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Gouache on paper; 31.8 x 49.5 cm.
Since 1945 Piero Dorazio studied architecture in Rome. At the same time first abstract works were executed. In 1947 he received a scholarship from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he contacted Modern artists, who lived in Paris. He founded the galleries "Age d'Or" in Florence and Rome to diffuse avant-garde arts in Italy.
During a one year stay in the USA he got acquainted with leading characters of Abstract Expressionism like Marc Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. At that time he also intensively studied Kandinsky's essays, whose theory of the immaterial aspects in painting influenced him strongly. In 1959 Piero Dorazio participated in the "documenta II" in Kassel. Afterwards he accepted a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, where Piero Dorazio founded the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1963 and was appointed professor in 1968.
In the 1960's the first compositions of ink ribbons were executed in his studio in New York, which dominated his work henceforth. After his return to Italy Dorazio moved to the former romanic cloister of Todi in Umbria. Piero Dorazio was regarded up to great age as one of the leading Italian artists of concrete color painting.
Piero Dorazio died at the age of 77 in Perugia on 17 May 2005.
Oil on canvas; 117.5 x 105 cm.
Gershon Iskowitz was born in Kielce, Poland. He began as an expressionist painter who dealt with figurative subjects and later painted the Canadian landscape in an abstract expressionist style. At the age of four he was sent to the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva where he began drawing. After a year and a half he begged his father to be allowed to return home and was given permission. He was tutored in Polish and placed in a public school. He was bullied at school and left after two and a half years. His father set up a small studio area for him in their home and allowed him to spend his time drawing and painting. At age nine he exchanged his art posters for free admission to a local cinema.
He registered at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1939. But war broke out before he began classes so he had to return to Kielce and was put to forced labor. In September 1943 the Kielce Ghetto was burned. Gershon and his brother, Yosl, were sent to Auschwitz. Gershon painted or drew at night only after every one else was asleep. He said "Why did I do it? I think it kept me alive. There was nothing to do. I had to do something in order to forget the hunger. It's very hard to explain, but in the camp painting was a necessity for survival." He was transferred to Buchenwald in 1944. Near the end of the war he tried to escape but was seriously wounded. In 1947 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and had private study with Oskar Kokoschka who painted in intense expressionistic style.
Gershon's first application to move to Canada was rejected because he had a limp. He reapplied and drew a picture for the bureaucrat in immigration. The fellow declared Gershon a genius, and approved his emigration application. In 1949 he emigrated to Canada. In 1952 he attended Artist's Workshop, Toronto until 1959–60 and began sketching trips to Markham and Uxbridge. He stopped painting scenes from his past in the mid 50's and turned to the Canadian landscape for his models. A major change in his painting style occurred in 1967 when a Canada Council grant permitted him to view the northern landscape from a helicopter. His painting became explosions of color and light.
In 1954 he had his first exhibition with the Canadian Society of Graphic Artists. He also did some part-time teaching at McKellar Lake. In 1964 he became associated with Gallery Moos, where he had many one-man exhibitions. In 1982 Gershon was honored by the AGO with a forty year retrospective of his work. A subset of the exhibition was put on display in London, England. Gershon said [painting] "... is just an extension of myself. It's a plastic interpretation of the way I think. You reflect your own vision. That's what it's all about. Art is like evolution and life, and you've got to search for life, stand on your own feet and continue. The only fear I have is before starting to paint. When I paint, I'm great, I feel great."
Acrylic on paper; 55.9 x 76.2 cm.
TWORKOV, JACK (1900–1982), U.S. educator, printmaker, painter. Tworkov was born in Biala, Poland and immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. He studied at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. Tworkov worked as an artist for the Works Project Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935, where he met Willem de Kooning. Both men emerged as forces in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Tworkov was also one of the founders of The Club, a loose New York association of Abstract Expressionists which met to discuss matters relating to art making. Like many other Abstract Expressionists, Tworkov's early work consisted of figures and still-lifes. He also rendered images in a cubist style before adopting the visual aspects of Abstract Expressionism. As to be expected, his early work shared many stylistic characteristics with that of de Kooning. As Tworkov gained eminence along with his colleagues in the New York School representational subject matter became subsumed in abundantly textured long, dashing, diagonal brush strokes, as in his painting Blue Note from 1959. Among other influences, Tworkov also turned to the art of the marginalized Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine as a source of inspiration; in fact, Tworkov wrote an article on Soutine during the latter's 1950 show at MOMA. Tworkov achieved the illusion of vibrating and multiple fields or screens of color from a cool, restricted palette and subtle nuances of tone. Likely influenced by the Minimalists, Tworkov integrated grids and other ordering systems into his images from the 1960s onward, such as Shield (1961) and Variables II (1964–65). One of his major series of paintings, House of the Sun, refers to Ulysses, whose epic adventures suggested a variety of themes to the artist. Tworkov taught at numerous institutions: the American University, Black Mountain College (other luminaries of this period such as John Cage, Franz Kline, and Lyonel Feininger also taught here during the 1940s), Queens College, the Pratt Institute, and Yale University, where he functioned as chairman of the art department. He was a recipient of a Corcoran Gold Medal in 1963. Tworkov's art has been exhibited at numerous major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. His work is in the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
This gorgeous piece, which now hangs in our living room, was painted 3/10/09 by Pennsylvania artist, Lee Kaloidis. You can view more of his exceptional work at www.leekaloidis.com. Use the "all sizes" feature to see the beautiful details of this painting. Also click on his flickr link below.
Oil on canvas; 190 x 216 cm.
Gershon Iskowitz was born in Kielce, Poland. He began as an expressionist painter who dealt with figurative subjects and later painted the Canadian landscape in an abstract expressionist style. At the age of four he was sent to the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva where he began drawing. After a year and a half he begged his father to be allowed to return home and was given permission. He was tutored in Polish and placed in a public school. He was bullied at school and left after two and a half years. His father set up a small studio area for him in their home and allowed him to spend his time drawing and painting. At age nine he exchanged his art posters for free admission to a local cinema.
He registered at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1939. But war broke out before he began classes so he had to return to Kielce and was put to forced labor. In September 1943 the Kielce Ghetto was burned. Gershon and his brother, Yosl, were sent to Auschwitz. Gershon painted or drew at night only after every one else was asleep. He said "Why did I do it? I think it kept me alive. There was nothing to do. I had to do something in order to forget the hunger. It's very hard to explain, but in the camp painting was a necessity for survival." He was transferred to Buchenwald in 1944. Near the end of the war he tried to escape but was seriously wounded. In 1947 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and had private study with Oskar Kokoschka who painted in intense expressionistic style.
Gershon's first application to move to Canada was rejected because he had a limp. He reapplied and drew a picture for the bureaucrat in immigration. The fellow declared Gershon a genius, and approved his emigration application. In 1949 he emigrated to Canada. In 1952 he attended Artist's Workshop, Toronto until 1959–60 and began sketching trips to Markham and Uxbridge. He stopped painting scenes from his past in the mid 50's and turned to the Canadian landscape for his models. A major change in his painting style occurred in 1967 when a Canada Council grant permitted him to view the northern landscape from a helicopter. His painting became explosions of color and light.
In 1954 he had his first exhibition with the Canadian Society of Graphic Artists. He also did some part-time teaching at McKellar Lake. In 1964 he became associated with Gallery Moos, where he had many one-man exhibitions. In 1982 Gershon was honored by the AGO with a forty year retrospective of his work. A subset of the exhibition was put on display in London, England. Gershon said [painting] "... is just an extension of myself. It's a plastic interpretation of the way I think. You reflect your own vision. That's what it's all about. Art is like evolution and life, and you've got to search for life, stand on your own feet and continue. The only fear I have is before starting to paint. When I paint, I'm great, I feel great."
Oil on canvas; 65 x 54 cm.
František Kupka was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic cubism (Orphism). Kupka's abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstract art. He was born in Opočno, eastern Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1871. From 1889 to 1892, he studied at the Prague Art Academy. At this time, he painted historical and patriotic themes. Kupka enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he concentrated on symbolic and allegorical subjects. He was influenced by the painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913) and his naturistic life-style. Kupka exhibited at the Kunstverein, Vienna, in 1894. His involvement with theosophy and Eastern philosophy dates from this period. By spring 1894, Kupka had settled in Paris; there he attended the Académie Julian briefly and then studied with Jean-Pierre Laurens at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Kupka worked as an illustrator of books and posters and, during his early years in Paris, became known for his satirical drawings for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, he settled in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, and that same year exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne. Kupka was deeply impressed by the first Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 in Le Figaro. Kupka’s 1909 painting Piano Keyboard/Lake marked a break in his representational style. His work became increasingly abstract around 1910–11, reflecting his theories of motion, color, and the relationship between music and painting (orphism). In 1911, he attended meetings of the Puteaux Group (Section d'Or). In 1912, he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the Cubist room, although he did not wish to be identified with any movement. Creation in the Plastic Arts, a book Kupka completed in 1913, was published in Prague in 1923.
In 1931, he was a founding member of Abstraction-Création. In 1936, his work was included in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in an important show with another excellent Czech painter Alphonse Mucha at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. A retrospective of his work took place at the Galerie Mánes in Prague in 1946. The same year, Kupka participated in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where he continued to exhibit regularly until his death. During the early 1950s, he gained general recognition and had several solo shows in New York.
Kupka had a strong interest in color theory. His decadent 1907 self-portrait The Yellow Scale prefigures his abstract emphasis on color. Around 1910 he began developing his own color wheels, adapting a format previously explored by Sir Isaac Newton and Hermann von Helmholtz. This work in turn led Kupka to execute a series of paintings he called "Discs of Newton" (1911-12). Kupka was interested in freeing colors from descriptive associations. His work in this area is thought to have influenced other artists like Robert Delaunay.
Oil on paper mounted on board; 66.7 x 51.1 cm.
“I can imagine an art that would have an innocuous surface where you don’t see anything at all of interest; you wouldn’t dream of looking at it with any idea that it could knock you over or have any power or anything, and then slowly you can begin to read into it all kinds of wonderful, imaginative things that you can see in it, and that could be a very marvelous form of art.” *
Born Rachmiel Resnick in 1917, Milton Resnick spent his childhood in the Ukraine, where he and his family were threatened by anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War. The family fled first to Cuba and then to Brooklyn in 1922. He initially studied architectural drafting and lettering at a trade school, but could not find work when he finished school in the midst of the Depression in 1932. The following year, he enrolled in the fine arts program at the American Artist’s School, where he met Ad Reinhardt. In 1937, he met Willem de Kooning, who became a close friend, and in 1938, he joined the WPA. Resnick’s artistic pursuits were interrupted in 1940, when he was drafted into the army. When Resnick returned to New York after his discharge in 1945, he resumed painting and began meeting with de Kooning, Kline, Arshile Gorky, and other artists at the Waldorf Cafeteria for discussions about art and abstraction. From 1946 to 1948, Resnick lived in Paris, where he met Constantin Brancusi, Jean Hélion, and Tristan Tzara. He returned to New York, and in 1949, he was one of the founding members of the Club. That same year, Resnick was supposed to have his first solo exhibition, but the dealer cancelled it, causing a major setback to his career. In 1955, the Poindexter Gallery mounted his debut exhibition, but as a result of this six-year delay, Resnick has often been mislabeled a second-generation abstract expressionist.†
Resnick was a constant presence on the abstract expressionism scene, despite his ambivalence about being called an abstract expressionist. In 1951, he participated in the Ninth Street Show; his work was exhibited at the Stable Gallery; and in 1957, the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum selected his work for inclusion in the 1957 Annual Exhibition and Artists of the New York School, respectively. In 1959, he began to increase the scale of his work, creating massive paintings of small, thick gestures that covered the wall-sized canvases, forming a composition of all-over abstraction. Two years later, he started work on his famous New Bride (1961-1963), an abstraction of thick white impasto, with flecks of pale color, painted on a nine-by-seventeen-foot canvas. It took Resnick two years to build up the surface of the painting, and this became the first of the impasto monochromes for which he is best known.
Resnick continued to work in an abstract style until the late 1980s, when he started creating a series of gouaches featuring simplified human forms suspended in a field of brushstrokes and color. These isolated, abstracted figures continued in his art of the 1990s. Painted in acrylic and oil in addition to gouache, these figures are often alone, and even when Resnick painted them in pairs, each figure remains isolated, close to but unable to make contact with the other. From 2001 until his death in 2004, Resnick created his “X-Space” paintings, exploring the relationship between color, line, and space from a variety of angles. Regardless of the scale of his paintings or their degree of abstraction, Resnick’s gestural brushstrokes and his fascination with the textural and spatial aspects of art remained constant throughout his life.
* Geoffrey Dorfman, "Milton Resnick: In Memoriam," artcritical.com, March 2005 (accessed March 2009).
† David Cohen, “Milton Resnick Was an AbEx Pioneer,” New York Sun, May 29, 2008. www.nysun.com/arts/milton-resnick-was-an-abex-pioneer/78823/ (accessed February 2009).
Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly Jr. is an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibits his paintings worldwide.
Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive es—or perhaps, hundreds of years of bathroom graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge—each mark with its own history—as its proper subject. Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words.
ODC - In the Style of Aaron Siskind - Abstract Expressionism - Aaron Siskind photographed many images of peeling paint and a few of the grass. I'm taking on the grass thyme. I hope this image is correct.
I must love lying on wet surfaces. I waited for the sunrise and the sunlight to shine through the wet grass before lying on the wet grass.
Burned plastic and acrylic on panel; 143.6 x 242.8 cm.
Alberto Burri was an Italian artist known for his adventurous use of new materials. Burri was trained as a physician and began to paint only in 1944, while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. About 1946 he moved to Rome and began to paint seriously. His early works—rags splashed in red paint to simulate blood-soaked bandages—grew directly out of his experiences as a doctor in the Italian army. He then began to produce works grouped into series according to the material used. The works of the earliest series (c. 1953) were made of coarse cloth stitched together. After 1956 he employed thin pieces of burned wood and layers of polyethylene in which holes were burned, creating a rich spatial network within the layers of plastic. The humble and sometimes crude materials used in these works contrast effectively with their elegant designs, and the easily destroyed materials form a perforated network over an impinging background field. In his series of metal works done after 1959, however, the solid material completely encloses the background field, although the metal is hammered from behind as if the imprisoned field were trying to break out.
Mark Rothko, original name Marcus Rothkovitch, American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school; his use of colour as the sole means of expression led to the development of Colour Field Painting.
In 1913 Rothko’s family emigrated from Russia to the U.S., where they settled in Portland, Ore. During his youth he was preoccupied with politics and social issues. He entered Yale University in 1921, intending to become a labour leader, but dropped out after two years and wandered about the U.S. In 1925 he settled in New York City and took up painting. Although he studied briefly under the painter Max Weber, he was essentially self-taught.
Rothko first worked in a realistic style that culminated in his Subway series of the late 1930s, showing the loneliness of persons in drab urban environments. This gave way in the early 1940s to the semi-abstract biomorphic forms of the ritualistic Baptismal Scene (1945). By 1948, however, he had arrived at a highly personal form of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such dramatic techniques as violent brushstrokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colours that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space.
Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. He restricted his designs to two or three “soft-edged” rectangles that nearly filled the wall-sized vertical formats like monumental abstract icons. Despite their large size, however, his paintings derived a remarkable sense of intimacy from the play of nuances within local colour.
From 1958 to 1966 Rothko worked intermittently on a series of 14 immense canvases (the largest was about 11 × 15 feet [3 × 5 metres]) eventually placed in a nondenominational chapel in Houston, Texas, called, after his death, the Rothko Chapel. These paintings were virtual monochromes of darkly glowing browns, maroons, reds, and blacks. Their sombre intensity reveals the deep mysticism of Rothko’s later years. Plagued by ill health and the conviction that he had been forgotten by those artists who had learned most from his painting, he committed suicide.
After his death, the execution of Rothko’s will provoked one of the most spectacular and complex court cases in the history of modern art, lasting for 11 years (1972–82). The misanthropic Rothko had hoarded his works, numbering 798 paintings, as well as many sketches and drawings. His daughter, Kate Rothko, accused the executors of the estate (Bernard J. Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Morton Levine) and Frank Lloyd, owner of Marlborough Galleries in New York City, of conspiracy and conflict of interest in selling the works—in effect, of enriching themselves. The courts decided against the executors and Lloyd, who were heavily fined. Lloyd was tried separately and convicted on criminal charges of tampering with evidence. In 1979 a new board of the Mark Rothko Foundation was established, and all the works in the estate were divided between the artist’s two children and the Foundation. In 1984 the Foundation’s share of works was distributed to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel; the best and the largest proportion went to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly Jr. is an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibits his paintings worldwide.
Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive es—or perhaps, hundreds of years of bathroom graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge—each mark with its own history—as its proper subject. Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words.
Composition (ca. 1950-56)
Oil on canvas
20 1/4 x 16 inches
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
www.spanierman-at-easthampton.com/07_Greene/07_Greene_rev...
Swiping is an audio/visual animation composed using swipe gestures made on an iPad – a contemporary Abstract Expressionist painting that reflects on the gesture in the digital age. Each new swipe generates a colorful brush-like form that dynamically expands in 3-dimensions, accompanied by synthetic sound. Here, the gesture is not the expressive act that Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock were known for; instead it is a physical command to explore an infinite flow of digital information.
To create Swiping, thousands of gestures were recorded on an iPad and then animated using custom software. Sound by Chris Carlson (@modulationindex). Made with OpenFrameworks.
Oil on canvas; 50 x 40 in.
TWORKOV, JACK (1900–1982), U.S. educator, printmaker, painter. Tworkov was born in Biala, Poland and immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. He studied at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. Tworkov worked as an artist for the Works Project Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935, where he met Willem de Kooning. Both men emerged as forces in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Tworkov was also one of the founders of The Club, a loose New York association of Abstract Expressionists which met to discuss matters relating to art making. Like many other Abstract Expressionists, Tworkov's early work consisted of figures and still-lifes. He also rendered images in a cubist style before adopting the visual aspects of Abstract Expressionism. As to be expected, his early work shared many stylistic characteristics with that of de Kooning. As Tworkov gained eminence along with his colleagues in the New York School representational subject matter became subsumed in abundantly textured long, dashing, diagonal brush strokes, as in his painting Blue Note from 1959. Among other influences, Tworkov also turned to the art of the marginalized Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine as a source of inspiration; in fact, Tworkov wrote an article on Soutine during the latter's 1950 show at MOMA. Tworkov achieved the illusion of vibrating and multiple fields or screens of color from a cool, restricted palette and subtle nuances of tone. Likely influenced by the Minimalists, Tworkov integrated grids and other ordering systems into his images from the 1960s onward, such as Shield (1961) and Variables II (1964–65). One of his major series of paintings, House of the Sun, refers to Ulysses, whose epic adventures suggested a variety of themes to the artist. Tworkov taught at numerous institutions: the American University, Black Mountain College (other luminaries of this period such as John Cage, Franz Kline, and Lyonel Feininger also taught here during the 1940s), Queens College, the Pratt Institute, and Yale University, where he functioned as chairman of the art department. He was a recipient of a Corcoran Gold Medal in 1963. Tworkov's art has been exhibited at numerous major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. His work is in the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
Oil on board; 67.6 x 100.0 cm.
Winifred Nicholson was an English painter and colorist who developed a personalized impressionistic style that concentrated on domestic subjects and landscapes. In her work, the two motifs are often combined in a view out of a window, featuring flowers in a vase or a jug.
Nicholson was born in Oxford. Her parents were Charles Henry Roberts and Lady Cecilia, daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. Her interest in painting started early in life. George Howard was an accomplished painter as well as a friend and patron of many distinguished artists. Nicholson began painting with Howard around age 11. She attended the Byam Shaw Art School.
Nicholson married the artist Ben Nicholson in 1920. There were three children; Kate Nicholson also became an artist. In the 1920s Winifred became a Christian Scientist, an allegiance that lasted for the rest of her life. Although it is sometimes said incorrectly that with Ben, Winifred formed part of the artist colony at St Ives, Cornwall, she was never permanently living there. Although she painted less in the abstract style than in the representational, she did experiment with her own form of abstraction in the 1930s. Influences between her and Ben were mutual, Ben often admitting he learned much about color from his first wife. After they separated, she lived half of each year during the 1930s in Paris.
After her divorce from Ben Nicholson in 1938, she spent most of the rest of her life in Cumberland, at Boothby and at Bankshead. She painted prolifically throughout her life, largely at home but also on trips to Greece and Scotland, among other places. Many of her works are still in private collections, but a number are in the Kettle's Yard art gallery, Cambridge, and several key works belong to Tate. One painting is believed to have hung at 10 Downing Street. She had a lifelong fascination for rainbow and spectrum colors and in the 1970s she made particularly strong, innovative use of such colors in many of her paintings.
Emilio Vedova was born on August 9, 1919, in Venice. Self-taught as an artist he attended for a short period the evening decoration classes at the Carmini school. About 1942 he joined the group Corrente, which also included Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, and Umberto Vittorini. Vedova participated in the Resistance movement from 1943. In 1946 he collaborated with Morlotti on the manifesto Oltre Guernica in Milan and was a founding member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice. In this period he began his Geometrie nere series, black and white paintings influenced by Cubist spatiality.
Vedova’s first solo show in the United States was held at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York in 1951. In the same year he was awarded the prize for young painters at the first São Paulo Bienal. In 1952 he participated in the Gruppo degli Otto. Vedova was represented at the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1955 and won a Guggenheim International Award in 1956. He executed his first lithographs in 1958. In 1959 he created large L-shaped canvases, called Scontri di situazioni, which were exhibited in a black environment created by Carlo Scarpa for the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte, which opened at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Vedova was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1960 Venice Biennale, the year in which he created moving light sets and costumes for Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza ’60. This led to the first Plurimi in 1961–63: freestanding, hinged, and painted sculpture/paintings made of wood and metal. From 1963 to 1965, Vedova worked in Berlin, at the Deutsche Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and created his best known Plurimi, the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ‘64, presented at Documenta III, Kassel. From 1965 to 1969 (and in 1988), he succeeded Oskar Kokoschka as Director of the Internationale Sommerakademie in Salzburg. In 1965 and 1983 he traveled in the United States, where he lectured extensively. For the Italian Pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal, he created a light-collage using glass plates to project mobile images across a large asymmetric space. Vedova taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, from 1975 to 1986. Since the late 1970s, he has experimented with a variety of new techniques and formats such as the Plurimi-Binari (mobile works on steel rails), monotypes, double-sided circular panels (Dischi), and large-scale glass engraving. In 1995 he began a new series of multifaceted and manipulable painted objects called Disco-Plurimo. Vedova died in October 25, 2006, in Venice.
Mark Rothko, original name Marcus Rothkovitch, American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school; his use of colour as the sole means of expression led to the development of Colour Field Painting.
In 1913 Rothko’s family emigrated from Russia to the U.S., where they settled in Portland, Ore. During his youth he was preoccupied with politics and social issues. He entered Yale University in 1921, intending to become a labour leader, but dropped out after two years and wandered about the U.S. In 1925 he settled in New York City and took up painting. Although he studied briefly under the painter Max Weber, he was essentially self-taught.
Rothko first worked in a realistic style that culminated in his Subway series of the late 1930s, showing the loneliness of persons in drab urban environments. This gave way in the early 1940s to the semi-abstract biomorphic forms of the ritualistic Baptismal Scene (1945). By 1948, however, he had arrived at a highly personal form of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such dramatic techniques as violent brushstrokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colours that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space.
Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. He restricted his designs to two or three “soft-edged” rectangles that nearly filled the wall-sized vertical formats like monumental abstract icons. Despite their large size, however, his paintings derived a remarkable sense of intimacy from the play of nuances within local colour.
From 1958 to 1966 Rothko worked intermittently on a series of 14 immense canvases (the largest was about 11 × 15 feet [3 × 5 metres]) eventually placed in a nondenominational chapel in Houston, Texas, called, after his death, the Rothko Chapel. These paintings were virtual monochromes of darkly glowing browns, maroons, reds, and blacks. Their sombre intensity reveals the deep mysticism of Rothko’s later years. Plagued by ill health and the conviction that he had been forgotten by those artists who had learned most from his painting, he committed suicide.
After his death, the execution of Rothko’s will provoked one of the most spectacular and complex court cases in the history of modern art, lasting for 11 years (1972–82). The misanthropic Rothko had hoarded his works, numbering 798 paintings, as well as many sketches and drawings. His daughter, Kate Rothko, accused the executors of the estate (Bernard J. Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Morton Levine) and Frank Lloyd, owner of Marlborough Galleries in New York City, of conspiracy and conflict of interest in selling the works—in effect, of enriching themselves. The courts decided against the executors and Lloyd, who were heavily fined. Lloyd was tried separately and convicted on criminal charges of tampering with evidence. In 1979 a new board of the Mark Rothko Foundation was established, and all the works in the estate were divided between the artist’s two children and the Foundation. In 1984 the Foundation’s share of works was distributed to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel; the best and the largest proportion went to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Antoni Tàpies is a Spanish Catalan painter. He is one of the famous artists of European abstract expressionism. He is perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau-al-Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements.
Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an abstract expressionist, working in a style known as "Arte Povera", in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags.
His international reputation was well established by the end of the 50s. From about 1970 (influenced by Pop art) he began incorporating more substantial objects into his paintings, such as parts of furniture. Tàpies's ideas have had worldwide influence on art, especially in the realms paintings, sculpture, etchings and lithography.
Gloss household paint on canvas; Diameter: 182.6 cm.
The controversial painter, sculptor and installation artist Damien Hirst is one of the world's most commercially successful contemporary artists. A leading member of the postmodernist generation known as Young British artists, he first came to prominence in the 1990s for his series of dead animals preserved and floating in formaldehyde. Influenced by Francis Bacon, his most famous works of avant-garde art include A Thousand Years (1989), a glass case with maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head; The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde and For The Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th century human skull covered in £15,000,000 worth of diamonds. Hirst is also known for his 'spin paintings,' manufactured on a rotating circular surface, and 'spot paintings,' consisting of rows of randomly-colored dots or circles.
Hirst has been praised by many for galvanizing interest in the British arts and in helping to create the image of a 'Cool Britannia'. Moreover, a large number of art professionals and experts have been quick to acknowledge his prowess in marketing works of art. Even so, his critics are no less vocal. A Daily Mail headline stated "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilizing forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all." Artist Charles Thomson of the The Stuckist Art Group wrote of Hirst's works: "They're bright and they're zany - but that's all there is at the end of the day." And in a 2008 TV documentary The Mona Lisa Curse, the respected modern art critic Robert Hughes attacked Hirst's work as 'tacky' and 'absurd' . However, despite the sceptics, Hirst continues to be a best-seller and, despite a bust-up with his erstwhile patron Charles Saatchi, the latter remains a staunch supporter of Hirst's artistic talent, commenting: "general art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote."
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Jackson CUSHMAN
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ARTE DEL MONDO www.arte-del-mondo.de
The artworks of Otto FRÜHWACH are exclusively available at
ARTE DEL MONDO www.arte-del-mondo.de
We are happy to answer your questions about the artwork.
Please write to us at shop@arte-del-mondo.de.
You can also visit us on
INSTAGRAM @arte-del-mondo.de
Please also have a look at the artworks by
Martin GRUNEBERG
Toshima HAYASHI
Ziggy M. BROOKS
Pavel POLIAKOV
Eric Sven LARSGAARD
Angelo MONTESALVINI
Jackson CUSHMAN
Gus ANDERSON
We look forward to seeing you !
ARTE DEL MONDO www.arte-del-mondo.de
Mixed media, tempera and ink pigments on paper; 66.7 x 65.1 cm.
Giuseppe Santomaso was born in Venice. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti there from 1932 to 1934. In 1938 he began his work in graphics. In 1939 the artist traveled to Paris on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Rive Gauche. Santomaso participated in the Quadriennale of Rome in 1943 and executed illustrations for Paul Eluard’s Grand Air in 1945. In 1946 he was a founding member of the antifascist artists’ organization Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana—Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice.
Since 1948 Santomaso has participated often in the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Prize of the Municipality of Venice in 1948 and First Prize for Italian Painting in 1954. He received the Graziano Prize from the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in 1956 and the Marzotto Prize at the Mostra internazionale di pittura contemporanea in Valdagno in 1958, among other awards. Santomaso taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice from 1957 to 1975. Particularly important for the development of his non-objective style is the journey to New York in 1957, on the occasion of his first exhibition in the United States at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, during which the artist met the leading members of the Abstract expressionism. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave the artist a solo exhibition in 1960. In 1961 he participated in the São Paulo Bienal and he traveled to Brazil the following year. A Santomaso retrospective toured from the Kunstverein in Hamburg to the Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund in 1965–66. In the meantime, the artist continue to produce graphic works. He contributed lithographs to On Angle, a book of Ezra Pound’s poetry published in 1971. His work appeared in the International Engraving Biennial in Cracow in 1972 and 1978. Solo exhibitions of his work were presented in 1979 by the Fondacio Joan Miró in Barcelona and the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich. The Borgenicht Gallery organized a Santomaso show for the spring of 1983.
Oil on canvas; 50.5 x 75 cm.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay studied under Karl Hofer at the Berlin Art Academy from 1925 until 1928. His first sources of inspiration resulted from his preoccupation with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Henri Matisse as well as Caspar David Friedrich and Nicolas Poussin.
Nay's still lifes, portraits and landscapes were widely acclaimed. In 1931 Ernst Wilhelm Nay received a nine-months' study bursary to the Villa Massimo in Rome, where he began to paint in the abstract Surrealist manner. On the recommendation of the Lübeck museum director, C.G. Heise, Nay was given a work grant financed by Edvard Munch, which enabled Nay to spend time in Norway and on the Lofoten Islands in 1937. The "Fischer- und Lofotenbilder" represented a first pinnacle of achievement.
That same year, however, two of his works were shown in the notorious exhibition of "Degenerate Art" and Ernst Wilhelm Nay was forbidden to exhibit any longer. Conscripted into the German armed forces in 1940, Nay went with the infantry to France, where a French sculptor placed his studio at Nay's disposal. In the "Hekatebildern" (1945-48), featuring motifs from myth, legend and poetry, Nay worked through his war and postwar experiences.
The "Fugale Bilder" (1949-51) proclaim new beginnings in a fiery palette and entwined forms. In 1950 the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover mounted a first retrospective of Nay's work. The following year the artist moved to Cologne, where, with the "Rhythmischen Bildern" he took the final step towards entirely non-representational painting. In them he began to use color purely as figurative values. From 1955 Nay's painted "Scheibenbilder", in which round color surfaces organize subtle modulations of space and color. These are developed further in 1963-64 in what are known as the "Augenbilder". A first one-man-show in America at the Kleeman Galleries, New York, in 1955, participation in the 1956 Venice Biennale and the Kassel "documenta" (1955, 1959 and 1964) are milestones marking Nay's breakthrough on the international art scene. Nay was awarded important prizes and is represented by work in nearly all major exhibitions of German art in Germany and abroad.
Oil on canvas; 129.8 x 97.1 cm.
Born in Hyogo, Japan, Kazuo Shiraga studied painting at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts (now the Kyoto City University of Arts). Upon graduating in 1948, he formed Zero Group with Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami and Keiko Tanaka in 1952, and with them joined the Gutai Art Association in 1972 (the group disbanded with the death of Jiro Yoshihara in 1972).
His painting method involves dripping paint onto canvas instead of using a brush and painting strokes with his feet while hanging from a rope. His work exhibits an incomparable feeling of power and speed and stands as one of the monumental landmarks in the history of Japanese avant-garde art.
Shiraga specialized in Japanese-style painting at school, switching later to oil painting. By the time he joined the "Gutai" group, a Kansai-based avant-garde art group, in 1955, he had begun to paint directly with his hands and feet, abandoning the brush all together. For this work too, Shiraga suspended himself from ropes and painted this work with his feet, using the canvas as a brush. Shiraga has commented that, through this method of painting, he wanted to display "traces of action carried out with speed." Indeed, the flow and build-up of pigment in this work create a dynamic effect resembling the violent movements of a massive beast, and the surface of the painting preserves the raw movements of the artist challenging the canvas.
Manhattan Cove
Oil on canvas
65 by 50 inches
Born in 1923 In Meridian, Mississippi Fred Mitchell studied art at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh where he met fellow artist Philip Pearlstein. He later attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he received his BFA and MFA.
See more examples of Fred Mitchell's work at:
www.artnet.com/gallery/423916982/gallery-sam.html
Permission to post this image graciously granted by GallerySam, Berkeley, CA
Oil on canvas; 40 x 70 cm.
Wilhelm Sasnal was born in Tarnów, Poland, in 1972. He studied architecture for two years at the Polytechnic, Kraków, beginning in 1992, and then became a painting student at the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie, Kraków. While there, he helped form an artist's collective that exhibited together as the Ładnie Group until 2000. Ironically named after the Polish word meaning "pretty" or "nice," the members made paintings of their contemporary, often banal surroundings, using a deskilled aesthetic that countered the style valued by their instructors. Sasnal finished his studies in 1999, and then worked briefly for advertising companies in Kraków while also making paintings, graphic novels (his strips are regularly published in "Machina" and "Przekroj", two Polish periodicals), photographs, and films.
Sasnal produces pencil drawings, ink drawings, photographs, videos and paintings. In his art he employs a variety of media and cultivates a non-uniform practice. Sasnal is primarily a painter. There is no limits to what he paints: More or less banal everyday objects, portraits of historical figures, views of his home town Cracow, snapshots of friends and family members and very often existing images from the internet or mass media are his starting point. Even if, over the years, one can make out a number of overarching themes, there are always new paintings that shift the emphases and connections once again. The same is true of his painting style. His approach is unpredictable and his methods range from graphic reduction and a pointedly two-dimensional, illustration-oriented style to seemingly autonomous gestures with brush and paint. Like Neo Rauch, however, Sasnal makes the grip of the Communist era on the post-Communist imagination his subject.
While painting is still at the centre of Sasnal’s work, he has also increasingly turned to photography and film in recent years. The video work The Band (2002) was made during a live performance of indie rock band Sonic Youth. A 2007 piece is a product many times removed from the 1961 Polish movie on which it is based – a fictionalized account of a historical event in which a railway worker accidentally sold industrial methyl alcohol as vodka, causing widespread illness, blindness and death.[3] The 16-mm film projection Untitled (2007) is based on found-footage from the late 1970s of Elvis Presley. Swiniopas (Swineherd) (2008), his first ever feature-length film, is an adaptation of a 1842 Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of the same name yet radically deviates from the original. Shot in black and white, Sasnal’s version is set in bleak, rural Poland. It concerns a swineherd who smuggles letters back and forth between a farmer’s daughter and her lesbian lover. Also in 2008, Sasnal caused controversy in Scotland with his film The Other Church, which focused on the brutal murder of the Polish student Angelika Kluk in Glasgow.
Print on paper; 44 x 45 cm.
Danish painter, sculptor and writer. In 1962 he entered the Eksperimenterende Kunst-skole (Experimental Art School) in Copenhagen.His first important one-man exhibition abroad was at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, in 1977. He later exhibited widely at public and commercial galleries throughout Europe and the USA.
A prolific artist, Kirkeby used a range of different media. He was a member of the Fluxus group and was influenced by Pop art in the 1960s. Later he was influenced by Tachism and Abstract Expressionism. The vigorous brushwork and chromatic beauty of his, mostly untitled, paintings and the sensuous modelling of his rough black bronzes have earned him the title ‘lyric expressionist'. The paintings, which tend towards the abstract, bear veiled iconographic reference, largely to the Danish landscape and the female figure.
In contrast to the poetic and dramatic character of his paintings and black bronzes Kirkeby's brick sculptures display an unusual clarity. They make strong reference to traditional Danish housing and are inspired by Mayan architecture, as in the house-like, symmetrical form (1973) at Ikast, Denmark. In 1981 Kirkeby completed a group of such sculptures for the County Council building in Ålborg. His concern with experiment and conceptual art led him to execute a series of works in chalk on blackboard, and he regularly published poetry, essays and travel books, as well as making television and full-length documentary films. He also produced many artist's books, such as the ‘picture novel' Landskaberne (‘Landscapes'; Copenhagen, 1969).
Bibliography
Per Kirkeby: Übermalungen, 1964–84 (exh. cat., Munich, Kstraum, 1984)
Per Kirkeby: Skulpturen und Bilder (exh. cat., Zurich, Gal. Knoedler, 1985)
Per Kirkeby: Retrospektive (exh. cat., Cologne, Mus. Ludwig, 1987)
Per Kirkeby: Pinturas, esculturas, grabados y escritos (exh. cat., Valencia, IVAM Cent. Julio Gonzalez, 1989–90)
‘Per Kirkeby', Louisiana Revue, xxx/3 (1990) [whole issue]
JENS PETER MUNK