art of now

Collection of artworks Class blog Fall 2013

[sarahbushra]

MATTHEW BARNEY

"Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and was raised in Boise, Idaho. He attended Yale University, receiving his BA in 1989, then moved to New York City, where he lives today. From his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that includes feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing. In his first solo exhibitions, Barney presented elaborate sculptural installations that included videos of himself interacting with various constructed objects and performing physical feats such as climbing across the gallery ceiling suspended from titanium ice screws. In 1992, Barney introduced fantastical creatures into his work, a gesture that presaged the vocabulary of his subsequent narrative films. In 1994, Barney began work on his epic Cremaster cycle, a five-part film project accompanied by related sculptures, photographs, and drawings. He completed the cycle in 2002. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum of artwork from the entire project, premiered at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in June 2002 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in October 2002 before its presentation in New York."

Source:

http://www.cremaster.net/bio.htm

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SHERRIE LEVINE

"Throughout her forty-year career, Sherrie Levine (American, born 1947) has investigated the question of originality in art. Part of the so-called “Pictures Generation,” which took its name from the groundbreaking 1977 exhibition at New York City’s Artists Space, Levine challenged the public’s understanding of authorship and ownership. She continues to encourage a fresh awareness of Modernism and its icons through her post-minimalist conceptual art practice.

The works in the exhibition include two recently donated examples of Levine’s earlier appropriations and three works from 2011/12. The bronze sculpture Untitled (Hat) recreates the signature fedora of Joseph Beuys, the influential German post-World War II artist and teacher, through luxurious material to critique the marketplace that fetishizes and monetizes artists. Also on view are two works in serial formats, includingMonochromes after Monet: 1 -16, a magisterial suite of paintings that incorporates present-day technology. Beginning with a reproduction of a famous waterlilies painting by Claude Monet, Levine used a digital scanning program to determine the average occurrence and density of colors across the surface. The 16 panels identify the dominant color of sections of the original painting when viewed from left to right. Levine’s work focuses the viewer on the relationships between the object, its reproduction, and our knowledge or experience of it to create an entirely new artwork"

Source:

https://www.portlandartmuseum.org/sherrielevine

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ANISH KAPOOR

"Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, he manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Forms turn themselves inside out, womb-like, and materials are not painted but impregnated with colour, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface, inviting the viewer to the inner reaches of the imagination. Kapoor’s geometric forms from the early 1980s, for example, rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures from the last ten years – kinetic and self-generating – ravage their own surfaces and explode the quiet of the gallery environment. There are resonances with mythologies of the ancient world – Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman – and with modern times, where 20th century events loom large.

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India in 1954 and lives and works in London. He studied at Hornsey College of Art (1973–77) followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London (1977–78). Recent major solo exhibitions include Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2013); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012); Le Grand Palais, Paris (2011); Mehboob Studios, Mumbai and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2010); Royal Academy of Arts (2009) and the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2002). He represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila. He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has honorary fellowships from the London Institute and Leeds University (1997), the University of Wolverhampton (1999) and the Royal Institute of British Architecture (2001). He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts."

Source:

http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/anish-kapoor

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Thomas Ruff

"Thomas Ruff’s photography suggests the possibilities of his chosen medium, as he might use digital manipulation for one subject and antiquated darkroom techniques for another. Ruff works in series, creating defined bodies of work whose subjects include empty domestic interiors, appropriated interplanetary images captured by NASA, abstractions of modernist architecture, three-dimensional computer-generated Pop imagery, and obscured pornography. Ruff’s portraiture series of the early 1980s (his first to receive critical acclaim) featured groupings of large three-quarter portraits like so many passport photos; their enlarged scale offered a startling level of legibility. Though these, like many of his photographic series, seem to beg a sociocultural interpretation, perhaps the most constant feature in Ruff’s career is his disavowal of such a reading. Instead Ruff focuses on aesthetics and process, building an eclectic oeuvre not defined by genre, method, or theme, but rather by stark imagery, relative conceptual seriality of subject, and the clever subversion of the printed image.

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, Zell am Harmersbach, West Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf. His first major retrospective was organized by the Kunstalle Baden-Baden and traveled to nine museums between 2001 and 2004, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and Tate Liverpool. He has had solo exhibitions at the Sprengel Museum Hannover (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007); Kunsthalle Budapest (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2009); Museum für Neue Kunst, Germany (2009); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2009); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2011); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011). Ruff’s photography was featured at the Venice Biennale in 1995."

Source:

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/thomas-ruff

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AHMED MATER

"Ahmed Mater (born 1979 in Saudi Arabia, lives and works in Abha, Saudi Arabia)

Born into a traditional Aseeri family, Ahmed grew up in a farm, south of the Kingdom, far from the urban centers that dominate modern Saudi Arabia. When he was 18, he became a founding member of Al-Miftaha Arts Village in Abha, while simultaneously studying medicine. Ahmed co-founded the groundbreaking Edge of Arabia in 2008, and since then his work has drawn international attention, being collected by the likes of the British Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His interdisciplinary art, encompassing photography, calligraphy, painting, installation, performance and video, explores the narratives and aesthetics of Islamic culture in an era of rampant globalization, consumerism and transformation. His art is informed by his daily life as a medical doctor in Abha as well as by his traditional upbringing in Saudi Arabia. 

His recent work delves into unofficial histories of Saudi sociopolitical life. It is concerned with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions, and the ways in which video and photography can document physical and psychological violence, that accompanies the accelerated transformation of a historically and traditionally rich place."

Source:

http://ahmedmater.com/about/short-biography/

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ANDREAS GURSKY

"German photographer. Gursky’s work is characterized by the tension between the clarity and formal nature of his photographs and the ambiguous intent and meaning they present, occasioned by their insertion into a ‘high-art’ environment. It is comparable to that of contemporaries such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, all of whom were influenced by the documentary approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher. During the 1980s and 1990s Gursky’s work took on an increasingly global range of subjects, and he presented his images on an ever larger scale. Through all his work runs a sense of impersonality, a depiction of the structures and patterns of collective existence, often represented by the unitary behaviour of large crowds. His images of the stock exchanges of North America and East Asia are exemplary in the way that he uses crowds to create a type of picture comparable in formal terms to the ‘all-over’ compositions of the Abstract Expressionist painters. In the early 1990s Gursky used this format to represent grand urban landscape vistas in the Far East, juxtaposing different urban zones and suggesting an interplay between the zones of leisure and commerce. This theme was also taken up in his photographs depicting Prada shop displays, for instance in o.T.V. (186×443 mm, 1996; see 1999 exh. cat., p. 20), in which assorted training shoes are lined up in an austere Minimalist display. Gursky’s distance from Cartier-Bresson’s dictum of the ‘decisive moment’ and his concomitant rejection of the truth of the candid image is underlined by his use of digital manipulation. Bundestag (284×207 cm, colour print, 1998; see 1999 exh. cat., p. 59), a highly complicated view into the newly built German government building, relies to a high degree on digital manipulation for its dazzling effect. Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf."

Source: 

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=7806

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YINKA SHONIBARE

"Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) was born in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art first at Byam Shaw College of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA, graduating as part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He currently lives and works in the East End of London.

Over the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Shonibare’s work explores these issues, alongside those of race and class, through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently, film and performance. Using this wide range of media, Shonibare examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mixing Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions."

Source: 

http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com/biography/

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"Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970’s. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.  Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, among others."

source:

http://garyhill.com/left/vita/biography

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Robert Adams

"Robert Adams (b. 1937) has been photographing the American landscape for almost 50 years. His photographs emphasize the redemptive beauty of nature in the face of humans' widespread and unremitting use of the land. In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Adams's work, and in 1997 his photographs were included in Documenta X. Adams was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1994 and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2009."

source:

http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/artists/robert-adams/

[sarahbushra]

Untitled Film Stills

"The American feminist artist Cindy Sherman (1954) is famous for the Untitled Film Stills series (1977-1980) that consist of black-and-white photographs of the artist posing in different stereotypical female roles. Although she poses for her photographs, Sherman’s pictures are not self-portraits in a traditional sense.

Modeling in several roles, she reveals gender as an unstable and constructed position, which suggests that there is no innate biological female identity. On the contrary, women adopt several roles and identities depending on their circumstances. Therefore, the roles in the Untitled Film Stills series vary from an immature schoolgirl to an attractive seducer and from a glamour diva to a caring housewife. Importantly, her work encourages self-reflection in the spectator. As Sherman argues, “I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me.”"

  source:

http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/sherman.html

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Cindy Sherman

"Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite."

source:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1170

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"Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He published his first poem in 1921. He attended Columbia University, but left after one year to travel. His poetry was later promoted by Vachel Lindsay, and Hughes published his first book in 1926. He went on to write countless works of poetry, prose and plays, as well as a popular column for the Chicago Defender. He died on May 22, 1967."

source:

http://www.biography.com/people/langston-hughes-9346313

Genius Child

This is a song for the genius child.  Sing it softly, for the song is wild.  Sing it softly as ever you can -  Lest the song get out of hand.  Nobody loves a genius child. Can you love an eagle,  Tame or wild?  Can you love an eagle,  Wild or tame?  Can you love a monster  Of frightening name?  Nobody loves a genius child. Kill him - and let his soul run wild. 

Langston Hughes

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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

  A piece of Horacio Cordero with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lenox Gallery, 1984, New York

  "As an exhibiting painter, Basquiat was informed by the same process of distillation in both his work’s content and its stylistic strategy. His paintings proclaimed the existence of a more basic truth locked within a given event or thought. As his career unfolded, the young artist applied the same intense scrutiny previously reserved for the world around him to the emotional and spiritual aspects of his own being.

Beginning in the early part of 1981, when he was barely twenty years of age, Basquiat went through what would be a defining period in his career. Homing in on the possibilities implicit in drawing from his own life experiences as a means of addressing larger human concerns, he produced five key works over an eighteen-month period: Untitled (Head) (1981), Acque Pericolose (1981), Per Capita (1981), Notary (1983), and La Colomba (1983). These works not only offer insight into this period in Basquiat’s career but reveal the depth of his concern for portraying spiritual experience. Though much has been written about the artist’s almost mythic persona and his role in revitalizing the New York art world in the early 1980s, little discussion has focused on the works’ irrefutable power to transcend the individual and address broader issues and universal themes."

source:

http://www.basquiat.com/artist.htm#

  Jean-Michel Basquiat & Andy Warhol

  "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is a 2010 documentary film about Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is based on footage which director Tamra Davis took when they met in 1985. "

Wikipedia

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PIERRE BOUCHER

Photographer and graphic designer Pierre Boucher was born on 29 February 1908 in Paris.His father enrolled in 1922 at the School of applied arts industry. Alongside the course of drawing, printmaking and typography, he discovers enthusiastically contemporary painters, Vlaminck, Braque, Matisse, Picasso. He soon took the measure of modernity affecting various creative fields: architecture of Le Corbusier, the cinema of Eisenstein and Fritz Lang, he is interested in the German Bauhaus movement, photographs of Martin Munkacsi ( 1896-1963), the photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy.

Untitled, 1934

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SEVEN EASY PIECES - MARINA ABRAMOVIC

"I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. I slowly drink 1 liter of wine out of a crystal glass. I break the glass with my right hand.  I cut a five-pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade. I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain. I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks. The heat of a suspended heater pointed at my stomach causes the cut star to bleed. The rest of my body begins to freeze. I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the public interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath me."

source:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/08/100308fa_fact_thurman

"Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral."

source:

http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/abramovic/

[sarahbushra]

"MARINA ABRAMOVIC, BORN IN 1946 IN BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA, IS WITHOUT QUESTION ONE OF THE SEMINAL ARTISTS OF OUR TIME. SINCE THE BEGINNING OF HER CAREER IN YUGOSLAVIA DURING THE EARLY 1970S WHERE SHE ATTENDED THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS IN BELGRADE, ABRAMOVIC HAS PIONEERED THE USE OF PERFORMANCE AS A VISUAL ART FORM. THE BODY HAS ALWAYS BEEN BOTH HER SUBJECT AND MEDIUM. EXPLORING THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL LIMITS OF HER BEING, SHE HAS WITHSTOOD PAIN, EXHAUSTION, AND DANGER IN THE QUEST FOR EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION. ABRAMOVIC'S CONCERN IS WITH CREATING WORKS THAT RITUALIZE THE SIMPLE ACTIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE LIKE LYING, SITTING, DREAMING, AND THINKING; IN EFFECT THE MANIFESTATION OF A UNIQUE MENTAL STATE. AS A VITAL MEMBER OF THE GENERATION OF PIONEERING PERFORMANCE ARTISTS THAT INCLUDES BRUCE NAUMAN, VITO ACCONCI, AND CHRIS BURDEN, ABRAMOVIC CREATED SOME OF THE MOST HISTORIC EARLY PERFORMANCE PIECES AND IS THE ONLY ONE STILL MAKING IMPORTANT DURATIONAL WORKS. "

source:

http://marinafilm.com/about-marina-abramovic

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PROTOGRAFIAS - OSCAR MUNOZ

""Protografías", a retrospective of his work opened Friday at 19 at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, Malba and will run until February 25, 2013.

Conceived from the idea protografía (Photo backwards, before or after the time instant that the image is set), the exhibition is organized around different themes: the moving image, unstable image, the image as a trace and reflecting, and stands as container space where the image is created and undone."

source:

http://elcatalejo.com/oscar-munoz-en-el-malba.html