Miguel Ángel Battegazzore

Miguel Ángel Battegazzore, “Series en Tríadas”, 1976, Oil on Canvas, 88 x 64 cm

Painter and set designer, Miguel Ángel Battegazzore was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on January 22, 1931. Growing up during the 1950s, he was inspired by Abstract Expressionism, the art culture at the time. Battegazzore graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in 1958 where he studied with muralist Miguel A. Pareja. During the years from 1961 to 1967, Battegazzore made study tours to Europe, Africa, and various countries in North and South America.

Battegazzaro taught for many years at the National School of Fine Arts, the Film School of Uruguay (ECU), and at the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences of the University of the Republic. He was awarded the Carlos Maria Herrera Municipal Scholarship, named in honor of the Uruguayan portraitist, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Scholarship.

In the evolution of his work, Miguel Battegazzora went from abstraction to figurative work, producing a very personal and updated interpretation of the symbolic world that had been established by Joaquín Torres García, considered the father of Latin American Constructivism. Battegazzaro took the organization which was basic to Torres’ symbolic work and deconstructed it, inserting disorder and randomness into his own paintings.

Battegazzaro had exhibited worldwide with shows in Lisbon, London, Venice, and the United States. He is also the author of “Joaquín Torres García:
The Plot and the Sign”, published in 1999 by the Municipal Government of Maldonado. His work is on exhibition in the Juan Manuel Blanes Municipal Museum in Montevideo, the National Museum of Visual Arts of Uruguay, and the Maldonado Museum of American Art.

Ikebana Basket

Ikebana Basket (Gourd Shaped), Late Meiji Period, Split Bamboo with Tied Bamboo Rope, Japan

The Meiji Period of Japan extended from Ocotber 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. This period corresponded to the reign of Emperor Meiji after 1868 to his death. It was the first half of the Empire of Japan during which Japanese society moved from being an isolated feudal society to its modern form, affecting social structure, politics, economy and foreign relations.

Ikeban is a the Japanese art of floral arrangement. Sculptural art baskets have been used since the inception of ikebana over 500 years ago to be one of the primary ikebana containers for the craft’s practitioners. They range from randomly woven nested baskets to more formal, tailored pieces.

Antoine Bourdelle

Antoine Bourdelle, “EL Arquero (The Archer)”, Bronze, 2007, Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Antoine Bourdelle was and influential and prolific French sculptor, painter and teacher. He left school at the age of 13 to work as a wood carver in his father’s cabinet making shop. He learned drawing with the founder of the Ingres Museum in Montauban, then sculpture at the art school in Toulouse. At the age of 24 he won a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, worked briefly in the atelier of Alexander Falguiere, and frequented the studio of Jules Dalou, who was his neighbor.

He became one of the pioneers of 20th century monumental sculpture. Auguste Rodin became a great admirer of his work, and by September 1893 Antoine Bourdelle joined Rodin as his assistant where he soon became a popular teacher, both there and at his own studio where many future prominent artists attended his classes, so that his influence on sculpture was considerable.

Fred Kaemmer

Glasswork by Fred Kaemmer,

Glass artist Fred Kaemmer likes to use the traditional decorative elements of glassblowing–frit, glass cane, metal leaf–in unorthodox ways. He often uses these elements on a piece’s interior surface to create unusual textures or patterns, rather than adding them to the surface or sandwiching them between layers of glass.

Kaemmer’s approach to glassblowing works against the grain of conventional glass decoration. By working on the interior surface, Kaemmer creates unusual vessels that fully engage the viewer, and the results edge the piece away from its utilitarian and traditional foundation toward a more sculptural work of art.

After graduating from college, Fred Kaemmer began working with glass as a distraction from the nagging question of “what now?” He took several summer workshops and eventually enrolled at The University of Wisconsin-River Falls to further explore hot glass. This was over ten years ago, and he now works full-time with hot glass in a studio that he built in St. Paul, MN.

Erik Johansson

Surreal Photography by Erik Johansson

Erik Johansson, originally from Sweden, claims to capture ‘ideas’ in his work. Whether using photographs and digital editing, or even paint and hand made cardboard models to re-create an imagined vision, his completed images look as though they are perfectly genuine photographs.
In fact, every new image is a combination of hundreds of original photographs, sometimes with raw materials created by Mr Johansson himself, and dozens of hours spent in Adobe Photoshop to digitally alter and combine different elements to illustrate his idea.
Mr Johansson writes on his website that he uses photography as a means of ‘collecting material to realise the ideas in my mind’.