What better way to spend a cold and wet day in Paris than at ‘The Centre Pompidou’. The complex plays host to France’s first retrospective of modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe and as one of the greatest figures in 20^th century North American art, we simply couldn’t miss it!

Completed in 1977, the Pompidou Centre was designed by Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini. With structural and mechanical systems exposed, this wonderful building was the first major example of an ‘inside-out’ design.  The building’s services were colour coded, giving the facade a high-tech,  industrial appearance: blue for air-conditioning, yellow for electrics, green to denote water pipes and red highlighting tubular escalators and lifts. The design was meant to be ‘not a building, but a town where you find everything’.

Born in 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe died at the age of 98. The exhibition delivers a complete review of her artistic career boasting some hundred paintings, drawings and photographs. Belonging to the limited circle of pioneers who drove American modernism, she was immediately recognised as a trailblazing artist with the beauty and skill of her remarkable paintings remembered today.

In 1929 she made the first of many trips to New Mexico, exploring the unfamiliar environment and experimenting with fresh colours, forms and compositional strategies. These explorations coincided with an expanding perspective among many American Modernists, who were seeking a larger view of the American scene beyond New York City. It was a move that provoked Georgia to paint abstract artwork, motioning a departure from her detailed paintings of enlarged flowers.

We loved learning more about the legacy and life of Georgia O’Keeffe. Here are just some of our favourites from this entrancing exhibition.