Category: surrealism

Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo, “Creating with Astral Rays”, 1955, Oil on Canvas

The visionary lone painter, Remedios Varo, typically portrays herself sitting at a desk engaged in magical work, embarking on a journey to unlock true meaning, or dissolving completely into the environment that surrounds her. As a well-studied alchemist, seeker, and naturalist, however dreamlike her imagery may appear, it is in fact reality observed more clearly; Varo painted deep, intuitive, and multi-sensory pictures in hope to inspire learning and promote better individual balance in an interconnected universe.

Interestingly, and understandably, it was not until the last 13 years of the artist’s life, having fled war-torn Europe, found home in Mexico (amongst a community of other displaced Surrealists) and finally become free of ongoing financial constraints, that Varo was able to paint prolifically. Every work completed by Varo demonstrates profound technical skill and an extraordinary insight into human nature.

Although an avid believer in the inter-relatedness of all things and people, including the inter-weave of sound, light and image, her paintings are not typically populated by multiple figures. Instead we are usually introduced to an isolated creaturely hybrid thinker/artist character, reminiscent of St. Jerome in his study or a wise crone wandering in search of new discoveries.Varo repeatedly situates mystical machines in her pictures.

While in most cases such industrial looking devices function to make products that can be touched, held, and made use of, Varo’s structures are here to process that which we cannot see. As our emotions and psychological lives are intangible and invisible, it is useful to investigate them within some kind of known parameters, i.e. within a previously encountered system. Therefore, such apparatus, however made strange, help us to communicate what would be otherwise unspeakable ideas.

Julia Lillard

Julia Lillard, “Spirit Animal”, Date Unknown, Collage

Julia Lillard is a self-taught Oklahoma artist who, for the most part, creates surreal digital and paper collage. Her first love was art photography, but in her 50s, that developed into a love for collage and abstract paintings. She has a range of styles that are somewhat eclectic, and her imagination is triggered by any image, color or situation that catches her attention. Julia lets something outside of herself take over and she usually has no idea what the end result will be.

Reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: http://julialillard.tumblr.com

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

 

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Knockout”, 1929, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 44 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lund, Sweden, in April of 1884, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, was an artist working in both oils and watercolors, and writer of poetry and short stories. He is regarded as a founding member of the Modernist art movement in Sweden.

For his early education, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson attended a Technical Company School; he later studied at Danish historical painter Kristian Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen. In 1907, he entered his work in an exhibition held at the Art Museum of the University of Lund.  Adrian-Nilsson traveled to Berlin in 1913 where through author and critic Herwarth Walden’s gallery, Der Sturm, he came in contact with the contemporary art movements.

Both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc were of huge importance when Adrian-Nilsson began developing his own style of expressive cubism, a semi-abstract style with deep, vibrant colors. Adrian-Nilsson became very influential in the radical art movement and was a member of the Halmstadgruppen, a group of avant-garde artists at Hamstad, Sweden, which continued unchanged until 1979. This group eventually included painter and sculptor Alexander Archipenko, painter and graphic artist Erik Olson, Sven Jonson, and Esaias Thorén. Initially cubists, the group was influenced later by Adrian-Nilsson’s surrealistic phase and his motifs of seamen.

Adrian-Nilsson was fascinated by modern technology and masculine strength, which was reflected in his images of sailors and sportsmen . Works of this nature include the 1914-15 “Katarinahissen I”, depicting two sailors amid a cubist blue-toned landscape, and “Sjömän i Gröna Lunds tivoli II”, a surrealistic work in blues and browns depicting sailors in Gröna Lund’s amusement park. Living a hidden life at a time that gay eroticism was both taboo and illegal in Sweden, Adrian-Nilsson expressed himself through these cubist and surreal images. 

By 1919, Adrian-Nilsson’s art was developing into pure abstraction. He lived in Paris between the years 1920 and 1925, during which time he met Alexander Archipenko and Fernand Léger whose influence can be seen in Adrian-Nilsson’s renderings of mechanically-styled sportsmen, seamen and soldiers. In the later part of the 1920s, Adrian-Nilsson was working in his geometric abstract period. He developed his own personal style of surrealism during the 1930s and exhibited his work in multiple  exhibitions, including the 1935 Kubisme-Surrealisme exhibition in Copenhagen.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson died in Stockholm on March 29, 1965 and is buried at the cemetery of Norra Kyrkogården in Lund.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson’s work is represented at the Nationalmuseum and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg’s Art Museum, the Malmö Art Museum, and the Museum of Culture in Lund where his work constitutes a permanent exhibition of modernistic art. Adrian-Nilsson’s writings are preserved at the University Library of Lund.

Insert Image: Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Katarinahissen I”, 1914-15, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Erdal Inci

Endless Loop Gifs by Erdal Inci

Multifaceted artist and photographer Erdal Inci creates mesmerizing gifs that are hard to look away from. Whether the animated graphics present a line of men twirling a baton with both ends lit on fire or a parade of lights scrambling in every direction, there’s something incredibly hypnotizing about his creations.

Typically, each of the Istanbul-based artist’s growing collection of gifs features only one man, sometimes the artist himself, who has been cloned to appear like throngs of people engaging in the same exact motions along an identical path. Presented in a never-ending loop, Inci’s gifs leave the viewer fully absorbed by the motion and dancing lights.

Tishk Barzanji

Illustrations by Tishk Barzanji

Tishk Barzanji is a visual artist who moved to London in 1997 and is based there. He studied Fine Art at Richmond upon Thames College, and Physics at Loughborough University. Barzanji’s work touches on the modernist movement and surrealism and is inspired by his childhood in Kurdistan. His process is about understanding the living space in a fast moving world and the human interactions within these spaces.

Victor Fota

Victor Fota, “Conflicting Metaphysics”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Victor Fota is a visual artist from Romania whose surreal paintings are inspired by science theories and facts. He is a graduate of the Fine Arts High School in Bucharest. He has a bachelor and masters degree in Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Faculty of Art History and Theory.

During his studies, Fota has been continuously confronted by the structure of works of art, constructed at different scales. He studied mural painting techniques, panel painting techniques on wood and canvas, and also painted furniture. This lead to a better understanding of how works of art have survived in the passage of time, and what made them resist. This profound study of the materials that form the works of art led him to domains of physics and chemistry.

The traditional 15th century Flemish oil painting technique seemed to fit best with Fota’s artistic concepts. The use of transparent coloured layers was the best technical method that could enhance the final message of the subjects of his paintings. These combine science facts and theories but are illustrated with a twist, using his personal, artistic perception of reality.

“The concept is based on the objective or rational observation of reality which is distorted by our senses and personal understanding in a subjective way, the result being the world we know.” -Victor Fota

Guy Billout

The Illustrations of Guy Billout

French artist Guy Billout’s universe of ironic illustrations has a tendency to magnify one’s anxieties, whilst offering humor and a look into a bizarro version of society. His work is overall minimal, but the subject in each piece offers scenarios that makes you think of countless outcomes and possibilities.

His work has been featured in numerous magazine publications such as Yhe New Yorker, and most recently, The Atlantic. He also writes and illustrates childrens books.

Calendar: June 11

A Year: Day to Day Men: 11th of June

The Sun King

June 11, 1936 was the opening day of the International Surrealist Exhibition.

The International Surrealist Exhibition was held from June 11 to July 4, 1936, at the New Burlington Galleries in London’s Mayfair, England. The exhibition was marked both by the high quality of the exhibits and by the fact that Andre Breton, Salvador Dali and many another European Surrealists came over for the occasion. The opening day stopped the traffic on Piccadilly due to the swell of the crowds and, over the weeks that followed, it forced the British arts establishment to reappraise what art actually was as well as what an exhibition could be.

Surrealism’s main flag bearer in Britain was Roland Penrose, a wealthy young artist. A meeting on the Rue de Tournon took place between him and a precocious young poet called David Gascoyne, who had become passionate about surrealism, and had just completed a book about it. The two men got talking about how extraordinary it was that, while Paris was undergoing a seismic art revolution, a few hundred miles away in London no one knew anything about it. They decided to change all that, with a show to jump-start the British imagination.

In the end, some 392 paintings and sculptures were assembled at the New Burlington Galleries. True to the surrealist notion of “objective hazard” (a random but ultimately fortuitous happening), the show was beset by problems which, added to the planned surprises, made it a veritable festival of the best that surrealism had to offer. First, there was the business of transporting the art: two days before the opening, a consignment was seized by Customs and two pieces – one by Wilhelm Freddie showing the naked bodies of dead soldiers, another by the Argentinian Leonor Fini showing young men dancing naked in the twilight – were turned back on grounds of decency. The hanging of the show happened just hours before the opening, only to be rearranged once again at the last minute.

The painter Sheila Legge showed up dressed in a long, white satin gown, her face obscured by roses and holding an artificial leg wearing a silk stocking. The poet Dylan Thomas offered the guests teacups full of boiled string. Andre Breton gave the opening speech dressed entirely in green. Salvador Dali gave his lecture wearing a diving suit with helmet. During the lecture, it became apparent that he was slowly suffocating inside his helmet; it had to be pried off to save him. He continued the lecture with a slide show, with the slides presented upside down.

Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner, “La Pétrification de la Papesse”, 1945, Oil and Wax on Masonite, Private Collection

Victor Brauner was born on June 15, 1903, in Piatra-Neamt, Romania. His father was involved in spiritualism and sent Brauner to evangelical school in Braïla from 1916 to 1918. In 1921 he briefly attended the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he painted landscapes in the style of Cézanne. He exhibited paintings in his subsequent expressionist style at his first solo show at the Galerie Mozart in Bucharest in 1924.

Brauner helped found the Dadaist review “75 HP” in Bucharest. He went to Paris in 1925 but returned to Bucharest approximately a year later. In Bucharest in 1929 Brauner was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist review “UNU”. Brauner settled in Paris in 1930 and became a friend of his compatriot Constantin Brancusi. Then he met Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to the Surrealists by 1933. André Breton wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the catalogue for Brauner’s first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1934.

The exhibition was not well-received, and in 1935 Brauner returned to Bucharest, where he remained until 1938. That year he moved to Paris, lived briefly with Tanguy, and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a scuffle in 1938.

At the outset of World War II Brauner fled to the South of France, where he maintained contact with other Surrealists in Marseilles. Later he sought refuge in Switzerland; unable to obtain suitable materials there, he improvised an encaustic from candle wax and developed a graffito technique.

Brauner returned to Paris in 1945. His postwar painting incorporated forms and symbols based on Tarot cards, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and antique Mexican codices. In the fifties Brauner traveled to Normandy and Italy, and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale Exhibitions in 1954 and in 1966. He died in Paris on March 12, 1966.

Julie Hefferman

Julie Hefferman, “Budding Boy”, 2010, Oil on Canvas, 200.7 x 142.2 cm

Born in Peoria, Illinois Julie Heffernan received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her Masters of Fine Art in Painting from the Yale School of Art. Her lush paintings are manifestations of Heffernan’s Baroque sensibilities and rich knowledge of art history—the interior spaces of her compositions often refer to grand ballrooms and ornate drawing rooms, while the exteriors are placed within abundant forests and imagined worlds.

Something of a contemporary surrealist, her compositions are drawn from the peculiar, nonsensical narratives of her dreams. As a result of drawing so directly from the images of her subconscious, Heffernan considers much of her work as a kind of self-portrait and titles them as such. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Joe A. MacGown

Joe A. MacGown, “Biogenesis”, 2016, Colored Ink and Pen on Wood, 12 x 12 Inches

Joe MacGown is an an artist who was born in Maine, where his interest in insects and art began. At the age of ten, MacGown and his family moved to Mississippi where he continued his study of insects and drawing. After a short time at the Memphis College of Art, MacGowen was employed in 1988 at the Mississippi State Entomological Museum as a scientific illustrator and assistant curator.

In his current position at the Entomological Museum, MacGowen curates the Culicidae, Formicidae, and scarab collection as well as collects specimens for the collection, with hundreds of thousands personally pinned and labeled insects. He has conducted numerous surveys in threatened habitats of arthropod species. MacGown is in charge of all scientific drawings for researchers in the museum and assists with the identification of insects being studied. His entomological drawings are published in numerous books and papers.

Rodney Smith

The Photography of Rodney Smith

Rodney Lewis Smith was a New York based fashion and portrait photographer. After he studied English Literature and Religious Studies at University of Virginia in 1970, Smith went for his graduate degree in Theology at Yale University in 1973. From eighty-eight rolls of film shot in Israel in 1976, Smith ended up compiling two portfolios, which later became his first book: “In the Land of the Light: Israel, a Portrait of Its People” which was published in 1983.

Smith primarily photographed with a 35mm Leica M4 before he transitioned to a 120/6×6 (medium format) Hasselblad with a 80mm lens. He preferrred natural light to illuminate his subjects, but occasionally would use continuous lighting. Smith shot predominantly in black and white, until 2002, when he first began to experiment with color film. His work is commonly referred to as classic, minimalistic, and whimsical.

Antoine Malliarakis Mayo

Antoine Malliarakis Mayo, “La Vie Augmente Toujours (Life Always Evolves”), Oil on Canvas, 1970,   81 x 65cm

Antoine Malliarakis Mayo is a Greek painter of French culture. He is generally classified as a surrealist, a movement in which he participated actively but never officially joined. Received at the Beaux Arts in Paris in 1924, Mayo took part in the Surrealist meetings and became friends with Desnos and Prévert.

In the 1940s May created costumes and sets for theater and for the cinema with increasing success. After having made the costumes for Marcel Carné’s masterpiece  “Les Enfants du Paradis”, he designed the costumes for: “The Beauty of the Devil” and “The Golden Helmet (The Land of the Pharaohs)” by Howard Hawks.

The paintings of Mayo revolved around the common themes of sensuality and eroticism which took different forms within his oeuvre. In particular after the 1960s, Mayo would paint the hands, then the bird nests – which for him housed and protected the root of life – followed by the egg, as these common themes reached a pinnacle within his scope of work.

The egg for Mayo represented the principle of life, rebirth and the fruit of life. “La Vie Augmente Toujours”, painted in the later part of Mayo’s artistic career is an exceptional work weaving through this visual language created by Mayo incorporating the vegetal life, the egg, the stones and the male figure.