Category: surrealism

Lara Zankoul

lara-zankoul-the-unseen-2013-cover

Lara Zankoul, “The Unseen” Series, 2013, Color Photograph #13

Lara Zankoul, is an interdisciplinary artist and self-taught photographer based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her work captures everyday human behavior and issues that occur within society through photographic media. The aim is to invite the viewers to come up with their own interpretation and understanding of the photographs and the stories behind them.

Lara Zankoul’s images often explore the mysteries of the human psyche, combining unusual elements with ordinary life. Her 2013 ” The Unseen” series features contemporary scenarios literally immersed in pools of water that occupy their living space, creating playful narratives. Zankoul does not use any kind of digital manipulation; all these artworks are done strictly through the sole use of camera.

Kay Sage

Kay Sage, “Festa”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 36 cm, Private Collection

Kay Sage was an American surrealist and poet. A member of the Golden Age and Post-War periods of Surrealism, Sage is mostly recognized for her artistic works, which typically contain themes of an architectural nature. She received her formal training in art at the Corcoran Art School in Washington DC in 1919 to 1920. She later studied art in Rome for several years, learning conventional techniques and styles.

Kay Sage’s exposure to surrealism at the International Surrealist Exhibit at Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938 inspired Sage to begin painting in earnest. She exhibited six of her new oils in the Salon des Surindépendants show at the Porte de Versailles in the fall of 1938. These semiabstract paintings, including “Afterwards” and “The World is Blue”, borrowed motifs and styles from de Chirico and the Surrealists, but showed hints of Sage’s own future work as well.

Source: thunderstruck9

Jean Cocteau: Film History Series

Enrique Riveros, “The Blood of a Poet”, 1932, Director Jean Cocteau, Cinematographer Georges Périnal

Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet” is an avant-garde film which starred Enrique Riveros, a Chilean actor who had a successful career in European films. It is the first part of the Orphic Trilogy, which is continued in the 1949 “Orphee”, and followed by the 1960 “Testament of Orpheus”.

The film was financed by French nobleman Charles de Noailles who gave Cocteau one million francs to make the film. Shortly after the completion of the film, rumors began circulating that it was an anti-Christian message. Due to the riotous public reaction to Noailles’s previous film “L’Age d’Or”, Cocteau’s release date for his film was delayed for more than a year. “The Blood of a Poet” was finally released on January 20, 1932.

In this scene from the second section of the film, the artist played by Riveros is transported through the mirror to a hotel, where he peers through several keyholes, witnessing such people as an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite. The artist finally cries out that he has seen enough and returns back through the mirror.

“Many years ago, as I was glancing through a catalogue of jokes for parties and weddings, I saw an item, ‘An object difficult to pick up’. I haven’t the slightest idea what that ‘object’ is or what it looks like, but I like knowing that it exists and I like thinking about it.

A work of art should also be ‘an object difficult to pick up’. It must protect itself from vulgar pawing, which tarnishes and disfigures it. It should be made of such a shape that people don’t know which way to hold it, which embarrasses and irritates the critics, incites them to be rude, but keeps it fresh. The less it’s understood, the slower it opens its petals, the later it will fade. A work of art must make contact, be it even through a misunderstanding, but at the same time it must hide its riches, to reveal them little by little over a long period of time. A work that doesn’t keep its secrets and surrenders itself too soon exposes itself to the risk of withering away, leaving only a dead stalk.” 

Jean Cocteau, Cocteau on the Film, 1972, Dover Publications

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Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Angel Ossorio, “The Red Egg”, 1942, Watercolor and India Ink on Paper Pasted on Cardboard, 61.8 x 35 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris

Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.

Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner. 

Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.

In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative. 

Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics. 

Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Young Moses”, 1941, Ink on Paper, 45.1 x 46.7 cm, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York City

Second Insert Image: Alfonso Angel Ossorio, “The Red Egg”, Detail, 1942, Watercolor and India Ink on Paper Pasted on Cardboard, 61.8 x 35 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Resurrection”, 1940, Black Ink on Paper, 43.2 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Dariusz Klimczak

The Surreal Photography of Dariusz Klimczak

Polish photographer Dariusz Klimczak composes dreamlike landscapes that hypnotize with their surprise and weirdness. The photographer’s digital photo manipulations open the door to his imaginative world, where a desolate desert is brought to life by quirky and playful characters. Everyday items clash in odd compositions with animals and humans, conflicting with gravity and the other physical laws without which our common sense would collapse.

Dariusz Klimczak has been a professional photographer for 30 years, a few of which he spent creating photo manipulations. The artist prefers monochromatic images which present the scenes with a more authentic and mystical quality.

James Mortimer

James Mortimer: Paintings, Oil on Linen

James Mortimer, a painter and a sculptor, was born in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1989. He was educated at a Catholic School and studied sculpture at the Bath School of Art, receiving the Kenneth Armitage Prize for Sculpture. Mortimer now devotes himself to painting imagined scenes of immoral excess, mythical creatures and larger than life characters. He is represented by the Catto Gallery on Heath Street in London.

James Mortimer’s fey boys inhabit a world of uncomplicated decadence, a surreal Renaissance landscape where man and beast exist together on increasingly equal terms. Inhibitions go out the window; each is a slave to their own nature. The ensuing relationships provide fertile ground for myriad little dramas as the companions look to get along. Animals become mischievous, even vicious at times. Their masters try to rise above it, retaining an almost Imperial sense of composure, but in the process find themselves somehow detached, lost even, gazing wistfully into the opium haze of their peculiar adopted land.

Whilst seemingly simple, there is wealth of drama playing out behind the scenes. Visual puns and innuendoes pepper his paintings like Freudian slips of the brush. Every fruit and every plant is pregnant with suggestion. Exoticism and the thrill of travel also permeate every scene, like Victorian Boy’s Own adventures that have turned slightly spicy and risqué. And underneath it all, there is a simmering sexuality. These characters are vain, vice-loving and beautiful.

Note: an Extensive collection of James Mortimer’s work can be found at: http://www.jamesmortimerart.com/paintings

art@cattogallery.co.uk

Ed Paschke

Ed Paschke, “Gypsy Blue”, 2001, Oil on Linen, 36 x 40 Inches

Ed Paschke was born in Chicago where he spent most of his life as an important painter. He was initially associated in the late 1960s with the second generation of Chicago Imagists who called themselves The Hairy Who. He received his B.F.A. from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1961 and his M.F.A. in 1970.

Between 1961 and 1970, Paschke lived for a time in New York where he easily came under the influence of the Pop Art movement, in part, because of his interests as a child in animation and cartoons. His fascination with the print media of popular culture led to a portrait-based art of cultural icons. Paschke used the celebrity figure, real or imagined, as a vehicle for explorations of personal and public identity with social and political implications.

Although his style is representational, with a loose affiliation to Photorealism, Paschke’s art plays heavily upon expressionist distortion and abstract form. The often grotesque cast to his paintings suggests an affiliation in spirit with Surrealism, a movement that has historically interested Chicago artists and collectors.

In the 1970s, Paschke’s figures, now presented primarily as headshots in extreme close-ups, began to wear masks and unusual headgear. Colors became electric; forms were increasingly distorted by video-like disturbances; facial features of mouth, eyes, and nose were hollowed out or veiled with aggressive color shapes. These features became standard elements of Paschke’s disquieting and compelling art.