Month: August 2015

Stanislav Putenko

Stanislav Putenko, “The Procession”, 2014

Stanislav Plutenko is a prominent Moscow artist-realist. His signature method — a mixed technique employing oil, tempera, acrylic and watercolor — is skilfully supplemented with masterfully airbrushing and glazing with clear paints.

Stanislav Plutenko belongs to the fine tradition of late USSR/early Russia period in which The Leningrad School of Painting/Fine Arts predominated. This prestigious school inherited from the reformed Imperial Academy of Fine Arts of Czarist Russia. The Leningrad School was held as a major phenomenon of artistic life in the USSR. It left a mark on Mr. Plutenko. His art exudes the gravity of Leningrad artistry, a sense of mission to create works of public importance, the culture of professional excellence, the exquisite harmony of color and a generalized interest in painting and figurative images.

Nir Arieli

Images of Male Dancers by Israeli Photographer Nir Arieli

Nir Arieli has an eye for motion, capturing breathtaking snapshots of male dancers as they perform arabesques allongé across ethereal spaces. His series, entitled “Tension,” combines the intimacy of portraiture with the artful layering of digital photography, producing dizzying images that pay homage to the beauty of the male form.

Arieli began his career in one of the most unlikely of places – as a photographer for the Israeli military. But after his stint in combat he turned to the performing arts, focusing on the graceful and bizarre aspects of dancers in motion.

“For me, dance is impossible and dancers just don’t make sense,” Arieli explained in an interivew with Kaltblut magazine. “They are non-human creatures: their odd physical abilities, dreamlike and nightmarish at the same time, fascinate me.”

Mario Merz

Paintings and Sculptures by Italian Artist Mario Merz

Born in Milano Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from the paper. Merz explored the relationship between nature and the subject, until he had his first exhibitions in the intellectually incendiary context of Turin in the 1950s, a cultural climate fed by such writers as Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, and Ezra Pound. He met Italian artist Marisa Merz during his studies in Turin in the 1950s. They were associated with the development of Arte Povera, and both were influenced by each other’s works.

Merz discarded abstract expressionism’s subjectivity in favor of opening art to exterior space: a seed or a leaf in the wind becomes a universe on his canvas. From the mid-1960s, his paintings echoed his desire to explore the transmission of energy from the organic to the inorganic, a curiosity that led him to create works in which neon lights pierced everyday objects, such as an umbrella, a glass, a bottle or his own raincoat. Without ever using ready-made objects as “things” (at least to the extent that the Nouveau Realistes in France did), Merz and his companions drew the guiding lines of a renewed life for Italian art in the global context.