Category: installation

Greger Gaida

Two Sculpture Installations by Gregor Gaida” ‘Attaboys’ and ‘Kind und Kreide 2′

Artist Gregor Gaida lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His figurative sculptures often depict aggressive, even violent people engaging with each  other under unknown circumstances, as with this pair of mischievous aluminum boys titled “Attaboys” installed in 2012. Gaida says that he often bases his figures off of images found in magazines and books.

“The found footage is often no more than an impulse that is no longer discernible in the further development of the shape. Analogous to photography, my objects are three-dimensional snapshots. The characters are frozen in movement and often cropped along imaginary image borders. I transport the fragmented character of photos into the third dimension. Simultaneously, when dealing with color and options of shaping, painterly characteristics appear. Thus, the life-sized special interventions are formally attributed to sculpture but are equally part of painterly and photographic categories.”-Gregor Gaida

“Attaboys” appears to be a reinterpretation of another set of sculptures from 2008, “Kind und Kreide 2”, where two similar boys are seen drawing a line with chalk.

Ryan McGinness

Ryan McGinness, “Signs”, 2014, Fifty Vinyl on Aluminum Signs/ Dispalyed in Manhattan from July 28- August 30, 2014

Signs, a public art project by artist and designer Ryan McGinness, featured funky street signs fabricated and installed by the New York City Department of Transportation all around downtown NYC.

The project included fifty signs installed and displayed around the Manhattan area until the end of August in 2014. The signs were installed on traffic light posts and lamp posts along the route of the city’s Summer Streets program, a weekly event where about seven miles of NYC’s streets were closed off to allow people to freely and safely run, walk, bike and play.

The fifty signs were made of vinyl on aluminum and were manufactured and published by the DOT itself. The signs featured various contemporary designs in black, red, and white. The artist identified each sign as a number and he also included whimsical descriptions for each of the design on his website.

Juan Munoz

Sculptures by Juan Munoz

Juan Munoz was a Spanish sculptor, working primarily in paper mache, resin and bronze. He was also interested int he auditory arts and created compositions for the radio. In 2000, Muñoz was awarded Spain’s major Premio Nacional de Bellas Artes in recognition of his work; he died shortly after, in 2001.

His first exhibition was in 1984 in the Fernando Vijande Gallery of Madrid. Since then, his works have been frequently exhibited in Europe and other parts of the world. At the beginning of the 1990s, Juan Muñoz began breaking the rules of traditional sculpture by sculpting works in a “narrative” manner which consisted of creating smaller than life-size figures in an atmosphere of mutual interaction.

Muñoz’s sculptures often invite the spectator to relate to them, making the viewer feel as if they have discreetly become a part of the work of art. His slate-gray or wax-colored monochrome figures create a sort of discreetness due to their lack of individuality, but that absence of individuality questions the viewer, perhaps even so much as to make the viewer uncomfortable. When asked his occupation, Muñoz would respond simply that he was a “storyteller.”

Wolfgang Stiller

Wolfgang Stiller, “Matchstickmen”, Wood Installation

German artist Wolfgang Stiller created the “Matchstickmen’” using head molds that he had laying around his studio. The giant matchsticks created of thick pieces of lumber are standing or lying in the room. The faces are all different and meant to look as if they simply emerged in the wood after burning each flammable tip.

Ryoichi Kurokawa

Ryoichi Kurokawa, “Octfalls”, One of Eight Displays in the Installation

“Octfalls” was an eight hour audiovisual installation by Ryoichi Kurokawa involving eight HD displays of waterfalls with eight channel multi sound. It was presented at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Ryoichi Kurokawa is a Japanese artist, born in 1978, who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Kurokawa’s works take on multiple forms such as installation works, recordings, and concert pieces. He composes the time sculpture with the field recordings and the digital generated structures, and reconstructs architecturally the audiovisual phenomenon.

In recent years, his works are shown at international festivals and museums including Tate Modern[UK], Venice Biennale[IT], Transmediale[DE], EMPAC[US], YCAM[JP] and Sonar[ES]. In 2010, he was awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category.

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor, “Dismemberment: Site 1″, Mild Steel Tube and Tensioned Fabric, 2009, gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand

This work is an installation for “The Farm”, a private outdoor art gallery in Kaipara Bay, north of Auckland. Kapoor often creates outdoor sculptures as with the case with his first outdoor fabric sculpture. Anish Kapoor states “it is designed to withstand the high winds that blow inland from the Tasman Sea off the northwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island”.

It is 85 metres long and consists of two elliptical steel rings (one vertical, one horizontal), 27 metres across with 32 cables providing displacement and deflection resistance to the wind loads. It is covered in a custom deep red PVC-coated polyester fabric by Ferrari Textiles that weighs 7,200kg alone. It was created with the idea of enhancing views of the harbour to the west and mountains to the east channelling the forces of water, air and rock. It reminds one of red blood cells and veins with a membrane like quality to it that Kapoor describes as being “rather like flayed skin”.

Laura Bacon

Willow Sculptures by Laura Bacon

British Sculptor, Laura Ellen Bacon (born 1976) works raw materials into large-scale or ‘human-scale’ artworks, in both interior and landscape settings. Working with predominately natural materials and her bare hands, her works embrace, surround or engulf architectural and natural structures.

Her work has been described as ‘startling but beckoning’; ‘monumental yet intimate’; ‘frenzied yet calm’.  Laura’s particular use of materials emerges from a compulsive desire to work them into a formed space of some kind, using a language of materials that seems strangely familiar to the natural world.

“I began making my early works upon dry stone walls and evolved to work within trees, riverbanks and hedges, allowing the chosen structure (be it organic or man-made) to become host. I am still powerfully driven to create spaces of some kind and over a decade into my work, my passions continue to merge creatively with architecture.

The forms that I make have a closeness with their host structure or the fabric of a building; their oozing energy spills from gutters, their ‘muscular’ forms nuzzle up to the glass and their gripping weave locks onto the strength of the walls. Whilst the scale and impact varies from striking to subtle (sometimes only visible upon a quizzical double take), I relish the opportunity to let a building ‘feed’ the form, as if some part of the building is exhaling into the work.”

Jason Hackenwerth

Jason Hackenwerth, “Crown of Thorns”, Latex Balloons

New York artist Jason Hackenwerth created the above in 2006 as part of “Honeysuckle Labyrinth” exhibit for the New Museum Gala in New York City. The artwork on display consisted of insect-like forms that rotated slowly on air currents, seemingly interacting with each other.

Hackenwerth chooses balloons as his medium because he feels they add an instantly recognizable characteristic to his creations—which he describes as microorganisms that communicate about connectivity.

Kendall Buster

Sculptures by Kendall Buster

Kendall Buster is a full-time faculty member in the sculpture and extended media department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her large-scale “biological architecture” projects have been exhibited in numerous national and international venues. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as part of a series on art and science and was the recipient of a 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in the Arts.

“Sculpture can expand beyond the idea of the making of a distinct, autonomous object and into site-responsive installation,” Buster said. “The way I work tends to engage architectural spaces, often using a variety of materials that may not be permanent, and so there is this wonderful opportunity to do all kinds of things with scale, play and volume.”

A native of rural Alabama, Buster began her education in the sciences, particularly biology and microbiology, which inform her work today.

“A lot of these pieces have accessible interiors and operate like models that transform a given architectural space,” she said. “And there are certain kinds of references to what we think of as the language of biology in that many of the materials I use really do resemble a membrane.”

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty”, Great Salt Lake, Utah

Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty, considered by many to be his most significant work, was constructed in April 1970 on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. The sculpture is built of mud, precipitated salt crystals, and basalt rocks. The sculpture forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. The sculpture is sometimes visible and sometimes submerged, depending upon the water level of the Great Salt Lake.

Smithson reportedly chose the Rozel Point site based on the blood-red color of the water and its connection with the primordial sea. The red hue of the water is due to the presence of salt-tolerant bacteria and algae that thrive in the extreme 27 percent salinity of the lake’s north arm, which was isolated from freshwater sources by the building of a causeway by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959.

Smithson was reportedly attracted to the Rozel Point site because of the stark anti-pastoral beauty and industrial remnants from nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, as well as an old pier and a few unused oil rigs. While observing the construction of the piece from a helicopter, Smithson reportedly remarked “Et in Utah Ego” as a counterpoint to the pastoral Baroque painting “Et in Arcadia Ego” by Nicolas Poussin.

Note: for those who are deeply into Smithson and Rothko, I recommend a treatise by Timothy D Martin with the Tate Museum entitled: “Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Rothko and Smithson”. An intense read but very interesting.   http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/timothy-d-martin-psychosis-and-the-sublime-in-american-art-rothko-and-smithson-r1136831

Yayoi Kusama

The Art work of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg] Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design.

Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, and Tate Modern in 2012. In 2006, she received a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008, Christie’s New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.

Wolfgang Buttress

Wolfgang Buttress, “Lucent”, Fibre Optics, Mirror

Commissioned by Hearn for the John Hancock Center in Chicago, Lucent will be the focal point of the towers entrance.

Working with eminent astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Bayliss, from the Australian National University, Wolfgang has created a semi-spherical sculpture made up of thousands of nodes which accurately map the stars which can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere from the Earth with the naked eye.

Fibre optic lighting subtly pulsates over the day and throughout the seasons. Lucent is attached to a mirrored ceiling creating the illusion of a whole sphere. Beneath the artwork sits a polished black granite pool of water; this reflects the sculpture and suggests a sense of infinity

Lucent expresses and emanates light; the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are implied in it’s reflection. They are there but cannot be seen.

Tatiana Blass

Tatiana Blass, “Penelope”, Loom, Red Yan

In 2011, Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass pierced the walls of a Sao Paulo chapel with large masses of red yarn, letting the bright material trail into the surrounding grasses, landscape, and trees. The installation, titled Penelope, was named after Odysseus’s wife in Homer’s Odyssey, a character who kept herself away from suitors while he was at war by weaving a burial shroud by day, and secretly taking pieces of it apart at night.

Inside the chapel the work continued with a 45-foot-long carpet leading to a loom into which it was stuck. Immaculate on one side of the loom and in pieces on the other, strings of the dismantled rug traveled outside of the chapel through preexisting holes that made their way into the yard. The piece, just like the epic poem, leaves us to wonder whether the work is in a state of construction or unraveling, if the carpet is being built, or slowly torn apart.

Alexandra Kehayoglou

Alexandra Kehayoglou, Landscape Carpets and Rugs

Using scraps leftover thread from her family’s carpet factory in Buenos Aires, artist Alexandra Kehayoglou embarks on a laborious hand-tufting process to fabricate wool carpets and rugs that mimic natural textures like moss, water, trees, and pastures. The carpets balance form and function and can powerfully transform an entire room into a lush meadow dotted with pools of water and tufts of grass. Many of her works even function as part tapestry and flow from walls to floor, or work as covers for chairs or stools.

Reblogged with thanks to http://www.thisiscolossal.com