Month: November 2017

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

Six Photos by Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

The Swiss-born, Berlin-based duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs respond with humor and wit to various traditions of modernist architecture, documentary photography and the heroic travelogue. By pecking at such constructions, the artists reveal a more whimsical, ironic, and subjective vision of the structures and technologies that shape the way we see and live.

Their work simultaneously explores the subject of artistic collaboration, as well as the expansion of photography as an artistic medium. Though much of Onorato & Krebs’ practice is photographic, the artists’ engagement with other media—film, sculpture, sound —sheds the artifice of objectivity and documentation to revel in reconstructions of the world around us.

San Michele at Str. Maggiore

Chas, Piazza San Michele at Str. Maggiore, Bologna, Italy

Bologna’s porticos were built because of the city’s early growth when eager students rushed to the world’s first university. Bologna simply needed more room. Porticos created more liveable space higher above ground level, with shops and shop owners underneath them, and arches of at least seven feet tall meant men riding their horses could easily pass through. Even artists and craftsmen could work outside, sheltered from the elements.

The historical city of Bologna has the most porticos in the world with nearly 40 kilometres of long walkways and tall arches you can stroll through. The covered walkways give Bologna its unique character dating back to the 1200s. Since then, there have been medieval, gothic, and renaissance influences in their design.  Each one is very different, from its structure to its shadows, and the different perspective they offer.

Wim Heleens

Wim Heleens, “Unexpected” Oil on Canvas, 2009

The work of Wim Heldens occupies an individual place in the contemporary art scene of the Netherlands. Understanding that the re-emergence of realist art as a counter movement to modernism was opening-up new perspectives, and realising that his main interest was the human condition and life as it unfolded around him, he quickly discovered that his talents could best develop in the portrait genre and the context of ordinary life, thereby picking-up an old Dutch tradition. But although much of his technique is traditional, the imagery is contemporary, and it is in this combination of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ that Heldens found his originality.

David Giterson: “The World was One World”

“The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto’s long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense.” 

—David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars