Month: October 2015

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia, “La Source (The Spring)”, 1912

Francis Picabia, born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia), was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. Picabia was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

Helmut Zimmermann

Paintings of Helmut Zimmermann

Helmut Zimmermann was born in 1924 in Aussig, Bohemia. After the war he studied at the Kunsthochschule in Munich and at the Akademie in Nuremberg. Zimmermann developed his “Bilderverwandlungen” after travelling Europe, USA, North-Africa, India, Japan and China and reading Martin Heidegger and C.G. Jung.
Helmut Zimmermann’s “Bilderverwandlungen” comprised of faces and mandalas, mystic paintings of circles or polygones. Apart from painting Helmut Zimmermann was also active as a writer and producer of animation movies, in which he showed a series of metamorphoses. Zimmermann shot each state within the painting process and shows the metamorphosis. The different states of the unfinished paintings are conserved within his films.
In the fall of 2004 Zimmermann donated his collection of films to the Film Museum in Munich.

James Bertucci

Pencil Drawings and Watercolor Titled “Passage” by James Bertucci

James Bertucci is a national award winning artist who has an emphasis in representational painting and sculpture techniques. James’ artwork has recently been exhibited in galleries of New York, Laguna Beach, Washington D.C. and Chicago.

James interest in art began at age three. At age 6, he won a District Award as the outstanding student in all of Will, Kendall and Grundy counties of Illinois for his artwork. His piece entitiled the “Illinois State Cardinal” was published in the Illinois Reading Council Journal at age 7. James credits his high school teachers and mentor for 11 years, John Tylk for developing his skills. Bertucci studied under artist John Tylk at age 5, who taught him drawing and painting skillls along with introducing him to various techniques and approaches to art.

Paul Tillich: “Being Human Means Asking the Questions”

Photographer Unknown, (Ginger Man Gazing Out Window)

“Being human means asking the questions of one’s own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one’s own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers.”

-Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol 1

Antony Gormley

Watercolors and Sculptures by Antony Gormley

Gormley’s career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. Almost all his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal casts.

Gormley describes his work as “an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live.” Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or “the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside.” His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time.

The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley’s Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines crafted by 350 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay. The appropriation of others’ works caused minor controversy and some of the figurines were stolen in protest. Also in 2006, the burning of Gormley’s 25-metre high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus.

On 13 March 2011, Gormley was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the set design for Babel (Words) at Sadler’s Wells in collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. He was the recipient of the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and is the 2013 Praemium Imperiale laureate for sculpture. Gormley was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to the arts.