Tag: art history

Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg, “Companions”, Multi-Colored Fiberglass, 2008

British-born, German-based sculptor Tony Cragg rose to prominence in the 1980s as a leading voice in the cohort known as New British Sculpture. Seeking a new, European sensibility, homegrown out of the continent’s neo-avant-garde positions, this group, which also included Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, took inspiration from a broad range of practices.

But the awe-inspiring technique of their work—Kapoor’s mirrored surfaces, Gormley’s cubistic distillation of space into three-dimensional grids, or Cragg’s fractal-like complexity—have tended to overshadow their art historical roots. In the case of Cragg, this genealogy forms the basis for the artist’s iconic style, often in surprising ways.

Turner Prize-winning sculptor Tony Cragg emerged in the late 1970s with a bold practice that questioned and tested the limits of a wide variety of traditional sculptural materials, including bronze, steel, glass, wood, and stone. “I’m an absolute materialist, and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime,” he has said. Eschewing factory fabrication of his works, Cragg has been known to merge contemporary industrial materials with the suggestion of the functional forms of mundane objects and ancient vessels—like jars, bottles, and test tubes—resulting in sublime, sinuous, and twisting forms.

Ivan Milev Lalev

Ivan Milev Lalev, “Krali Marko”, 1926

Ivan Milev Lalev was a Bulgarian painter and scenographer regarded as the founder of the Bulgarian Secession and a representative of Bulgarian modernism, combining symbolism, Art Nouveau and expressionism in his work. In 1920 at the age of twenty three, he was admitted to the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, where he studied under Prof. Stefan Badzhov, and had three one-man exhibitions. He also contributed to the communist comic magazine Red Laughter as an illustrator and cartoonist.

Milev died of influenza in Sofia on 25 January 1927, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. Regarded as one of the great masters of distemper and watercolour painting in Bulgarian art, Milev’s characteristic decorative style was much influenced by the European Secession, but it was also related to Bulgarian folk art and icon painting. Milev’s paintings are exhibited in the National Art Gallery and the Sofia Gallery.

Kevin Weir

Kevin Weir, “Jacob”, Computer Graphics, Vintage Photograph Gifs

 

Art director and designer Kevin Weir uses historical black and white photographs forgotten to time as the basis for his quirky—and slightly disturbing—animated GIFs. Having mastered Photoshop in high school, he found himself five years later “making black and white GIFs as a way to occupy myself during the downtime of an internship I had during grad school.” He shared the images on his Tumblr “Flux Machine” where they quickly went viral.

Weir makes use of photographs found in the Library of Congress online archive, and is deeply drawn to what he calls “unknowable places and persons,” images with little connection to present day, that he can use as blank canvas for his weird ideas. The tinted nature of the medium’s limited frames of animation and the creepiness factor add to the strangeness of the gifs.

Weir is now an art director at Droga5 in NYC, he also also animates music videos and sassy birds.

Michael de la Paz

Michael de la Paz, “Hearst Castle- The Roman Pool”, 2012

The Roman Pool at Hearst castle is a tiled indoor pool decorated with eight statues of Roman gods, goddesses and heroes. The pool appears to be styled after an ancient Roman bath such as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome c. 211-17 CE.

The mosaic tiled patterns were inspired by mosaics found in the 5th Century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. They are also representative of traditional marine monster themes that can be found in ancient Roman baths. The statues are rough copies of ancient Greek and Roman statues. One such copy represents the “Apoxyomenos.” Statuary was used on a considerable scale in the Baths of Caracalla.

Reblogged with thanks to https://www.flickr.com/photos/mykdelapaz/

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Photography by Albert Renger-Patzsch

In the 1920’s a number of German photographers that were linked to the social, political and artistic movement were referred as ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ meaning new objective or new realism, which the new objectivity had tried to change the view point perspective on the development of photography than just the dark room experiments.

In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style Albert Renger-Patzsch’s work exemplifies the esthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.

He wrote: “The secret of a good photograph—which, like a work of art, can have esthetic qualities—is its realism … Let us therefore leave art to artists and endeavor to create, with the means peculiar to photography and without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, “Gas”, Oil on Canvas, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, New York

This work resulted from a composite representation of several gasoline stations seen by Edward Hopper. The light in this painting—both natural and artificial—gives the scene of a gas station and its lone attendant at dusk an underlying sense of drama. But rather than simply depicting a straightforward narrative, Hopper’s aim was “the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature”—in this case, the loneliness of an American country road.

Fellow artist Charles Burchfield believed these paintings would remain memorable beyond their time, because in his “honest presentation of the American scene … Hopper does not insist upon what the beholder shall feel.”

Edward Willis Redfield

Edward Willis Redfield, “The Burning of Center Bridge”, 1923, Oil on Canvas, 127.6 x 142.9 cm, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doyelstown, Pennsylvania

Primarily a landscape painter, Edward Willis Redfield was acclaimed as the most “American” artist of the New Hope school because of his vigor and individualism. Redfield favored the technique of painting en plein air, that is, outdoors amid nature. Tying his canvas to a tree, He worked in even the most brutal weather. Painting rapidly, in thick, broad brushstrokes, and without attempting preliminary sketches, Redfield typically completed his paintings in one sitting.

In 1923 Redfield created the nocturnal scene that would be recognized as one of his most important works. “The Burning of Center Bridge” depicts the 1923 fire that destroyed the bridge connecting Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, with Stockton, New Jersey. Although Redfield took notes on an envelope as he observed the scene, he departed from his practice of capturing a landscape en plein air and painted the scene when he returned to his studio.

Within two days, Redfield created this canvas, which captures the heroic efforts of firemen trying to extinguish the fire as spectators stand by helplessly watching the burning wooden structure glow against a black sky filled with plumes of smoke. The destruction of the region’s oldest Delaware River covered bridge was a monumental event for local residents. News of the incident appeared in the Washington Post and in the headlines of the local Bucks County Intelligencer, which recounted the drama of 25 firemen falling into the river as they fought the fire while “the banks of the river were lined with a crowd aggregating thousands of spectators.”

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.

Vladimir Semensky 

Four Paintings by Vladimir Semensky

Born in 1968, Russian artist Vladimir Semensky creates paintings with a vibrant sense of spontaneous movement and naturalistic, individual gesture.  Dynamic poses and unguarded scenarios characterise his work.  Semensky’s paintings are large scale canvases and are born of the same spontaneous unique body movements he articulates in his compositions.  The movements of a person are almost eccentric in their singular relation to that person’s personality, surroundings and state of mind.

Semensky describes this with disarming frankness and allows a strangely intimate view that would never be afforded by a photorealistic painting.  This results in a chaotic and exciting sense that is usually absent in static imagery or posed, formal painting.  He captures the transience of things, private fleeting moments that we are usually only sensitive to in those we are closest to.

Thomas Jackson

Thomas Jackson,  “Emergent Behavior”, Tree and Cheese Balls

Photographer Thomas Jackson has continued his “Emergent Behavior” series where he photographs airborne swarms of common objects like Post-It notes, cheese balls, and plates in environments where you would least expect them. He also reverses the concept, shooting items from nature like sticks and leaves against an urban backdrop.

“I have struggled with the role of Photoshop in my work. I can’t make my images without it, yet I don’t really want it to be an integral part of my creative process. So I’ve set up some rules of the road for myself, and I’ve stuck to them while creating all my recent images. Basically I want the images to be as “in camera” as possible, so instead of employing PS to composite or more things around, I simply use it to remove elements I don’t want to be there.” -Thomas Jackson

Jeremy Barnard

Infra-Red Photography by Jeremy Barnard

Jeremy Barnard is a New England based photographer who has been taking photos for forty years.

“The new work I’ve been doing since 2006 is the infrared work. The infrared that I do isn’t startlingly surreal. Upon initial viewing, they look almost as if they are black and whites. But then you begin to notice some of the tonalities are reversed. A lot of people tend to think they are negative images or that they are solarized. I love the infrared. It has become my passion.

Our portion of the light spectrum that we can perceive is between 700 and 900 nanometers; just above that – from 900 to 1,200 nanometers – is the area of the light spectrum called near-infrared. What the army uses for night vision is heat infrared. We cannot with our eyes see near-infrared but there are species of animals, specifically insects, that can. Bees see infrared and some predatory birds can see infrared, including owls.

I am particularly interested in the fact that bees see it. I titled my infrared collection, “Through the Eyes of Bees.” What makes it interesting is that chlorophyll in plants is able to reflect infrared radiation almost 100 percent. Because leaves and organic things like plants and grasses reflect the radiation at almost 100 percent, they appear white.  A lot of the landscapes – people say to me, “Was this an ice storm?”  “Was this freshly fallen snow?” The photos end up looking a bit surreal.

Man Ray

Man Ray, “Glass Tears (Les Larmes)”, 1932, Collection of Elton John

Tate Modern today announces a major new exhibition, “The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection”, opening on 10 November 2016. The show will be drawn from one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography and will present an unrivalled selection of classic modernist images from the 1920s to the 1950s. Featuring over 150 works from more than 60 artists the exhibition will consist entirely of rare vintage prints, all created by the artists themselves.

It will showcase works by seminal figures such as Man Ray, André Kertész, Berenice Abbot, Alexandr Rodchenko and Edward Steichen, offering the public a unique opportunity to see remarkable works up close. The quality and depth of the collection will allow the exhibition to tell the story of modernist photography in this way for the first time in the UK. It also marks the beginning of a long term relationship between Tate and the Sir Elton John Collection.

 

Frank Buchwald

Frank Buchwald, Machine Light Number Three

Frank Buchwald is a interior designer and manufacturer of furniture, lights, and objects. He studied design at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is also a painter and freelance illustrator.

Machine light number 03 is made of burnished steel and burnished brass with a  tube 60 watt lamp bulb. It is 24 inches long and 11 inches high.