Who is the Exhibitionist?

A good question. One inevitably followed by: Why are you doing this? and Please leave me alone and finally, for god's sake, life is hard enough without u and ur pretensions... The Exhibitionist is a helping hand in the difficult, dangerous and down-right spenny world of exhibitionism. I'm referring, of course to the practice of attending exhibitions, as opposed to the rather…

Wearing Gillian.

So a dramatic change in fortune for the Exhibitionist has lead to a new job, as a Visitor Services Assistant at the National Portrait Gallery. This means I spend much of my time wandering around, looking at portraits and waiting for a terrorist attack of some kind. It's an interesting way of experiencing a Gallery…

Modern Life isn’t Rubbish

I'll begin by apologising profusely at the incredibly lengthy hiatus between my last post and this, I know you're all on absolute tenterhooks and furious at the lack of material output from The Exhibitionist in the past three months. The reason for my absence was an unpaid position I took up at the wonderful (but woefully…

Renaissance Man

I recently visited the National Gallery's current exhibition Beyond Caravaggio. Rather than focusing on the man himself, the exhibition centres around the work of lesser known artists who were inspired by Caravaggio in various ways. Some by his raw subject matter and commitment to realism. Others by his use of light and closely cropped frames. Actually, very…

Small is Beautiful

My love affair with the sometimes dull, usually dusty, always delightful world of museums was sparked from a young age with my first visit to Aberystwyth's very small, very beautiful Ceridigion Museum. It remains one of my favourite places in the world (so fuck u Venice) despite the fact that it's been a full ten years since I was…

The Magical History Tour

I felt a bit silly writing the blog this week. With everything that's happened recently, London's exhibitions hardly seems the most important thing to discuss. Actually, the day I left aside for writing this post happened to be the one following the presidential election and drinking myself to death/wandering around a graveyard, weeping/ staying in and…

Sightseeing

This week I decided to explore another theme on which I'm completely ignorant: science. I recently visited the Natural History Museum's exhibition on Colour and Vision which is in its last few days and nicely crowd free. However, before I'd even made it to South Kensington I realised something was terribly, terribly wrong. There was a…

The Life of Pablo

I thought I'd kick off my new life as a cultural dahhling by attending one of the most expensive and big deal retrospectives in town - Picasso Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. The £19 ticket price made me feel a little queasy but my magic staff card got me a free ticket and I consequently…