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In the heart of darkness, where shadows dance and light flickers, lies a realm untouched by time. "Whispers in the Shadows" unveils a world where beauty intertwines with the surreal, and each image serves as a gateway to the enigmatic depths of the human psyche. Inspired by the haunting works of Yoshitaka Amano and Zdzisław Beksiński, this collection is a tapestry of dreams and nightmares, woven with the threads of abstract expressionism. Here, a Swedish girl becomes the vessel of our deepest fears and fascinations, her smile a paradox amidst the brooding landscape of dark grays, blacks, and golds.
Poem
In the realm where night whispers linger,
A Swedish maiden smiles, a spectral figure.
In hues of gold, black, and sorrow's gray,
She dances with shadows, in eternal play.
Amidst the canvases of Amano's dream,
And Beksiński's nightmarish scream,
Her eyes hold stories untold,
In this world, hauntingly bold.
In the echo of each brushstroke's fall,
She whispers secrets, hidden to all.
A blend of beauty, fear, and art's embrace,
In this gallery of the dark, her ethereal place.
Haiku
Shadowed smile gleams,
In gold and gray dreams she weaves,
Silent whispers breathe.
Tapestry.
Soriano, son of Rafael Rodríguez Soriano and Amalia Montoya Navarro, was born in Guadalajara and displayed his first painting at age 14. He moved to Mexico City in 1935, where after a difficult start he was accepted into the local art scene.
He became a member of the Mexican School cultural movement also featuring Frida Kahlo and poet Octavio Paz. He also joined the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios.
Soriano experimented with abstract work as well as portraits and self portraits. He also became a sculptor in terracotta, ceramics and later bronze.
In 1957, he was awarded the José Clemente Orozco prize by the government of Jalisco. In 1985, Bellas Artes staged an exhibition in honor of his fifty years in the art world. In 1987, he was awarded the National Art Prize by the Mexican government. The Spanish Government awarded Soriano its Valazquez Plastic Arts Prize.
During his career, his works featured in 130 exhibitions held in Mexico, the US, China, France and Poland. Soriano has works on display in public places in Mexico such as a large dove outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey.
He died in February 2006 in Mexico City. He was 85 years old.
Watercolor on wove paper; 48.1 x 63.2 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; 195 x 160 cm.
Article provided by Grove Art Online www.groveart.com
Israeli painter, draughtsman, printmaker and writer, of Romanian birth, active in France. The drawings he made in deportation from Nazi labour camps at the age of 13 and 14 saved his life by attracting attention to his precocious talent. In 1944 he emigrated to Israel, living in a kibbutz near Jerusalem and studying art at the Bezalel School in Jerusalem; after being severely wounded in 1948 in the Israeli War of Independence, he continued his studies in Paris. He first made his name as an illustrator. From 1957 to 1965 he produced abstract paintings which had something in common with Art Informel but were characterised by his particular sensitivity of touch and sumptuousness of colour. During this period he also designed stained-glass windows.
Arikha stopped painting in 1965, feeling that it was impossible to continue in the same vein, and he restricted himself first to drawing and then to etching in black and white. He resumed painting in 1973, this time working exclusively from life, painting quickly in oil on canvas on an intimate scale well suited to his generally domestic subjects.
Wary of his own virtuosity and always receptive to the shocks of emotion and chance, Arikha practised a kind of dynamic realism. Arikha's paintings from life after 1973, calm and endowed with a feeling of plenitude arising from his mastery of colour and amplitude of gesture, also have a muted drama because of the vibration of the marks, tonal contrasts and spatial ambiguities, which together assure the modernity of his work within a long tradition.
Bibliography
Avigdor Arikha: Dessins, 1965–1970 (exh. cat., preface S. Beckett, essay B. Rose; Paris, Cent. N. A. Contemp., 1970)
S. Beckett and others: Arikha (Paris and London, 1985)
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
He said “Everybody is talented.” As a teacher, Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy lived by these words. As a painter and photographer he demonstrated his own talent. His vision of a nonrepresentational art consisting of pure visual fundamentals—color, texture, light, and equilibrium of forms—was immensely influential in both the fine and applied arts.
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas, 219.4 x 297.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A short time ago my friend Mobius Faith posted a terrific image titled "Traffic - Glad" and his background reminded me of a Rothko painting. I happened to look out my window and saw a small portion of what must have been an amazing sunset, and I captured this small part which reminds me again of Rothko. I'm sure "teacherholly" will post an award winning image from tonight's sunset. She has a knack.
Oil on paper; 65.3 x 48.7 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.
Anton Rooskens went to technical school in Venlo from 1924 to 1934. In 1935 he moved to Amsterdam. As a painter he was self-educated. In the works he made during the nineteen thirties, mainly landscapes, the influence of Van Gogh prevailed. In 1945 Rooskens visited the exhibition "Art and Freedom" at the Rijksmuseum where he observed sculpture from Africa sculptures and New-Guinea. The simplified, straight shapes of this art can be found in his work of the early post-war period in which also the influence of cubism can be detected. He was the co-founder of the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep which merged with CoBrA later. Rooskens participated in the illustrious exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1949 and then he withdrew from the movement.
The connection with CoBrA turned out to be very stimulating for Rooskens. He developed a personal language of magic signs in penetrating black, yellow, ochre, blue and red and he painted compositions in which masks, shields and images of gods were entwined in a jumble of spontaneously painted areas of color. In 1954 he painted, influenced by African art, in a geometric style for a short period. From 1956 he put, in a more and more dynamic manner, abstract signs on large canvasses on which black paint, put on in sturdy strokes, is of a prominent presence. In about 1965 the fantastical beings, reminiscent of the CoBrA period, emerged again. Until the time he died in 1976 his paintings were brighter again.
Oil on canvas; 128.6 x 95.7 cm.
Zao Wou-Ki was a Chinese-French painter. He was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Zao studied calligraphy in his childhood and, from 1935 to 1941, painting at the school of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. In 1948, he went with his wife Lan-lan, a composer, to Paris to live on the same block in Montparnasse where the classes of Émile Othon Friesz took place. His earliest exhibitions in France were met with praise from Joan Miró and Picasso.
Zao and his wife pursued their own careers, their son having stayed in China with his Zao's parents. In the mid-1950s, they were divorced. In 1957, Zao decided to visit the United States where his younger brother Chao Wu-Wai was living in Montclair, New Jersey, close to the art scene of New York City. He wanted to learn more about "pop art". While in the US, he painted seven canvases at his brother’s house. There are relatively few items dating from that year (1957). Years later, the largest canvas was given by his brother, Chao Wu-Wai, to the Detroit Institute of Arts.[2]
He left the U.S. after a six week stay, traveling to Tokyo and then to Hong Kong, where he met his future wife Zhu Ying, a movie star with two young children. She later became a sculptor who received admiring and critical praise. She committed suicide at the height of her career.
Zao's works, influenced by Paul Klee, are orientated to abstraction. He names them with the date in which he finishes them, and in them, masses of colours appear to materialise a creating world, like a big bang, where light structures the canvas. He worked formats in triptychs and diptychs. While his work was stylistically similar to the Abstract Expressionists whom he met while travelling in New York, he was influenced by Impressionism. Zao Wou-ki stated that he had been influenced by the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne.[4][5]
His meetings with Henri Michaux pushed him to review his Indian ink techniques, always based in Chinese traditional drawings. Zao was a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, and was considered to have been one of the most successful Chinese painters during his lifetime.
His auction record of HK$68,980,000 (US$8,863,930) was set at Sotheby's, Hong-Kong, on 3 October 2011.[6]
Former French President Jacques Chirac was offered a painting by Zao Wu Ki by his ministers during their last meeting. By the end of his life Zao had stopped producing new paintings due to health problems. He died on 9 April 2013 at his home in Switzerland.
Watercolor on canvas and lacquered wood; 83.3 x 106 cm.
Lucio Fontana was an Italian/Argentine painter and sculptor. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera. Born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina of Italian parents, Fontana spent the first years of his life in Italy and came back to Argentina in 1905, where he stayed until 1922, working as a sculptor along with his father, and then on his own.
In 1927 he returned to Italy and studied under the sculptor Adolfo Wildt, and there he presented his first exhibition in 1930, organized by the Milano art gallery Il Milione. During the following decade he journeyed Italy and France, working with abstract and expressionist painters. In 1935 he joined the association Abstraction-Création in Paris and from 1936 to 1949 made expressionist sculptures in ceramic and bronze.
In 1940 he returned to Argentina. In Buenos Aires (1946) he founded the Altamira academy together with some of his students, and made public the White Manifesto, where he states that "Matter, color and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art". Back in Milano in 1947, he supported, along with writers and philosophers, the first manifesto of spatialism (Spazialismo)**. He also resumed his ceramics works in Albisola.
From 1949 on he started the so-called Spatial Concept or slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the surface of monochrome paintings, drawing a sign of what he named "an art for the Space Age". In 1948 Fontana experimented the use of neon lighting with "Ambiente spaziale a luce nera" (Galleria del Naviglio, Milan). He then created an elaborate neon ceiling called "Luce spaziale" in 1951 for the Triennale in Milan. In 1959 he exhibited cut-off paintings with multiple combinable elements (he named the sets quanta). He participated in the Bienal de São Paulo and in numerous exhibitions in Europe (including London and Paris) and Asia, as well as New York.
Shortly before his death he was present at the "Destruction Art, Destroy to Create" demonstration at the Finch College Museum of New York. Then he left his home in Milano and went to Comabbio (in the province of Varese, Italy), his family's mother town, where he died in 1968.
Öl auf Leinwand / oil on canvas
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
Ausstellung / exhibition "Robert Motherwell - Pure Painting"
Kunstforum Wien
Mikhail Larionov was born at Tiraspol, near Odessa. In 1898 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Isaac Levitan and Valentin Serov. He was suspended three times for his radical outlook. In 1900 he met Natalya Sergeevna Goncharova and formed a life-long relationship with her.
From 1902 his style was Impressionism. After a visit to Paris in 1906 he moved into Post-Impressionism and then a Neo-primitive style which derived partly from Russian sign painting. In 1908 he staged the Golden Fleece exhibition in Moscow, which included paintings by international avant-garde artists such as Matisse, Derain, Braque, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Other group shows promoted by him included Tatlin, Chagall and Malevich.
Larionov was a founding member of two important Russian artistic groups Jack of Diamonds (1909–1911) and the more radical Donkey's Tail (1912–1913). He gave names to both groups. His first solo show was for one day in Moscow in 1911. In 1913 he created Rayonism, which was the first creation of near-abstract art in Russia. In 1915 he left Russia and worked with the ballet owner Sergei Diaghilev in Paris on the productions of the Ballets Russes.
The highest price paid for a Larionov painting at auction is 2,200,000 British pounds.
Ink and wash on paper; 13 x 16 1/8 in. (irreg.)
Ralf Winkler, alias A.R. Penck is a German painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was born in Dresden, East Germany, and studied together with a group of other neo-expressionist painters in Dresden. He became one of the foremost exponents of the new figuration alongside Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Under the communist regime, they were watched by the secret police and were considered dissidents. In the late 1970s they were included in shows in West Berlin and were seen as exponents of free speech in the East. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They were included in a number of important shows including the famous Zeitgeist exhibition in the well-known Martin Gropius Bau museum and the important New Art show at the Tate in 1983.
In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with pictographic, neo-primitivist imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. He was included in many important shows both in London and New York. Penck's sculptures, though less familiar, evoke the same primitive themes as his paintings and drawings and use common everyday materials such as wood, bottles, cardboard boxes, tin cans, masking tape, tinfoil, wire and are crudely painted and assembled. Despite the anti-art aesthetic the rough and ready quality of their construction, they have the same symbolic, archetypal anthropomorphic forms as his flat symbolic paintings. The paintings are influenced by Paul Klee's work and mix the flatness of Egyptian or Mayan writing with the crudity of the late black paintings by Jackson Pollock. The sculptures are often reminiscent of the stone heads of Easter Island and other Oceanic art.
A keen drummer, he was a member of the free jazz group T.T.T. ("Triple Trip Touch") and took every opportunity to play with some of the best Jazz musicians of the late 1980s including Butch Morris, Frank Wright, Billy Bang, Louis Moholo and Frank Lowe, organizing events at his country mansion in Heimbach in 1990 involving installations by Lennie Lee, performances by Anna Homler and paintings by Christine Kuhn A.R. Penck lives and works in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dublin and New York.
Untitled (Black and White V)
ca. 1950s
Gouache on paper
4 7/8 x 21 inches
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
Oil on canvas; 89.9 x 146 cm.
Born in Montreal, he studied under Paul-Émile Borduas in the 1940s and was a member of Les Automatistes movement. He was one of the signers of the Refus global manifesto. In 1949 he moved to Paris and continued his career as an artist, where he commercialized on his image as a "wild Canadian". In 1959 he began a relationship with the American painter Joan Mitchell. Living together throughout the 1960s, they kept separate homes and studios near Giverny, where Monet had lived. They influenced one another greatly, as much intellectually as artistically, but their relationship was a stormy one, fueled by alcohol. The relationship ended in 1979. His 1992 painting Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg is Riopelle's tribute to Mitchell, who died that year, and is regarded as a high point of his later work.
Riopelle's style changed gradually from Surrealism to abstract expressionism, in which he used myriad soft cubes of color, applied as flat planes with a palette knife, on large canvases to create powerful atmospheres. In 1969 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, and began to spend more time in Canada. He was specially recognized by UNESCO for his work. One of his largest compositions was originally intended for the Toronto airport, but is now in the Opéra Bastille in Paris. In 1988 he was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec and was promoted to Grand Officer in 1994. In 2000 Riopelle was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. In June, 2006 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized a retrospective exhibition which was presented at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia and the Musee Cantini in Marseilles, France. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has a number of his works, spanning his entire career, in their permanent collection.
Pastel, paper blue; 45.6 x 58.5 cm.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, pseudonym Witkacy, was a Polish painter, novelist, and playwright, well known as a dramatist in the period between the two world wars.
After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Witkiewicz traveled in Germany, France, and Italy. In 1914 he left for Australia as the artist and photographer of an anthropological expedition led by Bronisław Malinowski. Three years later, as a reserve officer in the Russian Army, Witkiewicz witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1918 he settled at a provincial cultural centre, Zakopane, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. He committed suicide at the beginning of World War II.
Witkiewicz’s plays anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett in their deliberately contorted characters and plots and their use of grotesque parody. Rapid tempos, warped time juxtapositions, and catastrophic incidents are combined with an original and symbolic use of language in such plays as Kurka wodna (1921; The Water Hen) and Wariat i zakonnica (1925; The Madman and the Nun).
Witkiewicz’s works began to be revived in Poland and the West in the 1950s and were a perennial feature of Polish and foreign theatrical repertoires. Some of his plays were published in English translation in The Witkiewicz Reader (1992). His novel Nienasycenie (1930; Insatiability) projected a vision of cruel totalitarianism gaining control over nations and individual destinies. A number of his expressionistic paintings survive, and they form part of many museum collections in Poland and abroad.
For more details see the following link:
info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/witkacy/witkacy.html
Acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and gold leaf on canvas (in two parts), with steel and lead; 380 x 560 cm.
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter who became one of the most prominent figures in the Neo-Expressionist art movement of the late 20th century.
Kiefer abandoned his law studies at the University of Freiburg in 1966 to pursue art. He subsequently studied at art academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and Dusseldorf. In the latter city in 1970 he became a student of the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, who encouraged Kiefer’s early use of symbolic photographic images to deal ironically with 20th-century German history. Beuys also encouraged Kiefer to paint, and in such huge paintings as “Germany’s Spiritual Heroes” (1973) and “Operation Sea Lion” (1975) Kiefer was able to develop an array of visual symbols by which he could comment with irony and sarcasm on certain tragic aspects of German history and culture, in particular the Nazi period. These paintings used garish, somber colors and coarse, naive drawing, but they did achieve powerful effects owing to their imaginative allusions to Nazism. In the 1970s he also painted a series of landscape vistas that capture the rutted and somber look of the German countryside and that use linear perspective with great dramatic effect.
Kiefer’s landscapes and interiors done in the 1980s acquired an intense physical presence by means of perspectival devices and the incorporation of unusual textures on the surface of the painted canvas. Though Kiefer continued to treat Germany’s Nazi past in such paintings as “Interiors” (1981), the range of his themes broadened to include references to ancient Hebrew and Egyptian history, as in the large painting “Osiris and Isis” (1985–87).
Oil on canvas; 169 x 130cm.
Daniel Richter is a German artist based in Berlin and Hamburg. He attended Hochschule für bildendende Künste Hamburg from 1991-1995. Richter's work has appeared in many exhibitions such as Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst in Berlin, Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin and David Zwirner in New York. He has also shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Museum Morsbroich in Germany, Victoria Miro Gallery in London and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver. He is represented by Contemporary Fine Arts[6] in Berlin and David Zwirner in New York. A collection of Richter's work is on display at the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, USA through January 11, 2009. Working for the Salzburg Festival, Richter created two stage designs: for Bluebeard's Castle (2008) and for Lulu (2010).
Awards
* 1998 Otto-Dix-Award, Gera
* 2001 Award for Young Art, Schleswig-Holstein
* 2009 Kunstpreis Finkenwerder, Hamburg
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. He was born in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied philosophy at the City College of New York. From the 1930s he made paintings, said to be in an expressionist style, but eventually destroyed all these works.
Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of the way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work. An example is his letter in April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis: ---It is true that [Marc] Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it."
Oil on canvas; 82.3 x 70.2 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.
Gouache on paper laid down on linen; 41.2 x 31 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.
Mixed technique on paper; 36 x 29.5 cm.
Valerio Adami is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan , he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art carries obvious influence from Pop Art. He was born in Bologna, and by 1945 he was studying painting from Felice Carena. He was accepted into the Brera Academy in 1951, and there studied as a draughtsman until 1954 in the studio of Achille Funi. In 1955 he went to Paris, where he met and was influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. His first solo exhibition came in 1959 in Milan.
In these early years, Adami's works were expressionistic, but around the time of his second exhibition in 1964 at Kassel, he had developed a style of painting reminiscent of French cloisonnism, featuring regions of flat color bordered by black lines. Unlike Gauguin, however, Adami's subjects were highly stylized and often presented in fragments, as seen in Telescoping Rooms (1965).
In the 1970s, Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated subject matter such as modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. In 1971, he and his brother Gioncarlo created the film Vacances dans le désert. From 1985 to 1998, there were four retrospective exhibits of Adami's work in Paris, the Centre Julio-Gonzalez de Valence (Spain), Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires.
Jacques Derrida, the famous philosopher, launched an investigation of Adami's works in 'The Truth in Painting', specifically on his use of the frame ('the paregon').
Acrylic on canvas; 100 x 120 cm.
People's Artist of Ukraine, laureate of T.Shevchenko National award, prize-winner of the All-Ukrainian contest «Man of the Year-2003», holder of the list «100 great people of Ukraine» compiled by the country’s mass media.
In 2006 he joined the «Golden Guild» within International Academy of Modern Art in Rome as the «maestro of the highest prestige, who has written the most beautiful page in the history of modern art». In October 2007, a reputable London newspaper The Daily Telegraph published a list of «100 geniuses now living in the world», a survey carried out among British population by the global consulting company Creators Synectics based in Great Britain. Ivan Marchuk, the only one from Ukraine, was assigned number 72 on the list.
• Ivan Marchuk was born in 1936 in the village of Moskalivka in Ternopil region.
• In 1956 he graduated from the Lviv School of Decorative Arts.
• In 1965 he graduated from the Lviv Institute of Decorative Arts, ceramic department.
• In 1979 - the first official personal exhibition in Moscow (exhibition halls on Malaya Gruzinskaya str.).
• From 1980 to 1989, without any official recognition and admission to the Union of Artists, he was arranging exhibitions in various institutions and organizations, such as, for instance, in the Art department of the National Library of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. At the same time he is distinguished as an informal leader of the Ukrainian art underground.
• In 1989 he immigrated to Australia, then he moved to Canada and finally to the United States.
• In 1990 - Marchuk visited Ukraine and opened his first official exhibition in Kyiv, in the Ukrainian State Art Museum of Fine Arts (now - National Art Museum of Ukraine).
• In 1997 he became the laureate of T.Shevchenko National award.
• In 2001 Marchuk settled permanently in Ukraine.
• In 2006 the International Academy of Modern Art in Rome admitted Ivan Marchuk to the «Golden Guild» and elected him an honorary member of the Scientific Council of the Academy. It was the first recognition of the Ukrainian artist by the institution of such a high level. Today there are 51 artists from all over the world who are members of «Golden Guild».
• In 2007 according to the British paper The Daily Telegraph Ivan Marchuk was called a genius of nowadays among hundreds of prominent figures of our time (72 place).
• From 1979 to 2007 Ivan Marchuk held more than 60 personal exhibitions, among them:
1991 - Ukrainian Center, Philadelphia, USA
1992 - Gallery «13», New York, USA
1993 - Gallery «SAVAH», Sydney, Australia
1999 - Gallery of the city municipality, Lille, France
• 2005 – Exhibition devoted to the 40th anniversary of the artist’s creative work, «Ukrainian House», Kyiv
• 2006 - Cultural Bridge Kyiv-Paris «Strings of Sadness and Hope». The simultaneous exhibitions dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl tragedy, «Ukrainian House» (Kyiv, Ukraine), the Cultural Center, Embassy of Ukraine in Paris and UNESCO (France)
• 2007 - Kyiv Museum of Russian Art
• 2008 - Kyiv Museum of Russian Art, «The Way Home» (exhibition of landscapes of different years).
For me, art is the life and revelation. There is no other alternative. At the same time art is drudgery. I work 365 days through a year, and can not help but do it. It is the verdict of fate, karma, doom. There is no escape from it. I dream of going to the warm beach, lying in the grass and listening to its growth, I want to watch the clouds soaring high up in the sky. I want to enjoy life, have fun, to mix up with people in a good company. I wouldn’t mind going to school to teach someone there. And then it occurs to me: but more than that I want to do something myself. Invincible belief!
Ivan Marchuk
www.ukrainianart.com/index.php?page=artistinfo&artist...
Ivan Marchuk is Ukraine’s most prominent artist. Having made his name in America, Canada and Australia, Marchuk returned to Kiev after the September 11 attacks. One of the Ukrainian president's favourites, Marchuk was also named as one of 100 contemporary geniuses by Synectics UK& Europe consulting company, alongside such luminaries as Albert Hoffman, Nelson Mandela and ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening.
Oil on canvas; 280 x 300 cm.
Oil on canvas; 270 x 220 cm.
Albert Oehlen is a German artist. He graduated at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Hamburg, in 1978. Closely associated with the Cologne art scene, he was a member of the Lord Jim Lodge along with Martin Kippenberger among others. His art is related to the Neue Wilde movement.
Oehlen has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including Grounswell at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Provins – Legende at Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde and Spiegelbilder 1982-1985 at Max Hetzler in Berlin. He is represented by Max Hetzler in Berlin and Luhring Augustine in New York. He has worked collaboratively with Jonathan Meese. Since the late 1990s Oehlen has played in the bands Red Krayola and Van Oehlen. He is the brother of Markus Oehlen.