I always think of the paintings as a prop in the sense of their own interior specificity in relation to an outward meaning or function, which, to me, is one of incongruence. The defined logic of the painting’s individuality bears little resemblance nor has much effect on the way in which the painting functions in the larger whole. I liked this because the painting becomes wholly specific but also random and so doesn’t bear the weight that an object usually would.
Richard Aldrich, 2007
This week suggestion; David Lynch’s cult tv show Twin Peaks as well as Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, the movie he directed the year after the series ended. The film can be seen as a prologue and epilogue of the tv show. Also, we invite all the fans to watch a lesser known series called Hotel Room. David Lynch co-produced it and he directed the first and last of the three episodes. Finally if you like Lynch like we do here, you can watch a very interesting documentary by Toby Keller, Pretty As Pictures, which give us a wonderful inside the life and mind of Mr. Lynch.
‘For most of us photography stands for the truth,’ Baldessari has said. ‘But a good artist can make a harder truth by manipulating forms or pushing paint around. It fascinates me how I can manipulate the truth so easily by the way I juxtapose opposites or crop the image or take it out of context. When two forces contend in a photograph, I may favor one side or the other – the rider or the horse, for example, the upright mummy in its coffin or the woman standing in awe next to it. »(in John Baldessari, 1990, Rizzoli, by Coosje van Bruggen).
His oeuvre create a dialogue in which painting and photography are both fully engaged and he is following the his own tradition of ‘fragmenting single motifs or areas of a canvas or picture to defy narrative logic and standard interpretation’ (Rainer Fuchs)
A primary tension between repression and expression runs throughout L.A.-based Sterling Ruby’s multifaceted practice, at least as a jumping-off point. If for Ruby repression results from dogma—specifically the rigid tenets of Modernist art—then his work in turn expresses a thoughtful, pointed attempt to expose and counter any whiff of either. Minimalism has been a particular target (a much-cited print by Ruby declares “Kill Minimalism/Long Live the Amorphous Law”), and he mobilizes an inclusive, brash and often confrontational esthetic in heralding his charge.
Keegan Mchargue fascination with the subconscious forces the viewer to engage with is work in a way that we have to confront Mchargue’s twisted subconscious itself. We, as viewers, need to work at rearranging all these associations, multiple forms, shapes and colors as well as a weird kind of ordered randomness. The result is a charming blend of everyday objects and almost recognizable silhouettes that all seem to symphonize in a strange world.
Louise Bourgeois is in my personal opinion the most important women artist to have ever lived. Although she is mostly known for her spider sculptures, notably the one just outside our National Gallery in Ottawa, her body of work is gigantic and very diverse, always touching and hauntingly beautiful.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she immigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s, she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger and more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work: her childhood. She has famously stated, “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lived in New York, where she passed away in May 2010.
Source; PBS Art21. Please visit the Art21 website to watch her talk about her work.
Michael Cina is an internationally recognized Creative Director who is currently leading a multi-disciplinary design studio, Cina Associates. Michael is known globally for originating YouWorkForThem, a graphic design boutique, and its’ sister company, WeWorkForThem, an award-winning design studio. His design portfolio includes many prominent Fortune 500 companies including Apple, American Express, ESPN, Pepsi, Coke, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Mazda, and Victoria’s Secret. Cina’s work is consistently featured in numerous publications and he has spoken at many global design conferences about his unique vision for design. He also does works that is more painterly and not intented to be commercial. Using graphic communication and visual narratives, his works explores different techniques and mediums exploring visuals possibilities that they have to offer.
»There is a role and function for beauty in our time. »
- Tadao Ando
Ida Ekblad is a norwegian artist working in a broad range of mediums such as painting, sculpture, poetry and music. She works mostly with our society’s waste that she collects in the different cities where she works, resulting in abstract compositions that are some kind of reminiscence early expressionism of the CoBrA movement. The strongest aspect of her work lies in the fact that she is using that visual language to make a comment on our contemporary culture.
