Month: June 2021

Although he studied sculpture, drawing remained Longo’s favorite form of self-expression. However, the sculptural influence pervades his drawing technique, as Longo’s “portraits” have a distinctive chiseled line that seems to give the drawings a three-dimensional quality. Longo uses graphite like clay, molding it to create images like the writhing, dancing figures in his seminal Men in the Cities series. For that series, Longo photographed his friends lurching backward, collapsing forward or sprawled on invisible pavement. After enlarging the pictures through a projector, he and an artist assistant drew them in sizes ranging from three-quarter scale to larger than life-size. In the process, Longo often dramatized poses and always standardized attire into quite formal, black-and-white clothing. The idea for this work came, in 1975, from a still image in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The American Soldier. According to art critic William Wilson of the Los Angeles Times, the pictures recall nothing so much as the final scene in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. About four years passed before Longo turned the vision of a man shot in the back into a monumental series of drawings. He produced about 60 Men in the Cities between 1979 and 1982. One drawing from this series was used as the album cover to Glenn Branca’s album The Ascension. As a consequence, in his 30s, Longo was among the most widely publicized, exhibited and collected artists of the 1980s along with the likes of Cindy Sherman and David Salle. However, several critics have commented that Longo had lost his way as a visual artist by the mid-’80s.

Working on themes of power and authority, Longo produced a series of blackened American flags (“Black Flags” 1989–91) as well as oversized hand guns (Bodyhammers 1993–95). From 1995 to 1996 he worked on his Magellan project, 366 drawings (one per day) that formed an archive of the artist’s life and surrounding cultural images. “Magellan” was followed by 2002’s Freud Drawings, which reinterpreted Edmund Engelman’s famous documentary images of Sigmund Freud’s flat, moments before his flight from the Nazis. In 2002 and 2004 he presented Monsters, Bernini-esque renderings of massive breaking waves and The Sickness of Reason, baroque renderings of atomic bomb blasts. Monsters was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

To create works such as Barbara and Ralph, Longo projects photographs of his subjects onto paper and traces the figures in graphite, removing all details of the background. After he records the basic contours, his long-time illustrator, Diane Shea, works on the figure for about a week, filling in the details. Next, Longo goes back into the drawing, using graphite and charcoal to provide “all the cosmetic work”. Longo continues to work on the drawing, making numerous adjustments until it is completed about a week later.

In 2013, Longo’s artwork was featured in an article in the men’s magazine, Man of the World along with an article discussing his life and career.

In March 2013, The Lexander Magazine reviewed Longo’s 1982-83 diptych entitled Pressure, highlighting it as the “penultimate visual anthem of the era,” expanding upon Neal Benezra’s 1988 analysis of the work as having been “the most representative work of art of the 1980s.”

As well as authoring several books, he directed the video for Blur’s “Good Song” and also for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “Agnes, Queen of Sorrow”. In 2005 he designed a London Underground leaflet cover. Since 2005, he has contributed a cartoon for The Guardian‘s Weekend magazine every Saturday. Other projects have included the album Worried Noodles (Tom Lab, 2007) where musicians interpret his writings as lyrics, including collaborations by David Byrne, Hot Chip, and Franz Ferdinand.

Shrigley co-directed a short film with director Chris Shepherd called Who I Am And What I Want (2005), based on Shrigley’s book of the same title, with Kevin Eldon voicing its main character, Pete. Shrigley also produced a series of drawings and t-shirt designs for the 2006 Triptych festival, a Scottish music festival lasting for three to four days in three cities. He also designed twelve different covers for Deerhoof’s 2007 record, Friend Opportunity. In the same year he also designed the title sequence for the film Hallam Foe, as well as the drawings and the writing in Hallam’s on-screen diaries.

Shrigley’s mascot for Scottish football team Partick Thistle, “Kingsley” in George Square, Glasgow

In 2014, Jonathan Jones reviewed Shrigley’s work Brass Tooth, writing, “David Shrigley must have had a big, toothy grin when he created multiple editions of his sculpture Brass Tooth, which goes on sale for £1,200 a pop at the London art fair this week. It is a cast of a single tooth – including the roots – and is typical of Shrigley’s sly, subversive, humorous art in how it brings a modern art cliche crashing down to Earth”.

In 2015, he designed “Kingsley”, a mascot for Scottish football team Partick Thistle as part of a sponsorship deal. The mascot’s design was the object of some amusement, with Scottish BuzzFeed reporter Jamie Ross describing it as “based on every nightmare I had as a child.”

Shrigley also undertook a residency at Auckland’s Two Rooms in 2015, during which he painted for the first time since his graduation from The Glasgow School of Art in 1991. He said that the residency presented ‘an opportunity to explore a different medium and explore what you can do with “that” versus what you do with “this”.’

Shrigley’s sculpture Really Good was installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth plinth in September 2016 until March 2018. The bronze cast of a fist with an out-of-proportion thumbs-up was the winning commission for the Fourth Plinth Project, which has been inviting artists since 1999 to make a proposal for the empty plinth, originally intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV that was never made. “I made a drawing of an elongated thumb that said everything is good and I wrote some text that sounded like some sort of weird political satire: If we make this sculpture, we can make the world a better place through some kind of self–fulfilling prophecy.”^[

In 2019, he designed the yellow and red card of the AS Velasca.^[

Smith’s early work drew on packaging and advertising, which led to his being associated by some critics to the Pop Art movement. Smith stated that his work was “often physically related to hoardings or cinema screens which never present objects actual size; you could drown in a glass of beer, live in a semi-detached cigarette packet”. However, his concerns were largely formal. His works from this period, such as Panatella (1961) can be seen as abstract works whose scale, handling of paint and use of colour show the influence of American colour field painters such as Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, and he tried to integrate their expressive painterly concerns with an exploration of the experience of mass culture. As an attempt to make a connection between ‘high’ art and popular culture Smith’s work differs from the work of his British Pop contemporaries, who were more concerned with iconography. Smith stated that “My interest is not so much in the message as in the method”

In 1963 Smith progressed to an examination of the two-dimensional nature of painting. In Vista he added a shaped extension to the rectangular canvas, and in works such as Piano and Giftwrap progressed to extending the surface of the painting out into three-dimensional space. Despite the three-dimensional element of these works, Smith insisted on their identity as paintings: saying “Since I have always retained a wall, there is no question of a multifaceted sculptural object”  Smith never produced any free standing sculptures, preferring to challenge the conventions of painting by working in an area between painting and sculpture.

In 1972 he exhibited the first of what are called the “kite paintings”, in which rather than using a conventional stretcher the canvas is tensioned by cords and structures of aluminium tubing, which become an element in the composition of the works. This both reduced the strength of the edge of the canvas while at the same time drawing attention to its contour. Smith’s new found interest in the edge of a picture is shown by the concentration of incident there in works such as 3 square 2.

The concerns of these works also appear in his small scale work of the time, where the paper was cut and folded, and often include elements fastened to the work by paperclips or pieces of knotted string.

Dorazio, along with artists Mino Perilli and Guerrini, helped found L’Age d’Or in 1950. It was a bookstore/gallery space dedicated to abstract art. In 1952, he promoted the foundation Origin with Alberto Burri, Ettore Colla and others, and edited the magazine Arti Visive. As a representative of Italy, in 1953 he traveled for the first time to the United States to participate in the International Summer Seminar at Harvard University. That fall, he moved to New York City and stayed through 1954. In October 1953, Dorazio had his first solo exhibition at George Wittenborn’s One-Wall Gallery.

He published La Fantasia Dell-Arte Nella Vita Moderna” in 1955, a review of modern art in Italy. Regarding this book, reviewer Christopher Masters states that Dorazio advanced his belief, perhaps with a surfeit of optimism, that “abstract art could change the world… That just as science and technology were destroying the barriers between different cultures, so the new ‘universal style’ would lead to a ‘universal civilisation’.”

He was invited to teach at the Graduate School of Fine Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in 1959. He taught painting there for one semester each year from 1960 to 1969, splitting his time between the United States and Italy. In 1970 he returned to live and work full-time in Rome. In 1974 he moved his studio from Rome to Umbria, near Todi. Peter Iden, founding director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt from 1978-1987, acquired three works by Dorazio from 1981 to 1983 (Oracolo, 1959; Blue Hearttrap, 1961; Stridente, 1982-83) for the museum collection. These were part of the museum exhibitions in Frankfurt in 1985 and Milan in 1987. In the 1990s, the works were temporarily loaned to the European Central Bank.^[9] Dorazio continued to work and exhibit until 2004.

Described as an “outspoken, independent character” who was the “opposite of politically correct”, Dorazio’s use of materials and colors stayed constant over time. He is mostly known for paintings with thick bands of bright color and crosshatched grids. While abstract, his paintings do not neglect detail or complexity. His style is in line with what Clement Greenberg later described as “Post-painterly abstraction”.