Year: 2015

Robert Therrien

Sculptural Installations by Robert Therrien

Born in 1947, Robert Therrien was an American artist known known for his large-scale sculptures. His work reimagined and reinvented objects from everyday life, such as a set of table and chairs or stacks of plates, turning them into monumental immersive sculptures. Los Angeles-based, Therrien was described as being possessed by a sense of wonder over commonplace experiences.

The artist’s solo exhibition at the The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000 examined the work at what proved to be a crucial moment in his career. The show featured monumental new sculptures, including the 1994 “Under the Table”,  “No Title”, a stack of blue plastic plates originally exhibited in 1999, and three gigantic beards.

“Therrien has been making exquisitely crafted sculptures that are easily recognized as objects encountered in the daily world. Yet, however recognizable the object, the sense of estrangement in these new sculptures is more pronounced than ever before.” – critic Christopher Knight

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor, “Memory”, Cor-Ten Steel Installation, 2008, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin

Anish Kapoor’s 2008 “Memory” is a site-specific work that was conceived to engage two different exhibition locations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin and New York. Utilizing Cor-Ten steel for the first time, the sculpture represents a milestone in Kapoor’s career. Memory’s thin steel skin, only eight millimeters thick, suggests a form that is ephemeral and unmonumental. The sculpture appears to defy gravity as it gently glances against the periphery of the gallery walls and ceiling. However, as a 24-ton volume, Memory is also raw, industrial, and foreboding.

Positioned tightly within the gallery, Memory is never fully visible; instead the work fractures and divides the gallery into several distinct viewing areas. The division compels visitors to navigate the museum, searching for vantage points that offer only glimpses of the sculpture. This processional method of viewing Memory is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Visitors are asked to contemplate the ensuing fragmentation by attempting to piece together images retained in their minds, exerting effort in the act of seeing—a process Kapoor describes as creating a “mental sculpture.”

Memory’s rusting exterior creates a powdery surface, which relates this commission to Kapoor’s early pigment pieces from the 1980s. Rather than necessitating an additional coat of paint to smooth the interior curvature, the sculpture’s Cor-Ten tiles, perfectly manufactured to prevent light from seeping through, create the necessary conditions for darkness within. The work’s square aperture—wedged precisely into one of the gallery’s walls—allows a view into this boundless interior void.

The endless darkness seems to contradict what visitors know about the work’s delimited exterior. This contradiction between the known and the perceived is one of Kapoor’s central interests. The window also defines a two-dimensional plane that can be read as a painting rather than an opening. Kapoor’s interest in this pictorial effect is best reflected in his statement “I am a painter working as a sculptor.”

Aleksandr Deyneka

Alexendre Alexandrovitch Keineka, “La Douche, Apres la Bataille (Shower, After the Battle)’, 1937-42, Oil on Canvas, Kursk State Art Gallery

Born in May of 1899, Aleksandr Deuneka was a Soviet Russian painter, graphic artist and sculptor, regarded as one of the most important Russian modernist figurative painters of the first half of the 20th century. He was a founding member of groups such as OST and Oktyabr, and his work gained wide exposure in major exhibitions. Deyneka’s paintings and drawings depict genre scenes as well as figures engaged in labor and sports.

The painting “After Battle” was inspired by a photograph by legendary Soviet photographer Boris Ignatovich that was presented to Aleksandr Deyneka. Deyneka thought the composition with an athlete in the foreground was perfection itself. He had difficulty transferring it to the canvas, however, and the painting took five years to complete. Deyneka finished it at the height of World War II, which is why the athletes in the title had turned into soldiers.

Man of Nature

Photographer Unknown, (Man of Nature), Model Unknown

“His eyes contain the history of the world
Of all its inhabitants who come and go
He yields his wisdom freely for all
So human hearts may follow his well-worn tracks

Peace and grace surround him
As Nature shields him in her protective embrace
She moves through him speaking softly
Enchanting tales of her wilderness. . . .”

-Collette O’Mahoney, The Soul in Words

Alfred Gilbert

Albert Gilbert, “Anteros”, Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, Piccadilly Circus, London

The Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain is located at the southeastern side of Piccadilly Circus in London. It was erected in 1892-1893 to commemorate the philanthropic works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, who achieved the replacing of child-labor with school education.

Albert Gilbert’s statue of Anteros was the first sculpture in the world to be cast in aluminum, which was just becoming in wide public use in the early 1890s. The statue is set on a bronze fountain, which inspired the marine motifs that Gilbert used on the statue. The model for the sculpture was Albert Gilbert’s studio assistant, a 16 year-old Anglo-Italian, Angelo Colarossi who was born in Shepherd’s Bush. Italian-born piece-moulder and figure maker fernando Meacci was involved in the moulding of the fountain which was most likely cast by George Broad & Son, a major foundry established in the 1870s.

Robin-Lee Hall

 

Robin-Lee Hall, “Upstairs”, Egg Tempera on Gesso Panel, 10 x 12 Inches

Born in London in 1962, Robin-Lee Hall studied Fine Art and Critical Studies at St. Martins School of Art and received a BA in Fine Art (Painting) at Kingston Polythechnic. He was appointed in 2008 to conduct workshops by the National Gallery in London. Hall is a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Hall works in the medium of egg tempera, a traditional way of making one’s own paint from pigments, the yolk of an egg, and small amount of water. After doing preliminary sketches, he lays the paint down on gesso panels, cross-hatching layers of color.

Jean Andre Castaigne

Jean Andre Castaigne, Untitled, (Men Dressing), Graphite on Paper

French artist Jean André Castaigne was an important figure during the Golden Age of Illustration, producing paintings and both book and magazine illustrations in France and America. His work influenced a generation of illustrators with its sense of realism and drama, vivid story-telling, and attention to accurate detail.

A master of composition and form, Castaigne was equally at ease drawing humans, animals, architecture and landscapes. As a youth, he read prodigiously and studied classic Greek, Latin, French, and German literature from books provided by his grandfather, the librarian of Angoulême. Castaigne expressed an early gift for art, sketching imaginary scenes inspired by these books.

At the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Castaigne trained to become a painter in the Salon tradition.  His paintings were first exhibited in America at the New Orleans Exhibition of 1884. The first of his many illustrations appeared in “The Century” magazine around 1891.

As the principal draftsman for French president Felix Faure, Jean André Castaigne was awarded the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. In 1901 he returned to America as an official representative of the Imprimerie Nationale to study American printing plants in various cities. Castaigne’s travels throughout the United States gave him an opportunity to create a series of illustrations reflecting America in the early twentieth century.