features some videos especially adapted from the archive ‘Video in Progress’ that points out the Athenian transsexual environment and underworld in a familiar way, since Paola has been a protagonist in it for three decades and beyond.

Paola will run until 16 February.

Riccardo Conti

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21/01/2013

Danh Vo – Chung Ga Opla

Danh Vo – Chung Ga Opla

Danh Vo (born in 1975 in Saigon, currently lives and works between Berlin and New York) the recent winner of the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize, is the protagonist of the second show curated by Alessandro Rabottini around the “Accademy” topic in the lavish spaces of Villa Medici in Rome.


Danh Vo is the perfect example of a son of the multicultural society: his family fled South Vietnam in a homemade boat, and was rescued at sea by a Danish ship. For this reason Vo settled in Denmark, the experience influencing his personal imagery, pushing him in creating not just a sort of personal idea of history, but also in “testing” the official Western history.


Like his previous exhibitions, also this show titled Chung Ga Opla – a phonetic translation in Vietnamese from the French “Oeuf au plat” (fried egg) – is similar to a psychological and unconscious journey in the artist’s mind and reflections: each artwork and installation are performance-based pieces, inspired by his life experiences, seeming to materialize real facts, musings, and inventions mingled together in a sort of ready-made gallery of objects.


These historical artifacts create a dialogue with the site and the spaces in which they are displayed, like in Villa Medici, where everything has been created as a “reaction” with the ambient and amplifying this experience of examining how such items are dispersed across borders or how they symbolize transnational movements. 
Danh Vo seems to suggests that official histories and biographies are written, rewritten or completely relative, and the experience of the emigrant offers a unique point of view to make more dense this relationship with some pivotal benchmarks like cultural and ethnic identity.


The core of Chung Ga Opla is represented by Fabulous Muscles, a room where the artist has involved his relatives and a group of children, leaving them completely free to paint and draw on the walls. In this naïve-like example of Art Brut Danh Vo has inserted different quotes from authors like Antonin Artaud, Emil Cioran and David Bowie.


More than an exhibition of a visual artist, Chung Ga Opla – along with the other Danh Vo’s shows – is an attempt to use contemporary art as a language to learn and explain new ways to tell stories and histories.

Danh Vo’s exhibition will run until 10 February.

Riccardo Conti

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14/01/2013

Francis Alÿs | REEL-UNREEL

Francis Alÿs | REEL-UNREEL

It was more than one year ago since we first met Francis Alÿs’ work. We were at Kirschgarten Haus in Basel and the Belgian artist (b. 1959 Antwerp) – who moved to Mexico City in 1986 where he chose to become a visual artist – dressed the part of collector and art curator showing his unusual, fetishist, somehow obsessive, but absolutely unique and amazing collection of amateur and professional reproductions of Jean-Jacques Henner’s 1885 portrait of Saint Fabiola.


After travelling around the world with the retrospective Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, which was displayed at Tate Modern in London, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brussels, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York; and after been featured at dOCUMENTA 13, the works by the international artist are now on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York with his solo show REEL-UNREEL (title from the video of the same name presented in Kassel).

Francis Alÿs’ projects come from his daily observations of events and situations taken from the street. Using different media – photograph, video, installation, drawing and painting – the versatile artist depicts the surrounding reality in different perspectives, sometimes apparently insignificant, but always connected with economic, political and social issues emerging in urban dimensions and analysed with a personal and poetic approach. Through the repetition of ordinary actions, such as children’s games (to which he dedicated a long series of movie), the artist focuses on anthropological themes related to immigration, urban development, modernisation and cultural preservation, conformism and human failures.


In REEL-UNREEL, Kabul, Afghanistan (2011), the twenty-minute video created in collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi, Alÿs shows two Afghan children, who keep a film reel – instead of the classical hoop – in continuous motion from the hills, through the old city and the downtown market area of Kabul to the opposite hills, one boy running and unwinding the strip of film, while the other follows him, rewinding it. The game repeatedly goes on until the film turns up in a small fire on the street that breaks it and the reel falls over a cliff, which overlooks the city. The movie, giving a symbolic value to small and simple gestures, refers to the Kabuli fire of 5th September 2001, when Taliban set fire to the Afghan reel archive and it has mostly to do with the lack of respect for heritage and cultural places, which needs to be preserved.

The exhibition presents also a series of canvases of colour bars, painted during the preparation of the video in Afghanistan, which are characterised by bright strips reminding TV test patterns that cover part of the represented daily scenes and help the artist to take some distance from that heavy experience. “I needed to step out of it (…) I cannot paint violence” said the artist, who constantly turns his attention to contexts in which he is both stranger and active player.

REEL-UNREEL show will run at David Zwirner’s 525 West 19th Street spaces in New York until 9th February 2013. Many thanks to the gallery staff for its availability and kindness.

Monica Lombardi

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07/01/2013

DAVID CLAERBOUT | Finissage

DAVID CLAERBOUT | Finissage

This is the last week to see the first solo show in Italy by David Claerbout (b. 1969, Kortrijk, Belgium) arranged at Mart, The Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Trento and Rovereto, which will run until 13th January 2013. The exhibition, overseen by Saretto Cincinelli, — showing once again the non-expected research activity carried on by the renowned Italian institution — presents an overview of the international Belgian artist, who might still be less recognised in our country but, for sure, deserves to be discovered and appreciated for his unique and personal approach to contemporary art. 
After abandoning painting to work with film, starting from collecting photography, Claerbout focuses on time, and more precisely, on the three aspects of past, present and future, suspending and unifying them in one surface to evidence the different associations and interpretations of one, single image.


One of the first, and significant works by the artist is Untitled (Single Channel View) (1998-2000), which is the projection on a wide screen of an old b/w picture representing a classroom seen in diagonal, where all the students except one are looking out of the big window, towards a blinding sun; the light coming from outside reflects the shadows of two trees on the background wall. Everything seems to be calm, the guys are totally still and nothing moves as it should be in a picture but, watching closely, it is possible to see the leaves fluctuate slowly, almost imperceptibly, returning the spatio-temporal lag between motion and immobility, and creating a combination of photography and cinema. The proposed image is plausible, but something artificial floors the viewers, who find themselves within a sort of both present and past tense.

Making use of digital techniques, Claerbout goes beyond the codified distinction according to which photography captures an instant, while cinema tells the flows of time. In Long Goodbye (2007), the artist, once again, shows a sole picture, projected without sound, yet here the image is in colour and the movement is more evident. A woman with a tray gets closer, she places the tray on the table and turns her head toward the camera (to us), while the camera distances itself and time dilates. The flow of time is characterised by an incongruous play of lights and shadows – on the house walls –, which generate a sort of accelerated sunset. Here is the paradox between speeding up the time of the surrounded space and slowing down the woman’s gestures. Time-slice draws the attention to something we don’t know, because we cannot see anything more, and nevertheless the details abound, we aren’t able to totally understand what we are looking at.


Opposed dichotomies – movement/stillness, slowdown/acceleration, reality/assemblage of fictitious images – compose imaginaries apparently uninterrupted, which are actually hold through technical artifices. The show, dialoguing with the museum space arranged by the architect Pedro Sousa, sets up a non-narration where everybody looks at something and everyone are observed, but where nothing really seems to happen, a non-event.

Until 6th October 2013, along with David Claerbout, Mart will also present La Magnifica Ossessione (The Magnificent Obsession), an exhibition displaying 2.784 objects of its collection – defined by Cristina Collu, the director: “Self-taught, water-diviner, auto-da-fé of works. Victim or protagonist, recomposed collection, disturbing and provocative, maniacal and fetishist. Obscure object of desire. Secret, sharing, intoxication, celebration. Giddiness of blending” – to celebrate the first ten years of ‘well done’ activity.


Monica Lombardi

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02/01/2013

Shows To Be Excited About In 2013

Shows To Be Excited About In 2013

While everyone is finishing their ‘best’ and ‘worst’ of 2012 lists and while we are slowly becoming more aware of the fact that yet another year has past, we thought that the best way to fight melancholia and resentment in not meeting our 2012 goals is setting a new list of those for the upcoming year. Well, here is a short list of exhibitions that shouldn’t be missed in the new 2013 year.

Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things
The end of January welcomes the first of our beautiful 2013 shows. With quite a geeky design title “Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things” this exhibition at Design Museum in London aims at unveiling the key designs that have shaped the modern world, tracing the history and processes of contemporary design. This exhibition should run for two years offering a comprehensive view on design and includes furniture, product, fashion, transport and architecture alongside a selection of prototypes, models and films.

Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth

This February will see the opening of a retrospective of Dieter Roth’s particularly dense print work at our beloved MoMA in New York. One of the fathers of the contemporary artist’s books ‘genre’, Roth has through the years (and this show is particularly focused on the period between 1960 and 1975) created numerous works that played with the idea of books as objects. From book-sausages filled with paper instead of meat (Literaturwurst) to pieces dipped in melted chocolate or a series of postcards, this exhibition tries to gather all of his major book-works among which a particular relevance is given to the book Snow. This is the show many of the contemporary publishers trying to delve in the artist’s books world should really look up to!

David Bowie Is
As the year marches further, even the shows get spicier! Hence, this March, precisely March the 23rd, will see another grand opening: the already much talked about David Bowie retrospective. The V&A has been granted the exclusive access to David Bowie Archive in organizing a truly amazing show that will explore “the creative processes of Bowie as a musical innovator and cultural icon, tracing his shifting style and sustained reinvention across five decades”. More than 300 objects, including handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments and album artwork are bound to reveal almost everything about this amazing artist and on of the greatest icons of the 20th century.

If these shows don’t amaze you and are not worthy of your 2013 list of goals, please make sure you anyhow manage to squeeze some art and design in it, it should make your life a bit better!

Rujana Rebernjak

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27/12/2012

24/12 at Galerie Crone

24/12 at Galerie Crone

I’m probably not the only one thinking of Christmas Eve when coming across the number combination 24/12, the title of Berlin’s Galerie Crone‘s new group exhibition. Many with me enjoyed the opening the other weekend, sipping glühwein and munching plätzchen cookies in proper Yuletide spirit. After all, I’ve learned, Berliners are the kings of Christmas coziness, spoiled with a juicy number of 77 Christmas markets spread around the town in December. But merry times aside, the title of the show refers first and foremost to the 24 exhibited works by the 12 different artists that in some way or the other are connected to Galerie Crone, such as Donald Baechler, Ryan McGinley, Walter Pfeiffer, Rosemarie Trockel and Andy Warhol.

Spread out across the two spacious floors of the gallery, located just steps away from the tourists hoards lingering around Checkpoint Charlie, are mostly photography work along with some paintings, a few sculptures and one site-specific tape installation signed Monika Grzymala. Her net of multi-coloured tape strips seem to be leaking from the corner into what resembles a giant, colourful spider web.

Other rarities on the first floor includes the blink-and-you-might-miss-it brilliant pairing of works just by the entrance. The serene “The divers”, a 1930 photography by George Hoyningen-Huene of two swimmers by the water, teams up perfectly with Walter Pfeiffer’s untitled swimming pool study of a young man with his back to the camera. Along with Amelie von Wulffen’s untitled, dreamy landscape in oil, aquarelle and Indian ink and Daniel Megerle’s small collages in black and white, these works are the highlights on the first floor.


On ground floor, Ryan McGinley’s nude teenagers steal the spotlight just as they usually do, but Adrien Missika’s marble plate “Marie-Louise (Emperador)” and photography “Second Life” along with Grzymala’s triptych of silver gelatin prints from her Berlin studio became my personal favourites.

24/12 will be on show through February 8th 2013.


Helena Nilsson Strängberg – Image courtesy of the artists/Galerie Crone

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19/12/2012

Bob Dylan, The Comedian

Bob Dylan, The Comedian

Bob Dylan’s first exhibit at Gagosian Gallery, last year’s The Asia Series, was about as scandalous an introduction into the cutthroat Madison Avenue art scene as one could hope for—only it wasn’t the good kind. Initially advertised by the gallery as a “visual journal” of Dylan’s travels through Asia, it was quickly discovered that most of the paintings were, in fact, identical replicas of photos taken by the likes of Leon Busy, Dmitri Kessel, and a Flickr user named Okinawa Soba who claimed that Bobby had used no less than six—six!—of his photographs for what came to be known as his “paint-by-numbers” exhibit. How did Okinawa know? Dylan incorporated his Photoshopped edits into his paintings. True to his character, Bob kept mum on the subject, but the gallery rushed to revise the show almost as fast as the critics tore it apart.

His new exhibit, Revisionist Art, again at Gagosian Gallery through January 12th, follows in a similar fashion, only without all the scandal. With hushed publicity and a more apt title this time around, Dylan proceeds to take a dull stab at what Andy Warhol and his peers were doing fifty years ago—placing pop culture imagery in a parallel universe to expose its underlying absurdity. Not such a bad idea, on the surface. The primary difference between the two artists, aside from the quality of their silkscreens, is that Warhol never tried to make a folk album.

Go to the 5th floor at 980 Madison and you’ll see familiar covers of Life, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Time blown up on canvas and splashed with headlines both goofy (“The Meaninglessness of David Byrne”) and blandly political (“Frank Sinatra and Joey Bishop have a laugh at fundraiser for Presidential hopeful Rudy Guiliani”), supplemented by an array of celebrities and politicians who appear naked, smeared in blood, or screaming—and often all three. One decent society lady, on the cover of Architectural Digest, is seen standing in a posh living room, her skirt up, bush exposed, behind a stark title that reads “Houses of the East Coast”. Another, Bondage Magazine, advertises “for those who think outside the box”. That’s about as funny as it gets, which likely explains why the room was empty.


Most of the covers have famous names juxtaposed images of everyday people (like the one whose title reads, “Bare-Bosomed Courtney Love Strikes Back!”), which we think is supposed to mean something, only we can’t figure out what. In either case the irony falls flat. “Dylan has long been a contextualizer of his own source material,” the official press release explains, in what suspiciously sounds like an apology for last year’s exhibit. “His Revisionist art provides a glimpse of an artistic process that is equally maverick and elusive [as his music career].” Elusive, sure. But maverick? This is the guy—we’re talking about Bob Dylan here!—who once wrote prophetic lines like, “He not busy being born is busy dying”, wrote Blonde on Blonde, a guy whose new album, Tempest, is considered to be among the year’s best. But this? Dylan or no, if you’ve ever had the desire to scribble a Hitler mustache on a picture of Taylor Swift, you’ve pretty much got the gist of what’s going on here.

Lane Koivu – Image: © Bob Dylan. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

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