Sunday, January 30, 2011

Artist: Carl Warner - Foodscapes

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A peapod boat sails away from a land made of bread and potatoes, over a sea of salmon

A peapod boat sails away from a land made of bread and potatoes, over a sea of salmon

Picture: CARL WARNER

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Coralscape: an underwater scene with coral made of broccoli, tropical fish made of various fruits and vegetables, and a pineapple island

Picture: CARL WARNER

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Autumn Flakes: an autumnal landscape made enirely out of breakfast cereals

Autumn Flakes: an autumnal landscape made enirely out of breakfast cereals

Picture: CARL WARNER

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Bread and cheese: an edible landscape

Bread and cheese: an edible landscape

Picture: CARL WARNER

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Parmesan cliffs with sweet potato boulders and cress and savoy cabbage foliage

Parmesan cliffs with sweet potato boulders and cress and savoy cabbage foliage under a red cabbage sky

Picture: CARL WARNER

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The Broccoli Forest, a picture by London-based photographer Carl Warner. Look out for a gallery of his work on the Telegraph site later today

He spends a lot of time staring at vegetables in supermarkets, which can make him seem a little odd. However, finding the right shaped broccoli to use for a tree is an all-important task

Picture: CARL WARNER

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Fishscape: with rocks made of oyster shells and crab claws, boats made of marrows and asparagus, and a shining, slivery, slippery sea of fish


Fishscape: with rocks made of oyster shells and crab claws, boats made of marrows and asparagus, and a shining, slivery, slippery sea of fish

Picture: CARL WARNER

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A landscape prduced for Sacla

A landscape pr0duced for Sacla

Picture: CARL WARNER

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Garlicshire: a village for lovers of garlic and cabbage

Garlicshire: a village for lovers of garlic and cabbage

Picture: CARL WARNER

Marilyn Manson and David Lynch Open Exhibition at Kunsthalle in Vienna Earlier this Year





US musician and artist Marilyn Manson poses in front of his artwork, entitled Elizabeth Short as Snow White, You're sure you will be comfortable? (2006), during a press preview of the Marilyn Manson/David Lynch exhibition 'Genealogies Of Pain' at the Kunsthalle wien project space in Vienna, Austria. The exhibtion opens to the public from 30 June to 25 July. EPA/HANS KLAUS TECHT.

VIENNA.- It was in the nineties when Marilyn Manson (born in 1969) became well known as a shock rocker combining brutally hammering industrial sounds with thick theater make-up and controversial texts about serial killers and Satanism to a garish spectacle. His extreme personality, which incited the hatred of parent associations and representatives of the religious right, was soon pushing beyond the boundaries of pop music. Marilyn Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, played numerous minor parts in feature films like David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and became the unofficial mascot of the MTV serial “Celebrity Deathmatch.”

It was less well known that Marilyn Manson had been painting pictures for quite some time. “I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now,” Manson told the Rolling Stone magazine in 2005, “I no longer want to make art that other people – particularly record companies – are turning into a product. I just want to make art.” Marilyn Manson’s career as an artist started in 1999 when he produced conceptual five-minute watercolors which he sold to drug dealers. The 21 watercolors of this exhibition seem to be in accord with his image and the themes that made him a famous/notorious figure: horror, pain, blood, tears, mutilated bodies, wounded souls. Yet a frequently delicate pastel coloring and blurred contours subtly subvert his works’ “explicit” contents, exposing the dichotomy of emotion and toughness, aggression and sensibility as an unresolved ambivalence. Manson’s interest is focused on the analysis of both the extremities and the cavities of the human body, i.e. exactly those parts of it which are most delicate, such as mouth, fingertips, eyes, or genitals, whose injury arouses our primeval fears.

“Outside it was raining cats and barking dogs. / Like an egg-born offspring of collective humanity, in / sauntered Marilyn Manson,” writes David Lynch (born in 1946) in his introduction to Manson’s biography of 2000. The exhibition also comprises four of his short films from between 1967 and 1973 as a counterpart to and historical reference for Manson’s aesthetics.

As suggested by the works’ titles – Six Men Getting Sick (1967), The Grandmother (1970), The Amputee (1973) – Lynch is also concerned with the reflection of pain and its aestheticization, as well as with the deformation and vulnerability of the human body. The filmmaker’s probably most impressive early work is the short The Alphabet (1968), a mixture of real film and animation, which visualizes the creation of the alphabet as a painful and traumatic act of birth: we see the head of a woman made up in white who staggers through a room against a black background and spits out letters that assemble to forms and fleeting shapes of meaning. The Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” is translated into the concreteness of letters, the signifying and the signified turned into material for a fantastic filmic experimental arrangement. “Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.” (David Lynch)

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Artist: Humberto Castro

Golden Cages
1998, oil on canvas




Like Fish
1998, oil on canvas, private collection

Sea Horse
1998, oil on canvas, Collection: Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale, Florida



Humberto Castro was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1957. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro and Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana.

He works in painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics and installations. In his early years, he also delved into performance art, especially using it as a vehicle for social criticism in his country.

He is one of the most active members of the group widely recognized as the "Generation of the 80s"in Cuba, which generated changes in the aesthetic and conceptual art scene of the island.

In 1983 he founded the team Hexagon in which, alongside other artists, he mounted installations aimed at provoking public participation in the work. Between 1980 and 1984 he produces an extensive body of graphics, particularly innovating in the intaglio technique. He has designed sets for theater and film in Cuba.

In 1989 he emigrated to Paris, France, where he lived for ten years and became active in the Parisian intellectual scene, holding exhibitions and giving conferences across Europe. In 1999 he moved to the United States, where he lives and works.




Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Artist: Alexander Calder - Sprial Images


ABSTRACT COMPOSITION WITH SPIRAL

By Alexander Calder

Dimensions: 30x22 inches

Medium: Color lithograph on BFK Rives paper

Signed

Edition number: 36 of 90

Sale information

American Art and Contemporary Art

at Swann Auction Galleries

Nov. 18, 2010



Artist: Alexander Calder

Dimensions: 673 x 975mm (26 1/2 x 38 3/8in)

Medium: Lithograph in colours

Creation Date: circa 1965

Artwork is signed

Edition number: artist's proof

Saturday, January 22, 2011

I am a Fire Horse.






Horse (🐎 🐴) – / () (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Fire): Cheerful, popular, quick-witted, changeable, earthy, perceptive, talkative, agile—mentally and physically, magnetic, intelligent, astute, flexible, open-minded. Can be fickle, arrogant, childish, anxious, rude, gullible, stubborn.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Artist: Feng Zhengjie - Happy Couples

ROMANTIC TRIP NO.16

By Feng Zhengjie

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 109.5 by 109.5cm.; 42 3/4 by 42 3/4 in.

Medium: oil on canvas


ROMANTIC TRIP NO.10

By Feng Zhengjie

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 80x100 cm

Medium: Oil on canvas

Creation Date: 1997


ROMANTIC TRIP NO.13

By Feng Zhengjie

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 150 by 110cm. (alt: 59 by 43 3/8 in.)

Medium: oil on canvas


BRIDE AND BRIDEGROOM

By Feng Zhengjie

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 100×80cm

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Creation Date: 1997


http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/feng_zhengjie.htm

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Artist: Feng Zhengjie

LE PAPILLON AMOUREUX

By Feng Zhengjie

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 73 3/4 by 74 7/8 in. 187 by 190.3 cm.

Medium: oil on canvas



LE PAPILLON AMOUREUX NO.14

By Feng Zhengjie

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 129.5 by 110cm.; 51 by 43 3/8 in.

Medium: oil on canvas


Feng Zhengjie (born 1968, Sichuan Province, China) is an artist based in Beijing. Originally a high-school and college art teacher in Sichuan, he came to Beijing in 1995.

His best-known work is his Portrait of China series, very large Warhol-style oil portraits, in a red/turquoise palette, of Chinese fashion model faces with vacant diverging eyes (his signature style). Critics view his work as a critique of contemporary consumer society. His early paintings were inspired by 1930s Shanghai posters. His more recent work is based on the red and green of traditional Chinese New Year art, the colours made "more acid, a representation of the flashy, commercial nature of modern China".

Zhengjie has exhibited internationally in many shows including Dialogue With Asia at Vika Gallery in Oslo, the 2002 Korea Contemporary Art Festival in Seoul, China Femmes de Chine at Veronique Maxe Gallery in Paris, Primary Colors at the Singapore Art Museum in Singapore and New Perspectives in Chinese Painting at Marella Gallery in Milan.

He is represented by Goedhuis Contemporary in London, New York and Beijing, and by Willem Kerseboom Gallery in Amsterdam.


http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/feng_zhengjie.htm

Artist: Zhang Xiaogang - Bloodline works

BLOODLINE: BIG FAMILY NO.1

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 150 by 179 cm.; 59 by 70 1/2 in.

Medium: oil on canvas


BLOODLINE SERIES: BIG FAMILY

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 80 x 100 cm

Medium: Oil on canvas

Creation Date: 1998


BLOODLINE - BIG FAMILY (TWO PIECES)

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 64×80cm(each)

Medium: Print on Paper

Creation Date: 2006

Edition number: 33 from an edition of 99


BIG FAMILY

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 33½ x 39¼ in. (85.1 x 99.7 cm.)


[MY BIG FAMILY]

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: L. 22½ x 28 1/8 in. (571 x 715 mm.)


A BIG FAMILY SERIES

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 90 x 70 1/8in. (229 x 179cm.)



A BIG FAMILY SERIES NO. 16

By Zhang Xiaogang

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 78¾ x 98½ in. (200 x 250 cm.)


Zhang was born in the city of Kunming in China's Yunnan province in 1958. He came of age during the 1960s and 70s political upheavals known as the Cultural Revolution, which exerted a certain influence on his painting. In 1982, he graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province, then joined a young group of young avant-garde painters who came to prominence during the 1980s. Like Wang Guangyi, Xu Beihong and Wu Guanzhong, Zhang Xiaogang belongs to the best-selling contemporary Chinese artists and is a favorite of foreign collectors.

Western painters including Richter, Picasso and Dali are influences. Zhang said: "I read in a book once a few words by British experimental artist Eduardo Paolozzi, which were very influential for me: 'a person can very easily have the right idea, but choose the wrong means to express it. Or he can have the right means, but lack a clear idea.'" Zhang also cites his discovery of photos of his mother as a young, attractive woman as a key inspiration for the Bloodline series.

Artist: Yoshitomo Nara

TEAR DROPS

Artwork Description

Dimensions: 29.5 x 21 cm. (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in).

Medium: Graphite and coloured pencil on paper.

Creation Date: 2002



LEBEN SCHAUM (LIVE FOAM)

Dimensions: 4 x 8 5/8 in. (10.2 x 21.9 cm).

Medium: Graphite and colored pencil on paper envelope.

Creation Date: 2002


(I) ABANDONED PUPPY

Artwork Description

Dimensions: each: 12½ x 9½in. (32 x 24cm.)


(I) UNTITLED
Artwork Description
Dimensions: each: 28¾ x 20¼in. (73.2 x 51.9cm.)

Monday, January 17, 2011

American Circus Posters at the Cincinnati Art Museum

The Amazing American Circus Poster February 26, 2011 – July 10, 2011


Strobridge Lithographing Company
Living Pair of Full Grown Hippopotomi. 1882
Color Lithograph Poster
Gift of the Strobridge Lithographing Company, 1965.685:47
Organized by Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, Kristin Spangenberg, The Amazing American Circus Poster features 80 circus posters created between 1878 and 1939, along with materials related to circus advertising.

Cincinnati-based Strobridge Lithographing Company, which created all the posters in this exhibition, and became the leading printer for the major circuses of this time. The posters designed and printed by Strobridge were unrivaled for their quality, and contain a detailed portrait of the American circus in its “Golden Age,” when it flourished as a vital institution for cultural entertainment in this country.



This exhibition will travel to the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. The Amazing American Circus Poster has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life.


Click on centered images to enlarge

“The Amazing American Circus Poster has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Because democracy demands wisdom.”



“Any views findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”


http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/absolutenm/templates/ArtTempExhibitions.aspx?articleid=992&zoneid=66