Month: June 2020

François Morellet was a French Conceptual sculptor, painter, and light artist, known for his geometric abstract art. Morellet’s earliest work were figurative paintings, but he quickly turned to abstraction, painting a series of lines that crisscrossed to form geometric shapes. He began to work in sculpture using neon tubes and continued to experiment with Minimalism and geometry in art.  In 1963, along with artists Julio Le Parc and Francisco Sobrino, co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel to research new modes of artistic expression.

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Ian Hamilton Finlay was a Scottish artist and writer. Trained at Glasgow School of Art, following the war, he spent a period working as a shepherd and started to write poems. With time, he began to compose poetry and inscribe them into stone; the resulting sculptures are often incorporated into the natural environment. Many of them are situated within Little Sparta, his master-work, a five-acre garden he developed with his wife, near the Pentland Hills outside of Edinburgh. Gardening and art happily cohabit here, and the expanse of land is full of his sculptural work. In 2004, Little Sparta was voted most important Scottish work of art, by a panel of artists and arts professionals, ahead of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art and Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister.

Finlay was prolific, endlessly creative and collaborative. Printmaking was a large part of his artistic practice, often made in collaboration with other artists, writers and technicians and involving both text and visual elements. Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985.

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Andy Goldsworthy creates outdoor sculpture using an endless array of natural materials, from snow and ice to leaves, grass, stones, clay, petals, and twigs. While influenced by the Land Art of Robert Smithson, Richard Long, and Walter de Maria, Goldsworthy’s ephemeral yet exquisitely crafted works have a geometric elegance that harkens back to the Modernist sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, whom he has also cited as an inspiration. Whether arabesques of ice, beehive stone domes, or delicate leaf patterns on water, his sculptures grow, stray, and decay according to natural cycles, their existence preserved only through vivid photographs and drawings.

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Bernard Cohen is mainly known as an abstract painter. Born in London, Cohen studied at South West Essex Technical College, and, later, at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Bernard Cohen formed part of the DANAD Design collective, set up in 1958, alongside fellow artists Barry Daniels, Tom Adams, Peter Blake, Robyn Denny and Edward Wright, and the architects Colin Huntley and Peter Adams. Bernard Cohen’s abstract canvases featured on the international stage, touring British Council art exhibitions as well as participating at the 1966 Venice Biennale.

Beginning in the early 1960s, he produced paintings that combined several different stylistic influences, primarily Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-1970s Cohen’s works became more colorful and precise in detail, featuring densely layered patterns and motifs.

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Luke Diiorio graduated from Lehigh University in 2006 with a degree in philosophy and has been painting recreationally for 15 years. It wasn’t until 2013, however, that he emerged from the Royal College of Art in London with an MA and adopted his own contemporary form of minimalism.

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Philip Sutton was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1928 but grew up in Leyton, east London. After leaving school at the age of 14, he worked in a drawing office before carrying out three years’ National Service, during which he was involved in the Berlin Airlift.

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Alan Davie was one of Britain’s most internationally acclaimed artists in the 1950s and 60’s and is arguably Scotland’s most important artist of the twentieth century. He was the first British painter to realise and recapitulate the vitality and significance of American Abstract Expressionism.

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Kika Karadi was born in 1975 in Budapest, Hungary and moved to the United States at age 11. She attended Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and graduated with a B.F.A. in 1997.

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Christina Burch’s paintings are inspired by a variety of art and cultural contexts, including her extensive travels in Italy, Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine education at the Swedish Institute in New York, Japanese and Tantric painting, and passion for Contemporary Art. Characterized by vivid color, stylized ornament, clean surfaces, lyrical imagery, and a poetic, sensuous and magical quality, Burch has gained an important global clientele for her commissioned work. The Eastern view of energy and embodiment has been very influential in her recent works which contemplate the sensual, poetic dimension of figuration in painting.

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A member of the Brooklyn-based organization The Still House Group, Dylan Lynch constructs sculptures from everyday found objects. Mostly store-bought, Lynch’s materials are selected intuitively, for what he describes as their immediate attraction; they range from ceiling tiles and cinderblocks to shopping carts and sports equipment. He reveals his hand in the impossibly delicate and precarious constructions of his pieces—like a baseball balancing in the crux of a crowbar, a folding chair balanced on just two of its feet, or a leaning tower of drop ceiling tiles appearing constantly of the verge of toppling over.

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Kim Bo Min is a Korean Asian Modern & Contemporary painter who was born in 1979.

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Laura Migotto lives and works in Rome where she graduated from the Artistic Lyceum and Academy of Fine Arts. She began her artistic career as a set and costume designer for theater and television. In 1982 she created an artistic laboratory producing graphics, painting and sculpture drawing upon her work in illustration and advertising. She founded TANGRAM, her current studio in 1984. Here she specializes, in traditional expressive techniques (oils on canvas and wood, acrylics, cement, metals, recycled wood, terracotta and enamels), but also includes information and digital technology that she uses for the creation and manipulation of images both painted and photographic. In each of her works she tries to enclose a made history from an expression and a gesture, an object or a symbol, a phrase or a combination of numbers. All of these elements, or the use of only one of them is crafted to engage the observer, to attract his interest, to transmit magnetism and to stimulate the human imagination, orienting the viewer to interpret what he or she observes. Her work is aimed at bringing out significant aspects of the depths of each of us, the vibrations, the thoughts both explict and hidden, the possible point of union between magic and reality. What is hidden and yet contained in a look or a gesture.The work tries to represent beyond what is seen by opening a window on the limits of our limits, on the dream, on mysterious symbols. Her works of painting and sculpture are in various public and private institutions and are in numerous private collections both in Italy and abroad.

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Ryan Conrad Sawyer Born 1983, Smithfield, VA Lives and works in between Virginia and Brooklyn

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Leif Ritchey is an American contemporary artist whose works combine art, music, and fashion. He is a colorist and often creates his work with an impasto application of white paint for both texture and dimension. He is known for his use of pale, pastel colors, manipulated pours and textures. He is the co-founder of Leif and Tooya Clothing as well as a member of the experimental surf band, Shades.

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Should categorization be a desirable goal, then Matt Sheridan Smith is about as difficult to file as the work is astringently intelligent: the press texts for his exhibitions tend to read like obscure treatises on gardening, history or viticulture. Perhaps occupying a post-Duchampian world of conceptual practice, and a proven, published master of the nearly lost art of interactive fiction (IF), where there textual input and the decisions of a reader determine the flow and/or outcome of a narrative, Sheridan Smith’s art is redolent with visual and literary puns, dark and clever twists and turns. In the broad scheme, his works articulates concerns of loss, language and identity, and attempts to preempt the necessity, or undermine the purpose of memory.

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Jonas Lund (born 1984, Linköping, Sweden) creates paintings, sculpture, photography, websites and performances that incorporate data from his studies of art world trends and behavior. He earned an MA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2013) and a BFA at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2009). He had a solo exhibition at Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013); and has had work included in numerous group exhibitions including at Eyebeam, New York; New Museum, New York, Xpo Gallery, Paris; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and De Hallen, Haarlem. His work has been written about on Rhizome, Huffington Post, Furtherfield and Wired.

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To describe Travess Smalley’s work, one could employ a number of terms—painting, photography, sculpture, collage, digital, physical, virtual—without fully capturing what the artist achieves. In his own words, his practice aims at creating an experience “where the viewer’s visual vocabulary just draws a blank and they can no longer distinguish the digital from the real.” For his “Vector Weaves” series, Smalley employs a hybrid digital/analog method that he has called creating “Feedback Loops.” First printing vector-based patterns onto paper with different degrees of transparency, the artist then layers the prints and scans them into one image. The resulting abstract, colorful collages are enlarged and printed on vinyl, then stretched over aluminum frames. By using Photoshop as an extension of his material artmaking, Smalley is able to archive the different processes that he applies to individual images, enabling them to be used again and creating a rich platform for quotation and alteration of his past works.

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Mike Perry’s photographs examine the interactions of landscapes, nature and industrial society. Over the last 20 years his practice has focused on Britain’s National Parks and increasingly the immediate surroundings of Pembrokeshire where he lives and works, questioning the romantic mythology of national parks as areas of wilderness and natural beauty.

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Tracey Moffatt AO is an Australian artist who primarily uses photography and video. In 2017 she represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition, “My Horizon”.

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Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

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Francis Cape has presented his work internationally in solo shows and group exhibitions. For his project “The Other End of the Line”, at the High Line, New York (2010), Cape sited a vintage 1972 mobile home under the High Line on Gansevoort Plaza in which he invited Ian Berry, curator of the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, to house a group exhibition. A graduate with an MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London (1991), Cape is the recipient of a 2001 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a Pollock Krasner Grant (2010), among others.

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Michaela Zimmer is a Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1964. Their work was featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Fold Gallery.

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Harold Cohen was born in London in 1928. He studied at Slade School of Fine Art where he also taught for several years after completing his degree. During the 1960s he exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1966), Documenta 3 (1964), the Paris Biennale, the Carnegie International and many other international shows; in 1965 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London organized an exhibition dedicated to him. He exhibited regularly at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London and the Alan Stone Gallery in New York.

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Louis Eisner’s paintings vary in imagery and subject—and sometimes lack a subject entirely. In one of his best-known series, “Void Paintings” (2011), Eisner painted large-scale ambient backgrounds with their sitters missing—creating portraits of, essentially, nothing. Eisner’s other works are more graphic and feature recognizable images, like popular cartoon characters or vividly colored children’s slides. Leviathan (2013), one of Eisner’s rare sculptural works, features cut outs from MAD Magazine strung from a mobile, ultimately meant to parallel Thomas Hobbes’s theory of social organization. Eisner is also an active member of the artist-led organization, The Still House Group.

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The Boyle Family, a collaborative group of artists, is known for their “Earth studies”—site-specific black-and-white 3-D casts of the earth. The communal group, started by husband and wife team Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, later came to include the couple’s children and even their friends and neighbors, who assisted in the artistic process. Boyle came from a poetry background, while Hills studied art and architecture. The two sought to objectively present reality in their work by decontextualizing randomly selected subjects. “We want to see without motive and without reminiscence this cliff, this street, this field, this rock, this earth,” they’ve said. In addition to exploring natural elements, animals, minerals, and society, the Boyle Family has collaborated with many musicians, artists, and dancers, including Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine.

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Jill Moser’s strongly gestural paintings and prints are calculated explosions of calligraphic lines and color. Her oeuvre is largely an exploration of the language of abstraction. She pairs wide and vigorous brushstrokes with fine line work: looping curves, areas of color saturation, and spaces of smoky evanescence. Like Philip Guston, Moser’s broader practice centers on a dialogue between painting and printmaking. “To work on a print is to strip down the constructive parts of an image, slowing down and revealing the performative aspects of its making,” she says. “I’m intrigued by how the process records both the structure and the event and makes the process become visible.” The print allows Moser to introduce a mechanical process that mediates between her hand and the image thereby allowing her to slow down and re-encounter her own gestures.

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Albert Irvin RA OBE RWA (Hon) was one of Britain’s most important post-war artists and is best known for his large-scale abstract colourist paintings. He was born in London on the 21st August 1922 and died on the 26 March 2015. At the age of 18 he was he was evacuated from London during World War II, to study at the Northampton School of Art between 1940 and 1941, before being conscripted into the Royal Air Force as a navigator. When the war was over, he resumed his course at Goldsmiths College from 1946 to 1950, where he would later go on to teach between 1962 and 1983.

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