In UFO (Unified Fashion Objectives), Albert Watson shows a collection of fashion photographs from 40 years as one of the world's leading artists in the field.

The show includes the portrait Kate Moss in Torn Veil, Marrakech, 1993 and the fashion shot Gisella, Paris, 1990, shot in the Jardin des Tuileries. The clothes of designers such as Prada, Chanel, Armani, Valentino, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto are featured on models in Watson's graphic style in a series of limited-edition, black and white prints.

These images also offer a preview of Watson's upcoming book UFO, to be published in fall 2010 by PQ Blackwell.

Watson has photographed more than 200 covers of Vogue magazine worldwide during his career, and also worked for many years for other top fashion magazines, such as Harper's Bazaar, Elle and Mademoiselle. He also photographed the collections in Paris and Milan for 25 years.

Albert Watson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and immigrated to the United States in 1970. He has been based in New York since 1977.

On the occasion of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels  presents El Greco: Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1900, an exhibition of over 40 works by El Greco.

El Greco (1541 – 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect who lived in the period of the Spanish Renaissance. Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, he became known in Italy as El Greco ("The Greek").

There is little documentary evidence about his background and early years. He began his career in a local artistic workshop in Crete that specialised in the production of icons. Crete at this time came under the control of the Republic of Venice , which led to an intensive artistic exchange. Many Greek artists travelled to Venice ; El Greco set out to try his luck there in 1567. In 1570 he moved to Rome , where he worked for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. In 1572 he was admitted to the Roman academy for painters, the Accademia di San Luca, and probably established a studio of his own, producing his first commissioned works. 

During his stay in Italy his painting style developed under the influence of Mannerism and the Venetian Renaissance. Michelangelo and Raphael were already dead, but their example left little scope for innovation and was oppressive for young artists. El Greco, however, determined to leave his own mark, stood up for his individual ideas, vision, and style. This attitude made him controversial: although he was a respected artist, he also came in for a lot of criticism. 

In 1577 El Greco moved to Toledo in Spain , where he was to live and work until his death. It was in Toledo that he received a number of his most important commissions and painted his most celebrated paintings. The years from 1596 to 1614 were a golden age for El Greco and his studio. He was at the height of his powers and carried out major commissions for a variety of religious institutions, such as the altarpiece for the Colegio de la Encarnación in Madrid . He remained active until his death in 1614.

Universally regarded today as one of the founders of the Spanish School of painting, El Greco has not, however, always enjoyed that lofty status: despite his successful career, his dramatic, expressionist style was viewed with mixed feelings by his contemporaries. Tastes, moreover, changed around the time of his death in 1614: Europe fell under the spell of the naturalism of the Caravaggesque style, which sought to depict reality as it was and was thus poles apart from El Greco's unique Mannerist talent. After his death El Greco's work soon went out of fashion and fell into obscurity. His art was suddenly rejected as old-fashioned.

Things only changed in the early 20th century, when the modern artistic avant-garde restored his reputation. This rediscovery was due to three key figures of the Spanish cultural scene of the time: the art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío (who published a monograph devoted to El Greco in 1908), the Marqués de Vega Inclán (who established a museum in his honour in Toledo in 1910), and the photographer Mariano Moreno.

El Greco: Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1900, curated by Ana Carmen Lavín Berdonces and José Redondo Cuesta, highlights the key role these three individuals played in the re-evaluation of El Greco's work around 1900. The exhibition also looks at the workings of his studio and offers a fascinating overview of El Greco's artistic development via a selection of outstanding paintings, including the Lágrimas de San Pedro and the stunning El Expolio. The highlight of the exhibition is El Greco's final series, El Apostolado (the twelve apostles), his artistic testament.

Palais des Beaux-Arts

rue Royale 10

1000 Brussels

Gonzalez-Torres (American, b. Cuba 1957-1996), one of the most influential artists of his generation, settled in New York in the early 1980s, where he studied art and began his practice as an artist before his untimely death of AIDS related complications. His work can be seen in critical relationship to Conceptual art and Minimalism, mixing political activism, emotional affect, and deep formal concerns in a wide range of media, including drawings, sculpture, and public billboards*, often using ordinary objects as a starting point—clocks, mirrors, light fixtures. Amongst his most famous artworks are his piles of candy and paper stacks from which viewers are allowed to take away a piece. They are premised, like so much of what he did, on instability and potential for change: artworks without an already preset or specific form.

To present the oeuvre of an artist who put fragility, the passage of time, and the questioning of authority at the center of his artworks, the exhibition will be entirely re-installed at each of its venues halfway through its duration by a different invited artist whose practice has been informed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work. A first version of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form by curator Elena Filipovic will open to the public and on March 5, 2010, the artist Danh Vo (born in 1975 in Saigon, Vietnam) will re-install the exhibition, effectively making an entirely new show.

After Brussels Félix González-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form will travel to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel where artist Carol Bove will intervene from 21 May to 29 August 2010.