Month: August 2017

Unbroken Necropolis Seal

Unbroken Necropolis Seal on King Tutankhamun’s Tomb

This seal was actually a seal to King Tut’s fifth shrine. The king was buried in a series of four sarcophagi, which were in turn kept inside a series of five shrines. This unbroken seal stayed 3,245 years untouched. The late discovery of Tut’s tomb in 1922 resulted from the fact that it was covered by debris from that of Ramesses IV which was located directly above its entrance. While the outermost shrine of the youthful pharaoh had been opened not once but twice in ancient times, the doors of the second of the huge shrines of gilded wood containing the royal sarcophagus still carried the necropolis seal which indicated the pharaoh’s mummy was untouched and intact.

Leland Foster

Six Gifs by Leland Foster

Leland Foster Is an artist and graphic designer living/working in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate from SUNY Binghamton, Leland received his BA in English Literature and Rhetoric. His work has been displayed extensively both in the US and abroad, at locations including the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens: Deutsche Werkbund Ausstellung Art Exhibition Poster, 1914, Color Lithograph, Printed in Cologne

This poster advertises an exhibition held by the Deutsche Werkbund in Cologne in Germany in 1914. The artist Peter Behrens (1868-1940) was a pioneer of Modern design and was known for his work for AEG, the German electrical company. He was an admired designer at the time. He was asked to create this poster for the Deutsche Werkbund.

The organisation was founded by artists, manufacturers and designers who were committed to improving the standard of German product design. Unusually, Behrens chose to use a classical, though stylised, design for this impressive poster. The torch perhaps indicated that the group was lighting the way ahead for the collaboration between manufacturers and designers.

Freddy Krave: Two Figures

Freddy Krave: Two Figures

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Caravan Palace, “Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies”

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Caravan Palace, “Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies”

“Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies” sampled The Andrews Sisters’ song “Straighten Up and Fly Right”.

“Ain’t no use in divin’
What’s the use in who’s divin’?
Straighten up and find a place
Straighten up and do things”

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Ken Unsworth

Ken Unsworth, “Suspended Stone Circle II”, Wire and Stones

Ken Unsworth came to prominence as a sculptor in the 1970s, when he combined performance or body art with highly conceptual sculptural forms. Some of these performances, in particular ‘Five secular settings for sculpture as ritual’, involved using his own body as a kind of minimalist sculpture. In one, he posed spread-eagle on the wall, held aloft by a pole between his shoulder blades in a visual recreation of Richard Serra’s lead prop piece now held in the National Gallery of Australia collection in Canberra.

Unsworth’s art is often ephemeral, surviving only in the memory of those who once saw it or in rumours of that memory, or sometimes as photographs or scratchy old videos. Like Joseph Beuys, whose work Unsworth passionately admires, his art is full of apparent contradictions. He reworks the great sagas of life and death while shaking the staff of a jester and yet he has created remarkable and enduring monumental sculptures. He is admired by formalists for his sculpture and for the rigorous logic of propped or suspended stones, while others respond to the expressionism of the paintings and the symbolist theatricality of his kinetic installations.

In many of his early body art pieces, Unsworth held his body in suspension as if levitating between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the material world and the immaterial. The figure seems trapped, pinioned or bound. These works are not only about equilibrium, balance and formal relations; they are also violent and claustrophobic experiences and many of his sculptures continue this theme. ‘Suspended stone circle II’ is one of his levitation works with 103 river stones each weighing around 15 kilograms held in place by three wires tied to three rings secured to the ceiling structure. The stones form a suspended disc, with each one held as if in a force field. The stones are hung so that their centre of gravity falls exactly on the central axis of the disc and each stone is equidistant from its neighbours. The three sets of wires create three cones, suggesting the force field which they literally constitute.