A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Ladislav Hodný, “Abstract Composition II”, 2012, Oil, Acrylic and Lacquer on Canvas, 130 x 105 cm.
In 1943, Ladislav Hodný was born in the city of Týn nad Vltavou in the Czech Republic. He graduated in 1961 from Vocational School of Bookbinding in Nový Jičín and, in 1965, from Secondary School of Arts and Crafts located in Brno. Hodný began his artistic career in the studio of his father, Ladislav Hodný Sr, where he continues the family tradition.
Mel Bochner, “Vertigo”, 1982. Charcoal, Conte Crayon and Pastel on Canvas, 108 × 74 in.
Reblogged with thanks to https://socialclaustrophobia.tumblr.com
Tomma Abts, “Hope”, 2011, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 48 x 38 cm
Born in Kiel, Germany in 1967, Tomma Abts is a contemporary abstract painter. She studied at Hodhschule der Künste in Berlin, later moving to London where she has her studio. Known for her small-scale, intricately composed geometric works, Abts works intuitively from drawings; her finished paintings bear the mark of being carefully re-worked numerous times.
The recipient of the 2006 Turner Prize, Abts has been exhibited widely. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2011, Douglas Hyde Gallery in 2005, the New Museum in 2008, and the Kunsthalle Basel in 2005. She is represented in many prestigious public collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Britain, and the Hammer Museum, among others.
Since 2005, Tomma Abts has been represented by the David Zwirner Gallery with locations in New York, London, and Hong Kong.
William Baziotes, “Cyclops”, Oil on Canvas, 1947, Chicago Art Institute
William Baziotes was an American painter known for his luminous abstractions of biomorphic forms. Though he is considered an Abstract Expressionist, Baziotes’s work remained outside the dominant aspects of the movement. His paintings are in many ways more closely aligned with the early Surrealist works of Mark rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell.
Born on June of 1912 in Pittsburgh, PA, William Baziotes was raised in the town of Reading, PA, where he worked antiquing glass as a young man. Interested in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the paintings of Henri Matisse, Baziotes moved to New York in 1933 to attend the National Academy of Design. During the late 1930s, he worked for the WPA Federal Art Project, both as a teacher and in its easel division.
Baziotes was introduced to Motherwell by the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta in 1941, and had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century in 1944. William Baziotes died on June 6, 1963 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.
Robert Motherwell, “Elergy to the Spanish Republic No. 110”, Acrylic with Pencil and Charcoal on Canvas, 1971, Guggenheim Museum
The atrocities of the Spanish Civil War which started when he was twenty-one made an indelible impression on Robert Motherwell. who later devoted a series of more than two hundred paintings to the theme. From Motherwell’s retrospective view, the war became a metaphor for all injustice. He conceived of his series “Elegies to the Spanish Republic” as majestic commemorations of human suffering and as poetic, abstract symbols for the unceasing cycle of life and death.
Motherwell demonstrates his admiration for French Symbolism with this series of paintings, an appreciation he shared with his fellow Abstract Expressionist painters. Motherwell was particularly inspired by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s belief that a poem should not represent some specific entity, idea, or event, but rather the emotive effect that it produces. The abstract motif common to most of the Energy series, an alternating pattern of bulbous shapes compressed between columnar forms, may be read as an indirect reference to the experience of loss and the heroics of stoic resistance.
The contentious nature of life itself is expressed through the stark juxtaposition of black against white, which is emphasized by contrasting ovoid and rectilinear slab forms. Concerning the Elergy series, Motherwell said, “After a period of painting them, I discovered Black as one of my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.”
Gillian Ayres, “Phaëthon”, 1990, Oil on Canvas, 244 x 366 cm, Tate Museum, London
British painter Gillian Ayres’ 1990 “Phaëthon” is a very large oil painting packed with a variety of interlocking but loosely defined shapes, including triangles, circles, semi-circles, arches and zig-zagging lines. Shades of yellow, red and orange are especially prominent, while many of the forms have been given thick white outlines. The surface of the canvas is thick with paint, which appears to have been applied quickly and freely in layers so that every area of the canvas is covered.
At the top of the painting black and white lines radiate from multi-coloured bands that curve from one side to the other over the central composition, which is made up of loosely delineated shapes of various sizes. At the bottom edge of the work is a sequence of vertical parallel lines in black, brown and red paint.
After a period beginning in the mid-1960s in which she worked predominately with acrylic paint, Ayres reverted to oil paint in 1976 and began utilising a much more colorful palette. Thick layers of paint, exuberant colours and expressive paint handling are characteristic of Ayres’s work after she finished teaching at the Winchester School of Art and left London for north Wales in 1981.
The title of this painting refers to the figure of Phaëthon, who, according to Greek mythology, was the son of the sun god Apollo. The predominance of yellow, red and orange in the painting may allude to Phaëthon’s parentage, and in particular to the mythical account of Phaëthon’s journey in his father’s sun chariot, when he drove so fast it caused the surrounding landscape to burst into flames. However, the titles of Ayres’s works are usually conceived after the paintings have been completed, and in some cases have been suggested by the artist’s friends or by a process of free association.
Jackson Pollock, “Number 8”, 1949 Drip Period, Enamel and Oil on Canvas, Neuburger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase
In the 1949 painting “Number 8”, Jackson Pollock’s line of paint has the capacity to be everywhere at once, to serve the ends of both illusion and substance. The paint line functioned supremely well as the vehicle of a speed of light all-overness, creating the impression that Pollock’s large poured all-over paintings arrived at their structure both internally and immediately. Pollock’s delicate crusts, which achieved an infinitesimal layer of relief, had profound affinities with two related modernist achievements, the Analytic Cubism of Picasso and the late wall-sized Impressionism of Claude Monet.
Pollock’s encrusted, puddled, labyrinthine, and weblike surfaces are physically and erotically present, enticing the viewer into a relation in which his body, and not just his eyesight, directly confronts the abstract field. This relation, which is at least as close to the experience of architecture as it is to the tradition of seeing through or “into” an illusionistic painting, can be deceptive. By means of his interlaced trickles and spatters, Pollock created a fluctuating movement between a clearly definite surface and an illusion of indeterminate, but somehow, definitely shallow depth. This effect reminds viewers of what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque arrived at with the facet-planes of their Analytical Cubist paintings.
Jackson Pollock, “The She-Wolf”, 1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in the 1943 painting “The She-Wolf” may allude to the animal in the myth of Rome’s birth that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.
However, “She-Wolf”came into existence because I had to paint it,” Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, Jackson Pollock added, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”
“The She-Wolf” was featured in Pollock’s first solo exhibition, at the Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Jackson Pollock to enter a museum collection.