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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
Oil on canvas; 127 x 147 cm.
Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren was born in Santiago, Chile in 1911. He studied architecture at the Universidad Catolica in Santiago. In 1933 Matta traveled to Paris and worked for two years as a draftsman in the Paris studio of famed architect Le Corbusier. While visiting his aunt in Madrid, he met Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. Neruda introduced Matta to Salvador Dali and Andre Breton. Impressed by Matta's drawings, Breton invited him to join the Surrealist group in 1937. Influenced by his association with the Surrealists and by Marcel Duchamp's theories of movement and process, Matta began to explore the realm of the subconscious and to develop an imagery of cosmic creation and destruction. His early works, the Psychological Morphologies and the Inscape series, were organic in style and content. By 1939 the war in Europe drove Matta to exile in New York, where he was an important influence on the young New York School artists, especially in his use of automatist techniques.
In 1940 he held his first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. A 1941 trip to Mexico with his wife and his friend Robert Motherwell intensified his interest in the pre-Columbian heritage of Latin America. In 1942 Matta was included in the New York exhibitions Artists in Exile at the Pierre Matisse Gallery and The First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw-Reid Mansion. In the mid-1940s his early abstractions gave way to paintings in which mechanical and insect-like shapes float and collide in a cosmic space charged with dynamic tension. In 1948, Matta returned to Europe and broke with the Surrealist movement. He settled in Paris in 1954. During the 1960s and 1970s Matta traveled to Cuba, South America, Egypt, and Africa. Although known primarily as a painter, Matta has also explored the media of sculpture, ceramics, and tapestry.
Oil on cardboard; 100 x 70 cm.
Italian painter. The son of the dramatist Luigi Pirandello, he trained with the sculptor Sigismondo Lipinsky between 1919 and 1920, when he turned to painting. His early work was influenced by Armando Spadini and Felice Carena, whom he knew personally, as well as by Gauguin, Kokoschka and van Gogh. In 1925 he exhibited at the third Biennale di Roma, and in 1927 he moved to Paris, where he was influenced both by Jules Pascin and by Cubism (e.g. his Still-life with Glasses, 1929; Rome, priv. col., see 1976–7 exh. cat., no. 9). He was associated with Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio and the other members of the Italiani di Parigi group, and he had solo shows in 1929 (Paris) and 1930 (Vienna). In 1931 he returned to Rome, exhibiting Interior in the Morning (1931; Paris, Pompidou) at the Sindacale Romana. Although he had links with the Scuola di Via Cavour (see SCUOLA ROMANA) and with Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli, during the 1930s he developed a highly individual form of poetic realism. Many of his paintings were composed of strange, irrational elements: for example Interior in the Morning includes a picture-frame surrounding the head of the central figure, a motif that had already appeared in Ladies with a Salamander (1928–30; Rome, priv. col., see Ferrari, p. 19). This suggestion of a ‘painting within a painting’ had in fact been anticipated by the Pittura Metafisica of De Chirico. The fantastic, mythical world that Pirandello created out of scenes from working-class life was, however, entirely his own. In The Staircase (1934; Rome, Gualino priv. col., see Ferrari, p. 26) a mundane depiction of a prostitute descending the stairs of a brothel is transformed by the fragmentary, phantom-like image of another woman walking upstairs. The subversion of everyday reality is also achieved through Pirandello’s manipulation of space. He exaggerates perspective in The Staircase, while the foreground of Golden Rain (1934; priv. col.) contains an illogical, crowded assembly of objects, together with an upside-down naked female figure, who appears to be about to tumble out of the picture plane.
A vivid explosion of color, light, and texture— 'Sunset Shine' captures the beauty of nature's golden hour with an abstract twist. Fiery oranges and reds melt into serene blues and greens, creating a dynamic interplay of warmth and tranquility. Bold strokes and layered textures give this piece an electric energy, reflecting the ever-changing brilliance of the sky at dusk. Let this artwork remind the viewer to pause, breathe, and soak in the colors of life.
A wide range of printed products featuring this artwork is available at the following link: tinyurl.com/48jkr63s
(C)2025-Artwork Copyright-Graham Seaman Art
Website at: www.grahamseamanart.co.uk
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.
Mental Plane II (1997)
Oil on canvas
h: 42 x w: 50 in
Courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC
Copyright Artist Natalie Edgar
Oil and pencil on canvas; 148.9 x 197.7 cm.
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955.
In 1911 Duchamp, the great iconoclast of 20th-century art, was still adhering to the conventions of easel painting, formal composition, narrative structure, and individual inspiration. His formative years were bracketed by studies at the Académie Julien in Paris in 1904–05 and participation in the artistic circle known as the Puteaux Group, which gathered at the home of his older brothers and fellow artists, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, after 1910. During this period, Duchamp moved rapidly through a succession of Modernist styles before renouncing painting altogether in 1913 in favor of an art that privileged the intellectual over the optical.
As artist and anti-artist, Marcel Duchamp is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century painting. With the exception of the “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” however, his works were ignored by the public for the greater part of his life. Until 1960 only such avant-garde groups as the Surrealists claimed that he was important, while to “official” art circles and sophisticated critics he appeared to be merely an eccentric and something of a failure. He was more than 70 years old when he emerged in the United States as the secret master whose entirely new attitude toward art and society, far from being negative or nihilistic, had led the way to Pop art, Op art, and many of the other movements embraced by younger artists everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts but he also changed the mind of the artist.
Oil on canvas; 182.8 x 152.5 cm.
1962 Born in Shantou, China
1985 BFA Education, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, China
1997 BFA Painting, University of Tasmania, Australia
1985–1990 Assistant Lecturer, Shantou University, Guangdong, China
2003 Co-Curator, Out of China, Long Gallery and Salamanca Arts Centre, Australia
Co-Curator, Tasmanian Vision, Shantou University Gallery, China
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955.
In 1911 Duchamp, the great iconoclast of 20th-century art, was still adhering to the conventions of easel painting, formal composition, narrative structure, and individual inspiration. His formative years were bracketed by studies at the Académie Julien in Paris in 1904–05 and participation in the artistic circle known as the Puteaux Group, which gathered at the home of his older brothers and fellow artists, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, after 1910. During this period, Duchamp moved rapidly through a succession of Modernist styles before renouncing painting altogether in 1913 in favor of an art that privileged the intellectual over the optical.
As artist and anti-artist, Marcel Duchamp is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century painting. With the exception of the “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” however, his works were ignored by the public for the greater part of his life. Until 1960 only such avant-garde groups as the Surrealists claimed that he was important, while to “official” art circles and sophisticated critics he appeared to be merely an eccentric and something of a failure. He was more than 70 years old when he emerged in the United States as the secret master whose entirely new attitude toward art and society, far from being negative or nihilistic, had led the way to Pop art, Op art, and many of the other movements embraced by younger artists everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts but he also changed the mind of the artist.
#25, 1951
Oil on canvas, 37 x 46 inches
Signed lower left: C. Park
Signed and inscribed on verso:
C. Park / #25, 1951
Photograph courtesy Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York.
Kazimir Malevich was born near Kiev in the Russian Empire. His parents were ethnic Poles. It remains a mystery of 20th century art, how, while leading a comfortable career, during which he just followed all the latest trends in art, in 1915 Malevich suddenly came up with the idea of Suprematism. The fact that Malevich throughout all his life was signing and re-signing his works using earlier dates makes this u-turn in his artistic career even more ambiguous.
In 1915 he published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. In 1915-1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916-1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk and A. Ekster. Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square (1915) and White on White (1918).
Unforcasted Wind (1997)
Oil on canvas
43 by 56 in.
Courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC
Copyright Artist Natalie Edgar
Oil, opaque watercolor and pastel on paperboard; 119.4 x 175.3 cm.
Adja Yunkers (1900–1983) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. He was born in Riga, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire in 1900. He studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris, and London. He lived in Paris for 14 years, and then moved to Stockholm in 1939. In Stockholm, he published and edited the arts magazines ARS magazine and Creation magazine. In 1947 he moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1950s he primarily worked in color woodcuts, introducing brushwork into the genre. In 1960, he began producing lithographs. He produced two important series of lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles―Salt (five lithographs) and Skies of Venice (ten lithographs). Yunkers died in New York City in 1983.
Adja Yunkers (1900–1983) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. He was born in Riga, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire in 1900. He studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris, and London. He lived in Paris for 14 years, and then moved to Stockholm in 1939. In Stockholm, he published and edited the arts magazines ARS magazine and Creation magazine. In 1947 he moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1950s he primarily worked in color woodcuts, introducing brushwork into the genre. In 1960, he began producing lithographs. He produced two important series of lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles―Salt (five lithographs) and Skies of Venice (ten lithographs). Yunkers died in New York City in 1983.
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 canvas; 80.6 x 100.0 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.
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.
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.
by San Francisco Bay Area artist Arnold Chao of arnisto.com
48" x 60"
oil on canvas
oil painting next to one of my art collectors, James Berry, in his San Francisco loft.
Untitled
(Blue, Yellow, and Green)
mid-1950s
Gouache on paper
17 3/4 x 23 1/2 inches
Photograph courtesy Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York.
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."
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.
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)