#brantfoundation

[vortexstreet]

Nate Lowman, Smiley Swiss Cheese, 2012, Oil and alkyd on canvas, 92 x 77 x 1 inches

[thebrantfoundation]

IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS

David Altmejd’s “The Island”, 2011

David Altmejd is a sculptor who is fascinated with the extraordinary potential of the object, and convinced that the act of making can generate meaning. Altmejd fashions intricate sculptural environments that call to mind miniature stage sets, museum dioramas, architectural models, and reliquaries.

There is no planned narrative to his work, this is something that is cultivated during the process of creating and changes over time during the art’s existence. David Altmejd studied biology before asserting himself as an artist and his biology background is a core to his work whether it’s the overall creatures and figures he creates or the cumulated systems you find running through his sculptures. Everything he makes has a certain energy running throughout.

In 2000, Altmejd began to sculpt isolated heads and other body parts of werewolves or bodies that have elements that resemble the werewolf. Indebted less to B movies than to nineteenth-century gothic tales like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), these works extend his interest in sculptural energy, referencing the entropy implicit in the mythical transformation from human to beast. Furthermore, the werewolf symbolizes a host of classic oppositions—human and animal, good and evil, life and death, beauty and abjection—all of which the artist embraces but refuses to resolve.

While Altmejd’s oeuvre examines the dark underbelly of the human imagination, beyond the haunting gore and monstrosity lies profound hopefulness. Out of death and decomposition, signified by the werewolf’s ubiquitous presence, emanate life and regeneration. “I see my installations as organisms,” the artist has said. “I start making something but at a certain point it starts making choices by itself.”

[habituallychic]

The Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the @thebrantfoundation is harder to get I to than Harvard but well worth the wait. #jeanmichelbasquiat #art #nyc #brantfoundation (at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center) https://www.instagram.com/habituallychic/p/BwpGAD4HQF3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=bujz1zfxhnj6

[quintessenceblog]

Everything about the Basquiat show at @thebrantfoundation is monumental - art, architecture and setting. Brilliant not to be missed exhibit. #art #basquiat #brantfoundation #nycatitsbest (at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv38htrnZlr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=859r66q16893

[thebrantfoundation]

Jason Rhoades’s Three-Wheel Waggon-Wheel Chandelier, 2004 on view at The Brant Foundation until September 2020

[thebrantfoundation]

Urs Fischer explores the genres of classical art history at the intersection with everyday life, as seen here with these cast aluminum bed sculptures. Beds are connected to sleeping, sex, and sickness and therefore occupy a significant corner of our lives. As a household object, this piece of furniture is uniquely loaded with symbols of dreaming, devotion, death, and despair, making it a popular subject for many artists over the years.

Fischer’s works, Untitled (2011) and Kratz (2013) signal an alternate surrealist world, something one would only see in a dream. Untitled appears to buckle under the pressure of some invisible force and is the result of multiple, intricate casting processes. The gradient color painted on the sculpture was taken from a landscape photograph and every edition (three in total) has its own unique color scheme. The other bed sculpture, Kratz (2013), is disguised in a layer of mimetic paint and topped off with a pile of real concrete that has been poured on top. Fischer creates the illusion that the bed is both soft and collapsing, thus playing with the viewer’s perception of texture, material, surface, and medium.

[artsology]

Very glad to have been able to get to @thebrantfoundation in Greenwich to see the @david_salle show on its last day. A great opportunity to see work spanning several decades all in one gorgeous location. #davidsalle #paintings #brantfoundation #greenwichct #retrospective (at Brant Foundation) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3I9rilWBr/?utm_medium=tumblr

[artsology]

Installation view of a Julian Schnabel exhibition at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, CT, back in 2014. Love the paintings, of course, but also love the reflections on the polished concrete floors! #julianschnabel #schnabel #paintings #brantfoundation #platepaintings #reflection #concretefloors #greenwich #contemporaryart (at Greenwich, Connecticut) https://www.instagram.com/p/CZcKTA-lVTS/?utm_medium=tumblr