Patti Smith seems to be everywhere these days. She’s got a new book Just Kids, an upcoming tour, and just opened an exhibition of drawings, photographs and personal things: Patti Smith and Steven Sebring: Objects of Life.

There were some great faces in Chelsea’s Robert Smith Gallery during the opening night: Michael Stipe turned up to congratulate Patti, Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson were there, even my beloved film archivist Jonas Mekas came out, and it was nice to notice the abundance of older art lovers, not only the typical gallery opening show-offs.

There was a reason why all these great people came. In the exhibition, the persona that is Patti Smith gets featured in four ways: you can find her drawings and writings; still-lifes of her iconic belongings done by Steven Sebring, a photographer, who spent a decade filming Patti and put it into a documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life; another room is highlighting Patti Smith as a performer with grand images of stage acts and singing; and the middle of a gallery is dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, as seen through Patti Smith’s camera lens.

The exhibition is powerful and insightful. The pictures of Patti Smith’s belongings talk about the icon that she is: her beat boots, her guitar, a necklace, childhood dress, luggage covered in old concert stickers, a Polaroid camera, a tambourine made by Robert Mapplethorpe. The objects in towering pictures appear illuminated, translucent. Real objects lay right there on pedestals: there’s a knight’s helmet, few pictures, a typewriter, and a Jeanne d’Arc book, which seems so fitting here.

Steven Sebring documents Patti on stage as well: pictures of her performing are powerful, and the image of Patti’s face with a bandana covering her eyes is breathtaking. However, here she is as a public persona, a performer. Her drawings – raw, outlined scribblings with text, sticky tape, lines drawn on dark albumen silver prints, attached pictures, screen prints of buildings – feel like free hand sketches, private and instinctive. The drawings are recent works, some of them created in collaboration with Steven Sebring, meanwhile Patti’s pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe remember the late ’60s and ’70s and her relationship with him. This part of exhibition introduces Patti’s new book, Just Kids.

The exhibition sums up everything that makes Patti so iconic: it’s not only her music, but her free spirit, non-conformism, style, and her relationships.