Tag: art history

Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George, “Hope”, One of Four Paintings of the Series “Death Hope Life Fear”, 1984

Gilbert and George met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s Art School in London. They began to create art together, developing a uniquely recognizable style both in their pictures and in their presentations of themselves as living sculptures. Over more than forty years, they developed a new format that created large-scale pictures, which are visually and emotionally powerful, through a unique creative process. Most of their pictures are created in groups and made especially for the space in which they are first exhibited.

The artists’ art, which is sometimes seen as subversive, controversial, and provocative, considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death.

Rufino Tamayo

Three Works by Rufino Tamayo

The top image is a lithograph entitled “Perro / Dog”, 1973,  from a series of 15. The middle image is an oil painting entitled “El Comedor de Sandias / The Watermelon Eater”, 1941, one of many works Tamayo did on the subject. The bottom image is an oil on canvas, painted on the eve of the United States entry into World War One, entitled “Animals”, 1941, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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.

Francois Andre Vincent

Francois Andre Vincent. French, “Saint Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, Musee Fabre, Montpellier

Francois Andre Vincent, a French Neo-Classical painter, was the son of the miniaturist François-Elie Vincent and studied under Joseph-Marie Vien. He was a pupil of École Royale des Éleves Protégés and studied from 1771-75 at the Académie de France. Vincent travelled to Rome, where he won the Prix de Rome in 1768 at the age of twenty-two..

After being awarded the Prix de Rome, Vincent spent the years of 1771 to 1775 in Italy, studying at the French Academy in Rome. It was there that he produced a series of witty and revealing portraits, along with paintings of ordinary people doing their daily activities, landscapes and a few drawings.

Francois Andre Vincent was installed at the Palais Mancini in Rome, where he painted numerous portraits, inspired by painterJean-Honoré Fragonard’s style. Vincent’s studies, such as his 1777 “The Drawing Lesson”, show him responding to Fragonard’s gentle and traditional Louis XV vocabulary of sentiment. At his first Salon of Paris exhibition in 1777, Vincent had fifteen pieces to show, of which three are now at the Fabre Museum in Montpellier. He also participated at the Salon in 1782, 1785, and 1787.

Francois Vincent was a leader of the neoclassical and historical movement in French art, along with his rival Jacques-Louis David, another pupil of Joseph-Marie Vien. Vincent maintained a successful career in France but always in the shadow of David, who was  the dominant artist of the day. His wide range of styles contributed to his obscurity, as people usually expected the same style in each painting from one artist. Vincent was a prolific artist whose work, produced in oil on canvas, pen and chalk drawings and watercolors, covered many themes.

In 1790 Vincent was appointed master of drawing to Louis XVI of France and two years later, he became a professor at the elite eighteenth-century French institution for art, The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Having flourished under the ancient regime and weathered the chaos of Revolution, he survived to see authoritarianism return with a vengeance under Napoleon. A combination of ill health and disillusionment prevented Vincent from taking up the imagery of  Empire to any great extent.

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, “Summer Noon – L – 20”, 1968, Oil , Canvas and Burlap Collage on Canvas, 56 x 72 Inches

Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist born in Boston who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionism. Along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, Marca-Relli was part of the leading art movement of the postwar era.

In 1930 at the age of seventeen, Marca-Relli studied for one year at the Cooper Union, a private arts and science college. He later worked at the Works Progress Administration (WPA) first as a teacher and then painting murals with the Federal Art Project division. After serving in World War II, he taught at Yale University during 1954 and 1955, later teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, during 1959 and 1960.

Marca-Relli’s early still lives, cityscapes and circus paintings are reminiscent of the surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico. He created many large scale collages throughout his career, combining oil paint with collage, using intense colors, broken surfaces, and splatters of paint in an expressionistic style. His later works showed a simplicity with black or somber colors and more rectangular shapes with neutral backgrounds.

D. Baretto

D. Baretto, “Cycling Trivialities”, Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs

D. Baretto graduated from the School of Fine Arts/ Tufts in Boston in 2016 with a BFA concentrating in illustration, animation and digital installation. He works from his studio, “Studio Barro”, locatied in Guadalajara, Mexico. Baretto has been directing several animation videos for musicians and brand-name commissions.

 

 

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana, Three Paintings from the Hartley Elegies Series

Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies (1989-1994) is a series of 18 paintings, grouped into three formats, rectangular, diamond and tondo. A poignant meditation on identity and loss, they are the most recent of his homages to American artists and poets, and were inspired by Marsden Hartley’s War Motif series, which Hartley executed as a tribute to the young German soldier Karl von Freyburg, who died during World War I and with whom Hartley had a deep friendship.

Indiana employs Hartley’s stylized visual language throughout the Elegies, while reinvesting them with additional content and meaning. He weaves references to Hartley and von Freyburg with allusions to himself, to places and historical events with overlapping symbolic meanings, forming a web linking his life to Hartley’s.

KvF I, the first of Indiana’s Elegies, (the first image above) is based on Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which Indiana had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indiana’s painting is a close interpretation of the work, faithfully incorporating the motifs of German World I pageantry and references to von Freyburg found in Hartley’s painting. These include the Iron Cross, which von Freyburg was awarded just before his death, the numeral 4, the number of von Freyburg’s regimen, the numeral 24, the age of von Freyburg at his death, and von Freyburg’s initials, KvF.

Indiana also employs the red, green, black, white, blue and yellow color scheme of Portrait of a German Officer, however he transforms Hartley’s thick brushwork and muted tones into his signature hard-edged lines and bright saturated color. He also adds a significant motif, a large central ring containing text, which is found in many of the subsequent Elegies.

In KvF I Karl von Freyburg’s name is spelled out in white letters in the top half, and the date October 7 appears between the years 1914 and 1989 in the bottom half. October 7, 1914 was the date of von Freyburg’s death and October 7, 1989 the date, exactly seventy-five years later, that Indiana began working on the Elegies. By including the latter date Indiana inserts himself into the series and links himself to Hartley and von Freyburg, asserting his kinship with the men.

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon, “A Knight”, 1885, Oil on Canvas, 53.5 x 37.5 cm, Private Collection

Odilon Redon, born in 1840 in Bordeaux, France, was a Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher. His work developed along two distinctive genres. His oil paintings and pastels were mostly still lifes with flowers; these gave him a reputation among Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colorist. His prints, however, were quite different, foreshadowing the Surrealist and Dadaist movements  with their exploration of fantastic, haunted, and macabre themes.

Redon studied under painter and teacher Jean-Leon Gérôme, one of the most prominent late 19th century academic artists in France. He mastered engraving under the tutelage of Rodolphe Bresdin, who was noted for his highly detailed and technically precise prints. Redon learned lithography under printmaker and illustrator Henri Fantin-Latour who became known for his group compositions of contemporary French celebrities.

Odilon Redon produced nearly two hundred prints, which included many series of multiple images. In 1879 he produced the lithograph series collectively titled “In the Dream”. a portfolio of ten lithographs. Redon dedicated a series to Edgar Allan Poe in 1882 which evoked the private torments in Poe’s life. His series “Homage to Goya” done in 1885 included imaginary winged demons and menacing shapes.

Odilon Redons’s lifework represented an exploration of his inner feelings and psyche. His source of inspiration and the force behind his work are explained by himself in his journal “To Myself”:  “I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.”

 

 

Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo, :Dia y Noche”, (Night and Day), Oil on Canvas, 1953, Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City

Rufino Tamayo, along with other muralists such as Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, represented the twentieth century in their native country of Mexico. After the Mexican Revolution, Tamayo devoted himself to creating a distinct identity in his work. He expressed what he envisioned as the traditional Mexico and eschewed the overt political art of such contemporaries as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Oswaldo Guayasamin and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He disagreed with these muralists in their belief that the revolution was necessary for the future of Mexico but considered, instead, that the revolution would harm Mexico.

Tamayo expanded the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the graphic arts by developing a new medium which they named Mixografia. This technique is a unique fine art printing process that allows for the production of prints with three-dimensional texture. It not only registered the texture and volume of Rufino Tamayo’s design but also granted the artist freedom to use any combination of solid materials in its creation. Rufino Tamayo was delighted with the Mixografia process and created some 80 original Mixographs. One of their most famous Mixografia is titled “Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros” (Two Characters Attacked by Dogs).

ROA

‘ROA’, “Metazoa: Mixed-Media Cabinets”

The new series of mixed media works entitled “Metazoa”by Belgium artist ‘ROA’ features the artist’s familiar black and white depictions of animals painted on various cabinet-like furniture pieces that can be opened or shifted to reveal anatomical details. ROA often chooses to depict animals native to where he is working, specifically species that have been forced from their native habitats and now live on the outskirts of urban areas.

Jesse Reno

Paintings by Jesse Reno

Jesse Reno is a self-taught American painter and muralist, whose art is based on his interest in native and primitive societies. Reno himself terms his art as “neo-primitivism”.

Jesse Reno was born in Teaneck, New Jersey in 1974. He was born with an extreme fever, which caused severe damage to his optic nerve. Because of this, Reno spent almost his entire first year in a hospital, where doctors were trying to examine and evaluate all of the damages caused by the high temperature. As it turns out, fever affected blindspots in over half the visual field of his right eye, and left him with a lazy eye and bad vision.

All of these damages, as well as the chronic pain caused by the problems, affected his perception as a painter and an artist, but hasn’t stopped him to draw since he could hold a pencil. His damaged vision causes strange distortions in depth perception, forcing his to always stay close to his works while painting. In addition, Reno’s vision is sensitive to both light and color, caused by a high level of contrast. Jesse Reno’s different vision greatly shaped his art, both in a color pallet and in terms of depth within his paintings, murals and commissioned works.

Juliusz Martwy

Juliusz Martwy, ‘Self-Portrait with Alex”’, Acrylic on Linen Canvas, 2014

Juliusz Martwy, born Juliusz Lewandowski, is a self-taught artist who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1977. He began his career with illustrations for an edition of French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s “The Songs of Maldoror”, written under his nom de plume Comte de Lautréamont,  and illustrations for the works of Marquis de Sade. Martwy draws inspiration for his work from the figurative styles of expressionism, cubism, the New Objectivity, and Russian traditional painting.

An important part of Juliusz Martwy’s collective works are the autobiographical threads, through which he presents the universal problems of human nature. He deals with social, political and moral issues in his paintings, both historical and contemporary, such as the past civil war in Spain and the current political situation in Poland. Apart from multi-faceted genre scenes, Martwy paints intimate figurative portraits within spaces that depict small narrative, often erotic, incidents.

More of Juliusz Martwy’s work and contact information may be found at the artist’s Behance site:  https://www.behance.net/juliuszlewandowski

Matthew William Robinson

Matthew William Robinson, Three Untitled Paintings, Mixed Media, 2011

Robinson grew up in a small town in northern Connecticut, the area was affected by the housing boom of the 1990’s. He spent his early college years in Johnstown/Gloversville,ny, and New Britain Connecticut. Both areas were post industrial cities, now depressed areas that displayed elaborate and beautiful city structure but left to waste away. Later, Robinson moved to Brooklyn where he became interested in gentrification, historical architecture and surrounding topics of urban living. “My work is a thought process, study of man made worlds and study of formal painting.”

Maciek Jasik

Maciek Jasik, “Secret Lives”

Maciek Jaskik is a photographer and pyrotechnician from Gdansk, Poland and living and working in New York City. He received his Bachelor of Arts from John Hopkins University in 2000 and has since been in many photographic exhibitions. He “seeks to understand society’s relationship with the natural world and explore ideas of identity, gender and the self while working in a parallel world of endless color and bewildering physical phenomena.”

“The modern world has separated us from the origins and uses of fruits and vegetables; we know them only for the flavors and textures they provide. Until only very recently, each held its own mystique, mythology, symbolism and connection to the culture and afterlife.

This series aims to reintroduce these mystical, invisible qualities to fruits and vegetables that have been lost amidst the clamor of nutritional statistics. Each offers its own indelible powers beyond our narrow habits of thought.”