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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
Oil on canvas; 60.5 x 59.5 cm.
Ben Nicholson was an English artist whose austere geometric paintings and reliefs were among the most influential abstract works in British art. The son of the painter Sir William Nicholson, he briefly attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1910–11, but he was largely self-taught. He traveled extensively in Europe between 1911 and 1914, and in 1917 he visited California, keeping a detailed record in sketches of architecture and landscape. About 1920 he began to paint seriously, creating still lifes and landscapes in a conventionally realistic style. During a trip to Paris in 1921, Nicholson saw Cubist works, which influenced his first semi-abstract still lifes; in 1924 he executed his first completely abstract painting.
During the 1920s, along with the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (who became his second wife) and Henry Moore, Nicholson was instrumental in introducing Continental Modernism into English art. In 1933 he and Hepworth joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group, an artists’ association that advocated purely abstract art. He also met the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, under whose influence Nicholson’s work took on a greatly simplified geometry; typical of this period are his low reliefs of whitewashed circles and rectangles, such as White Relief (1937–38). He was co-editor with the artist Naum Gabo and the architect Sir Leslie Martin of Circle, a manifesto published in 1937 to promote Constructivism and other modern art styles in England.
In the 1940s Nicholson returned to landscape and still-life themes, often painting simplified representations of still-life motifs within otherwise largely abstract compositions. In his later work he continued to shift between modes of abstraction and representation.
Oil on canvas; 200 x 200 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
Oil and color photograph collage on canvas, in 2 parts; 210 x 280.5 cm.
Jonathan Meese (born Tokyo) is a German painter, sculptor, performance artist and installation artist based in Berlin and Hamburg. His (often multi-media) works include collages, drawings and writing. He also designs theater sets and wrote and starred in a play, "De Frau: Dr. Poundaddylein - Dr. Ezodysseusszeusuzur" in 2007 at the Volksbühne Theater.
Meese attended Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, but left the school before completing his studies and was picked up by Berlin gallery Contemporary Fine Arts. An early installation Ahoi de Angst was presented at the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Susanne Titz, writing about the Biennale said, "It was thus clear that Meese had indeed put his finger on the pulse of his generation and presented it." According to Karel Schampers, "Jonathan Meese can tell a story in such a gripping way that you would never have the idea to doubt its truth. Especially his installations benefit from this quality."
He has been included in exhibitions “Spezialbilder” at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, “Grotesk!” at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and “Schnitt bringt Schnitte” at Ausstellungsraum Schnitt in Köln. Recent exhibitions include Thanks, Wally Whyton (Revendaddy Phantomilky on Coconut Islandaddy) at Modern Art, London, and a performance at Tate Modern, entitled Noel Coward Is Back — Dr. Humpty Dumpty vs. Fra No-Finger. He has exhibited at Modern Art, London, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, and Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca. He has worked collaboratively with the painters Jörg Immendorff, Albert Oehlen, Tim Berresheim, Daniel Richter, Tal R and the composer Karlheinz Essl. For the Salzburg Festival 2010, Meese created an acclaimed stage design for the world premiere of Wolfgang Rihm's opera Dionysus.
Butterfly wings and gouache on paperboard; 25.0 x 18.5 cm.
Jean Dubuffet was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, best known for his development of art brut (“raw art”). As an art student in Paris, Dubuffet demonstrated a facility for academic painting. In 1924, however, he gave up his painting, and by 1930 was making a living as a wine merchant. He did not return to a full-time art career until the early 1940s.
After World War II, as one of the leading artists of the School of Paris, he developed the techniques and philosophy of art brut. Derived from Dubuffet’s studies of the art of children and of the mentally ill, art brut is intended to achieve immediacy and vitality of expression not found in self-conscious, academic art. To reflect these qualities, Dubuffet often used crude ideographic images incised into a rough impasto surface made up of such materials as tar, gravel, cinders, ashes, and sand bound with varnish and glue. His drawings and paintings are by turns childlike and obsessive, and their unfinished appearance excited much controversy.
During the 1960s Dubuffet experimented with musical composition and the creation of architectural environments. In various graphic and sculptural mediums he continued to explore the potentials of art brut. In his later years he also created several large sculptures of black-and-white painted fiberglass for various public spaces.
Mobile Photography, Abstract Digital Painting, Abstract Expressionism, iPad 4, ArtSetPro, © Kurt E. Norlin, Albany OR USA, 2015
Oil with sand on canvas; 131 x 97.5 cm.
The artist Lasar Segall was a Brazilian Jewish painter, engraver and sculptor born in Lithuania. Segall's work is derived from impressionism, expressionism and modernism. His most significant themes were depictions of human suffering, war, persecution and prostitution. Segall was born in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, Lithuania and was the son of a Torah scribe. Segall moved to Berlin at the age of 15 and studied first at Berlin Königliche Akademie der Künste from 1906 to 1910. At the end of 1910 he moved to Dresden to continue his studies at the Kunstakademie Dresden as a "Meisterschüler".
Segall published a book of five etchings in Dresden, Sovenirs of Vilna in 1919, and two books illustrated with lithographs titled Bubu and die Sanfte.[1] He then began to express himself more freely and developed his own style, which incorporated aspects of Cubism, while exploring his own Jewish background. His earlier paintings throughout 1910 to the early 1920s depicted troubled figures surrounded in claustrophobic surroundings with exaggerated and bold features, influenced by African tribal figures.[2] In 1912 his first painted series of works were conducted in an elderly insane asylum.[3] Segall's work largely portrayed the masses of persecuted humanity in his Expressionist form. Later that year, he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where three of his siblings were already living. He returned to Dresden in 1914 and was still quite active in the Expressionist style. In 1919 Segall founded the 'Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919' with Otto Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, Otto Lange and other artists. Segall's exhibition at the Galery Gurlitt received multiple awards. However successful Segall was in Europe, he had already been greatly influenced by his time spent in Brazil, which had already transformed both his style and his subject matter. The visit to Brazil gave Segall the opportunity to obtain a strong idea of South American art and, in turn, made Segall return to Brazil.
Segall's subject matter was portrayed more subtly and softer in his early career. He did not depict much of the African influence on his artwork until he moved to Brazil. It was not until Segall visited Brazil for the first few times, that he branched out towards the Expressionist style. He was able to express himself in a freer manner while he portrayed the lifelong theme of his Jewish culture depicting the tribulations of European Jews.[1] Although he was a humanist, he never forgot his Jewish roots.[9]
Segall's initial paintings in Brazil reflect a strong national connection and passion for his newfound homeland. He portrayed the landscapes in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and portrayed the different races without tension or malintention.[10] However, Segall remained faithful towards his Cubist nature throughout the majority of his artworks. Specifically, one of his famous artworks, entitled Banana Plantation, shows a Brazilian banana plantation, thick in density.[7] Segall achieved balance in this painting by centering the worker's neck and head protruding from the bottom of the painting. This causes the audience to be fully focused towards the center space. This significant symmetrical balance emphasizes the human element involved in the Brazilian agricultural system.[7] The diminished amount of slavery in Brazil during this time period, the 1920s, abolished Brazilian-Negro slaves and replaced them with an overwhelming amount of European workers coming to Brazil. This particular image portrays the engulfment of the plantations by the Europeans.
Other prominent theme in Segall's work is human suffering and emigration. In another famous artwork of Segall's, entitled Ship of Emigrants, a ship dock is overcrowded and engulfed with emigrant passengers. Not only does the image portray a dark and saddening emotion, but it significantly portrays the troubled figures aboard the ship.[2] The solemn faces and lack of expression on the passengers blatantly shows the harsh reality of emigrants and their depressing lifestyles of forced moves.
Linoleum cut with oil paint additions, composition: 8' 2 7/8" x 59 13/16" (251.1 x 152 cm); irreg. sheet: 8' 7 9/16" x 61 13/16" (263 x 157 cm).
German painter, printmaker, and sculptor who is considered to be a pioneering Neo-Expressionist. Baselitz was part of a wave of German painters who in the late 1970s rejected abstraction for highly expressive paintings with recognizable subject matter ( Neo-Expressionism). His trademark work was painted and displayed upside down to emphasize its surface rather than its subject matter.
Baselitz began art studies in 1956 at the Academy of Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin. He was expelled and left East Berlin in 1957 for West Berlin. There he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, completing postgraduate studies in 1962. During this period he also changed his surname to Baselitz. From his youth he was interested in the tradition of German Expressionist painting and its reliance on “primitive” sources such as non-Western art, folk art, children's art, and the art of the insane. Like his predecessors Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde (both involved in a group known as Die Brücke), Baselitz employed a deliberately crude style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey raw emotion. In the mid-1960s Baselitz turned to the subject of heroes, rebels, and shepherds, often fragmenting the figures and continuing to make the thick impasto carry much of his paintings' emotional content. He also often used shocking or disturbing imagery to provoke a response in the viewer. In 1969 he began to paint and display his subjects upside down. Baselitz also created art in other media; his etchings, woodcuts, and wood sculptures are as direct and expressionistically charged as his mature paintings. His first American retrospective was organized in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Oil on canvas; 35 3/8 × 54 1/4 in.
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.
Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde (October 19, 1895, in Zoeterwoude, near Leyden, Netherlands - December 28, 1981 in Grimaud, near Arles, France) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris but his work resides somewhere between expressionism and surrealism, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du Bouchet.
Oil on canvas; 140 x 160 cm.
Painter, sculptor and graphic artist. Máttis-Teustch, an ethnic Hungarian in Romania, attended the School of Design in Budapest and learnt to become a sculptor at the Munich Academy in 1902-05. He lived in Paris from 1906 to 1908, and from 1908 onwards, he was a teacher of small sculpture and art history at the trade school in Brasov,. Romania. His early naturalesque landscapes and pictures on ecclesiastical and ethic issues were followed by more and more abstract compositions. His water colours and black and white linocuts reflected a state of mind brought about by his experiments in the country. He joined the Abstrakte Gruppe der Sturm in Berlin in 1918.
He met the A bis Z Group in Köln in 1919, later Bauhaus in Weimar. He worked in Hungary during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, then returned to Brasov. His subject matters became more and more abstract (a series of "Flowers of the Soul"). He also did sculptures of coloured clay and wood ("Female Figure", 1920). He took part in Romanian avantgarde from 1923 onwards. He suggested activity with the pictures entitled "Social Structures" by emphasizing the vertical axis.
He spent summers in Nagybánya from 1928 onwards. His figures were filled with more definite content after he had learnt the hard lives of miners. He represented expressionism and abstraction later. He never materialized his fresco designs although he did series of them in 1932-1940. He gave up painting during Worl War II. His surrealistic period during 1945-48 showed a new demand for psychological analysis. In the early 1950s, he painted naturalistic genre pictures. In his last period from 1956 onwards, he painted hands and legs only.
Jean Fautrier was a French painter and sculptor. He was one of the most important practitioners of Tachisme. He was born in Paris and studied in London at the Royal Academy of Art and the Slade School. He first exhibited his paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1922 and at the Fabre Gallery in 1923. In 1927, he painted a series of pictures (still lifes, nudes, landscapes) in which black dominates, and in 1928 he began work on a series of engravings. Until 1933 he divided his efforts between sculpture and painting; he then spent five years as a ski instructor in Savoy.
Fautrier resumed painting in 1937, and in 1943 made his twenty-second and last sculpture. The same year, stopped by the German gestapo, he fled Paris and found refuge in Châtenay-Malabry, where he began work on the project of the Otages. These paintings were exhibited in 1945 with the Drouin gallery. In the years that followed, Fautrier worked on the illustration of several works. His late work is abstract, generally small in scale, often combining mixed media on paper. He died in Châtenay-Malabry in 1964.
Guillermo Kuitca is an Argentinean artist who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, where he continues to work and live. Kuitca's work has been shown extensively around the globe, and is included in many important public collection, including The Tate Gallery, England; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC ; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY and The Daros Collection, Zürich, Switzerland . Kuitca represented Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recurrent themes of travel, maps, memory, and migration can be found in Kuitca’s work.
In the early and mid-1980s, Kuitca made works which incorporate theater imagery. Many paintings from this period feature figures on a stage-like platform, with titles often inspired by plays, literature and music. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kuitca began to integrate the subjects of architecture and topography in his work, often exploring the confluence of communal and private spaces. The floor plans of public institutions, such as those found in the “Tablada Suite” series, geographical maps, and genealogical charts begin to serve as important references during this period.” In 1992, Kuitca created his first works which incorporated the image of a painted bed, “often small and forlorn on the canvas.” Afterwards, the artist used the motif of an apartment floor plan, middle-class and compact, with only one bathroom. This floor plan would eventually lead to maps, theater plans and baggage carousels. Kuitca continued to explore organizational systems, in his “Neufert Suite” (1998) and “Encyclopédie” (2002) series. In his “Global Order” (2002) works, Kuitca combines a world map with architectural plans for interior spaces, “identifying borders and notions of ‘place’ as the changing products of human invention.”
Kuitca is well known “for his use of maps – particularly his transcriptions of topography onto mattresses” Kuitca says he uses the image of a map “to get lost… not to get oriented.” Stemming from his experimentation with aerial views of floor plans, Kuitca moved to maps because “he liked the way they occupy a space somewhere between the abstract and the representational.”
Kuitca’s retrospective “Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008” opened at the Miami Art Museum in 2009, and traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (19 February– 30 May 2010), New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (26 June – 19 September 2010) and will concluded at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (21 October 2010 – 9 January 2011).
French painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was greatly impressed as a boy by the Celtic carvings in the museum at Rodez and by the architecture and sculpture of the Romanesque abbey of Ste-Foy at Conques. In 1938 he went to Paris for the first time, where he visited the Louvre and saw exhibitions of Cézanne and Picasso. With the intention of training to be a drawing teacher, he enrolled in a studio in Paris but was encouraged instead to enter the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts; he was, however, bitterly disappointed by what was being taught there, which seemed to fall far short of what he had just seen, and returned to Rodez. The paintings he was making at this time were of trees in winter, without their leaves, with the black branches forming a tracery against the sky. He was called up in 1941 but demobilized almost at once. He moved to Montpellier to continue his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts there but spent most of the war working clandestinely on a farm in the Montpellier area. He was able to do very little painting during the Occupation, but he became aware of abstract art through his friendship with Sonia Delaunay, whom he met c. 1943.
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from Abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects.
Lithograph.
Walasse Ting (Chinese: 丁雄泉, October 13, 1929 – May 17, 2010) was a Chinese-American visual artist and poet. His colorful paintings have attracted critical admiration and a popular following. Common subjects include nude women and cats, birds and other animals.
He was born in Shanghai in 1929. He left China in 1946 and lived for a while in Hong Kong, then settled in Paris in 1952. There, he associated with artists such as Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Pierre Alechinsky, members of the avant-garde group, CoBrA.
In 1957, he moved to the United States, and settled in New York where his work was influenced by pop art and abstract expressionism. He began primarily as an abstract artist, but the bulk of his work since the mid- 1970s has been described as popular figuratism, with broad areas of color painted with a Chinese brush and acrylic paint.
He lived in Amsterdam in the 1990s, but regularly moved between there and New York.
He is the author of 13 books, including "One Cent Life" (E.W Kornfeld, 1964) a portfolio of 62 original lithographs by 28 artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Kiki Kogelnik, Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis.
He won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (for Drawing) in 1970
His works are found in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Hong Kong Museum of Art, among others.
He was sometimes referred to by his Chinese name "丁雄泉" or its various romanizations : Ding Xiongquan or Ting Hsiung-ch'uan.
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.
Isidoro di Mileto - Architetto (1996)
Oil on canvas
40.4 by 39.4 in.
Courtesy Galerie Biederman, Munich
www.artnet.com/Galleries/Home.asp?G=&gid=157&whic...
Biographical information:
Diptych painting on canvas; 560 x 280 cm.
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.
Bram Bogart is one of the artists of the ‘Informel’, the loosely knit aesthetic movement which produced a generation of painters in the early 1950s. The movement included such European artists as Alberto Burri in Italy, and Antonio Tàpies in Spain, whose textural canvasses distance them from their American counterparts, the Abstract Expressionists. From 1946 Bogart worked in Paris for a decade, a difficult time during which a typical reaction to his work (from a Dutch critic) was ‘a form of rock and roll with paint in its most stupid manifestation’. However after his move to Belgium in 1959, Bogart’s work became widely recognized. From the early 1960s onwards his canvasses are characterized by a new technique radiant with color, light and optimism. Bogart became a Belgian citizen in 1969. Bogart’s work has been the subject of countless one-man shows around the world.
Gerhard Richter is a German artist. He had his first solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. His fourth retrospective, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art in February 2002. Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005 retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call Gerhard Richter the best living painter.
Oil, emulsion, acrylic, clay, shellac, lead and iron on cardboard on plywood covered with glass; 190 x 140 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).
Woman I, 1950 – 52
oil on canvas
75 ⅞ x 58 inches
© 2009 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ Artists Rights Society, New York
While some critics in the past have appraised de Kooning's painting Excavation to be his greatest masterpiece there can be little doubt that this painting is his signature piece. Woman 1, the first of a long series of paintings and drawings , shows the violent destruction and reconstruction of the female form and cubist space. Woman 1 is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
Permission to post this image here kindly granted by The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ Artists Rights Society, New York
Oil and wax on cardboard; 20.5 x 24 cm.
Remedios Varo Uranga (December 16, 1908 – October 8, 1963) was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona, Spain in 1908. In 1924 she studied at the Academia de San Fernando de Madrid. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement. She met her second husband (the first was the painter Gerardo Lizarraga, whom, as was discovered after her death, she never divorced), the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret in Barcelona. There she was a member of the art group Logicophobiste. They were introduced through a mutual friendship with the Surrealist artist Oscar Dominguez.
Due to her Republican ties, her 1937 move to Paris with Péret ensured that she would never be able to return to Franco's Spain. She was forced into exile from Paris during the Nazi occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941. She initially considered Mexico a temporary haven, but would remain in Latin America for the rest of her life.
In Mexico, she met native artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but her strongest ties were to other exiles and expatriates, notably the English painter Leonora Carrington and the French pilot and adventurer, Jean Nicolle. Her third, and last, important relationship was to Walter Gruen, an Austrian who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe. Gruen believed fiercely in Varo, and he gave her the support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting.
After 1949 Varo developed her mature style, which remains beautifully enigmatic and instantly recognizable. She often worked in oil on masonite panels she prepared herself. Although her colors have the blended resonance of the oil medium, her brushwork often involved many fine strokes of paint laid closely together - a technique more reminiscent of egg tempera. She died at the height of her career from a heart-attack in Mexico City in 1963.
Her work continues to achieve successful retrospectives at major sites in Mexico and the United States. Currently, the ownership of 39 of her paintings, first loaned and then given by Gruen to Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art in 1999 is in dispute. Varo's niece Beatriz Varo Jimenez of Valencia, Spain, claims Gruen had no rights to those works. Gruen, now 91, claims he inherited no works from Varo, who died intestate. Varo never divorced the husband she married in Spain in 1930: a court denied Gruen's request in 1992 to be given inheritance rights as the artist's common-law husband. He and his wife, Alexandra, whom he married in 1965, acquired all the paintings given to the museum on the open market after Varo's death and are therefore his to give. He said he gave the only painting in Varo's studio at the time of her death, "Still Life Reviving," to the artist's mother. The work was auctioned at Sotheby's New York in 1994 for $574,000.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varo