WOW – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Sidewalk FS II.304”

Sidewalk stock 2

ANDY WARHOL
Sidewalk FS II.304
1983
Screenprint
20 1/4 x 80 in.
Edition of 250

Pencil signed and numbered

About This Work:

Much has been said about Andy Warhol, his art and his decadent personality.
Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, he originally started as a successful commercial designer in New York, then redirected his career towards fine arts.

This step within the world of advertising had a great impact on his later view of art, as well as his interest in mass-produced pieces. Fascinated by consumerism and using his previous knowledge of the manipulative power of the media, Andy Warhol based his art on advertisements, so that “anybody could recognize it in a split second”. 

This would only be the beginning of what he will later be known for: Pop Art.

Warhol’s fascination for fame and celebrities shows up in this work, that he masterfully simply calls Sidewalk.
Sidewalk
was first published in a portfolio titled Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary, which contained eight works by eight artists, to raise funds for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California in 1983.

The image of this work is from a series of photographs taken by Andy Warhol himself.
In works made prior to around 1975, Warhol primarily used images from the media in his prints, drawing attention to the impact that the media has on contemporary cultural values. Many of his later works, like this one, were made from photographs taken by him, a privilege earned through his own fame.

Warhol’s use of his own photographs here adds a personal aspect to the work.

This image displays the handprints and signatures of Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Jack Nicholson and Shirley Temple, that are on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Walk of Fame was created to “maintain the glory” of a community whose name are synonymous with glamour and excitement all over the world.

Warhol’s Sidewalk shows a section of the forecourt outside what once was Grauman’s Chinese Theatre – now called Mann’s Chinese Theatre – in Hollywood, California. 
Mr Grauman is mentioned in the writing on the top right of the screenprint, which says “For Mr Grauman, All Happiness“.
Since the theatre’s opening in 1927, film stars have been invited to leave their signatures, footprints and handprints here as a marker of their celebrity.

Much of Warhol’s work was concerned with celebrity, and the everyday person’s obsession with celebrity. While he cultivated the appearance of the ultimate fan of the American Dream and its cultural heroes, his works also challenge the basis of those ideals. Indeed, it was Warhol who famously declared that everyone could have fifteen minutes of fame.

Warhol’s Sidewalk was created to capture one of the many ways in which celebrities are memorialized, while at the same time it perfectly captures the culture of Los Angeles. 
The world of Warhol’s art lays deep below the surface. He works from a place far back in his mind, away from the ordinary way of looking at things, although his subject matter is always ordinary and available. He depicts real, humble things, so that they seem almost surreal, visionary.
In fact, the genius of this work, Sidewalk, is that people are walking all over the very people they immortalize. Almost oxymoronic, in a way.

WOW – Work Of the Week – Frank Stella “Del Mar”

Del Mar 2 2

FRANK STELLA
Del Mar, from Race Track Series
1972
Screenprint
20 1/4 x 80 in.
Edition of 75

Pencil signed, dated and numbered

About This Work:

Frank Stella first emerged on the scene in the late 1950s, when his Minimalist Black Paintings heralded a new era in postwar art. In the years since then, he has worked consistently in series, pioneering new approaches to form, color, narrative, and abstraction with innovative paintings, prints, sculptures and architectural installations.

Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation at Princeton University. He still lives and works in New York, and he is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today.

In 1970, at the age of 34, Frank Stella became the youngest artist ever to receive a full-scale retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He received a second retrospective at the same institution in 1987 — an unprecedented occurrence in the museum’s history.

The story of Stella’s artistic development is the story of ever-increasing visual complexity. When he burst upon the art world at the end of 1959, it was with a series of large rectangular canvases painted entirely in a dull black enamel. The surface of each painting consisted of a simple geometric pattern — uniform chevrons, for example, or interlocking rectangles — that was formed by thin, slightly wavering lines of unpainted canvas. There was no color, no contrast of forms or materials, no illusionistic depth or drawing. As Stella put it in an often-quoted interview from 1964, in those paintings “what you see is what you see”.

Stella creates abstract artworks that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references.

He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist’s emotional world.

His controlled colors, flat surfaces and rigid forms are once again the main features of his Race Track Series.  This work, as well as his others from this period of Stella’s career, can be seen to have inaugurated the Minimalist movement in art. Stella’s attempt to pare down painting, to purge it of extraneous gesture, warmth, and emotion made his work appear almost as a species of anti-painting, an inversion of everything that painting stood for and expressed.

Del Mar is part of a set of three large-scale, oblong prints, from the Race Track Series. These screen prints are named after two horse-racing tracks in Los Angeles, titled “Del Mar” and “Los Alamitos”, and one in Mexico, titled “Agua Caliente”.

Printed on heavy rag paper, the centered, concentric tracks receive their visual immediacy and variety from lively color harmonies, saturated deposits of inks and contrasts of matte, glossy and standard ink surfaces.

With a career extended across more than half a century, Stella both holds an important place in the history of American art and maintains contemporary relevance as his work continues to influence younger generations of artists.

The art market has seen an increase in demand and in auction prices in the print work of Frank Stella over the last few years. Much of this is due to the nature and importance of his work conceptually as a response to the art movement before him.

His retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York earlier this year, and the fact that he is 80 years old, have also brought more attention to his print work as well.
The art world will never see another Frank Stella again.

WOW – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Ingrid Bergman, The Nun FS.II 314”

Ingrid Bergman Nun stock

ANDY WARHOL
Ingrid Bergman, The Nun FS.II 314
1983
Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board
38 x 38 in.
Artist’s Proof (A.P.) of 20

Pencil signed and numbered

About This Work:

Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. Neverthless, his screenprinted images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, movie stars and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop Art.

Pop Art marked an important new stage in the breakdown between high and low art forms. Warhol’s paintings from the early 1960s were important in pioneering these developments, but it is arguable that the diverse activities of his later years were just as influential in expanding the implications of Pop Art into other spaces, and further eroding the borders between the worlds of high art and popular culture.

Andy Warhol is now considered one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, who created some of the most recognizable images ever produced.

After the the success of the Campbell’s Soup Series in the early 1960s, indeed, Warhol began creating screenprints of movie star portraits including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman.
Andy Warhol’s stunning images of Academy Award winning actress Ingrid Bergman, were created by the artist at the request of a Swedish art gallery in the 1980’s, Galerie Borjeson, in Malmo, Sweden.

The Ingrid Bergman Series is made up of three types of screen prints. The source images used for these portrait pieces include a publicity photo (Herself), and movie stills from her role in Casablanca (With Hat) and from the movie The Bell of St. Mary’s (The Nun).

Of course, when we think of Ingrid Bergman, we think of her playing Ilsa, the long lost love interest of Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart. No one can ever forget Bergman standing on the runway, all teary eyed and wearing the famous hat, as Bogart makes her get on that plane.
This was her most famous and enduring role, and that is why Warhol portrayed here in the hat as one of the three pieces in the Ingrid Bergman Suite.

However, many people do not realize that the movie The Bell Of St. Mary’s was enormously popular, the highest-grossing movie of 1945 in the USA. In this movie, Ingrid Bergman is the leading female role and stars together with famous actor and singer Bing Crosby, who plays the unconventional Father Charles “Chuck” O’Malley, assigned to St. Mary’s parish. The parish includes a school building on the verge of being condemned; but the sisters of the parish feel that God will provide for them. Father O’Malley and the dedicated but stubborn Sister Superior, Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman), both wish to save the school, but they have different views and methods.

This portrait of Ingrid Bergman in her most severe role is made even more dramatic in this iconic print. The vibrant color palette is made dynamic through Warhol’s exciting element of abstraction, the yellow lines making her figure and makeup pop, with her hands clasped in prayer and only sketched with yellow lines.

Like the majority of his works, once again, this print is indicative of Warhol’s obsession with all things relating to fame, especially movie stars. For this reason, his artwork can also be considered as a sort of visual recording of the culture of his time.

WOW – Work Of the Week – Marilyn Minter “Prism”

Prism 2

MARILYN MINTER
Prism
2009
Chromogenic print
20 x 16 in.
Artist’s Proof (A.P.) of 18

Signed, titled, dated and numbered on verso

About This Work:

Marilyn Minter (born in 1948) is an American contemporary photographer/artist.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and raised in Florida, she moved to New York City in 1976, where she currently works and lives, after earning a master of fine arts degree at Syracuse University. 

Marilyn Minter has been a part of the New York art scene since the late 1970s. Her artistic career started with a series of now celebrated photographic studies of her drug-addicted mother while she was still a student in Florida.
At the end of the 1980s, she painted herself straight into fevered and often bitter controversy when she began using imagery taken from porn magazines and Pop-derived images that often had hidden sexual references. 
Her infamy was even more exacerbated in 1990 when she was the first artist to self-produce her own TV advertisement, titled 100 Food Porn, which ran during late-night mainstream television shows.

Starting from the 1990s, she started to gradually refine her style and imagery so that, while still suggesting some kind of sexual undercurrent, her photographs and paintings seem equally to breathe the atmosphere of high fashion and contemporary glamour.

For over three decades, Marilyn Minter has produced lush paintings, photographs, and videos that vividly manifest our culture’s complex and contradictory emotions around the feminine body and around the concept of beauty, by bringing into sharp, critical focus the power of desire.
Her photographs and works often include sexuality and erotic imagery. Minter does it by using conventional darkroom processes. She never crops or digitally manipulates her photographs, a feature that is becoming more and more rare.

Prism is a refined version of Minter’s early works, which despite still having pornographic undertones, exudes a sense of glamour and high-fashion.
This work focuses on a hyperrealistic close-up of seemingly glamorous red lips.
By using this imagery and aesthetic, we are confronted by our own preconceived notions of what exactly constitutes beauty. Minter wants to convey the concept of beauty through non-beautiful and confusing elements, through a dichotomy of imagery and sense.

Through this work, one can see how Marilyn Minter both celebrates and criticizes glamour. By depicting these sexy red lips, with shiny jewels and sparkling glitters, that reflect light, she is portraying the complexities of glamour. This work not only depicts glamour, but also what glamour “feels like”.

Marilyn Minter has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and group exhibitions all over the worlds. In April 2015 Marilyn Minter opened her first major retrospective in the Museum of Contemporary Art Houston. This exhibition contains works that Minter had developed from 1976 to 2013. Perfectly suited, the exhibit was titled Pretty/Dirty.

Ahol Sniffs Glue New Print Release “REDRUM”

 

GREGG SHIENBAUM FINE ART

is proud to present its second editioned work with Miami Artist

AHOL SNIFFS GLUE

REDRUM

Limited to only 50 pieces.

This new work titled “REDRUM” is in the style of Abstract Expressionism. Highly influenced by this movement, Ahol breaks away from his well known style of  the “classic pattern”. In this screenprint the viewer can see the brush strokes of raw emotion poured into the work.

This print is a very meaningful work to the artist.  It is his first screenprint on paper published with Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art, and it is a work that depicts his feelings about the state of our nation and the world.

Ahol’s Eyeballs represent the eyes of the working class.  Usually seen in his typical pattern, Ahol paints these eyes to let the everyday working class person know that he is with them.  Painted on walls, cars, canvas, and anywhere he can, Ahol throws up a shout out to the regular guy, just going through the daily grind, of just making it to survive.

REDRUM (Murder spelled backwards), depicts the sad state of the killings in our communities, here at home, and around the world.

Innocent victims being shot down for just trying to get by, and live their lives.  Whether it is everyday working people in our streets and communities, law enforcement, people at a night club, or a someone overseas. This new screenprint by Ahol depicts the chaos, the turbulence, the anger, and the sadness of what is going on in our neighborhoods.

Painted in fluorescent red ink, to symbolize the blood spilled, and running through our streets, this expressionistic style allows for more artistic freedom that the Ahol has been wanting to achieve. This style  not only portrays the tension, and whirlwind of emotions that effect the people and the community, but also gives us a sense of the artist’s pure inner feelings.  This new style has more of a free flowing quality, that shows the artist’s emotion, growth, depth, and dimension.

GREGG SHIENBAUM FINE ART IS PLEASED TO BE PART OF THIS
NEW WORK, AND CREATIVE PROCESS!!

The details of this new edition are below.

  • Ahol Sniffs Glue
  • REDRUM
  • 2016
  • Fluorescent red ink screenprint on French Construction Blacktop 80# Coverweight card stock
  • 25 x 19 in.
  • Edition of 50
  • Signed and numbered
  • $300 

 

Ahol Sniffs Glue signing the REDRUM screenprints.

Ahol Sniffs Glue in front of his work REDRUM

third second

Click HERE to see the video of Ahol signing the screenprints.

 

WOW – Work Of the Week – John Baldessari “Person On Horse And Person Falling From Horse (With Audience)”

Intersection Series (Person On Horse Person Falling From Horse with Audience) stock

JOHN BALDESSARI
Person On Horse And Person Falling From Horse (With Audience)
2002
Chromogenic print on archival paper
15 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.
Edition of 150

Signed, dated and numbered in ink

About This Work:

Known as the Godfather of Conceptual Art, John Baldessari has defied formalist categories by working in a variety of media — creating films, videotapes, prints, photographs, texts, drawings, and multiple combinations of these. In his use of media imagery, Baldessari is a pioneer “image appropriator”, and as such has had a profound impact on post-modern art production.

Born on June 17, 1931 in National City, CA, John Baldessari has been instrumental in the West Coast art scene. His artwork has influenced a generation of conceptual artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, David Salle and many other younger artists.

He may be best known as the artist that “Put dots over people’s faces”, but through his diverse practice that includes paintings, sculpture, and installations, the artist shaped the Conceptual Art landscape. By blending photography, painting, and text, Baldessari’s work examined the plastic nature of artistic media while offering commentary on our contemporary culture.

What John Baldessari does, is he fuses photography, montage, painting and text to create complex compositions that explore the several interpretations of cultural iconography. He sources his wide range imagery from the larger visual world, primarily finding inspiration in advertising and film.

This work, Person On Horse And Person Falling From Horse (With Audience), from the Intersection Series, is a perfect example of the manner in which Baldessari deconstructs found images of action and perception stereotypes of the mass media.

This series features contrasting collaged images enclosed in rectangles and juxtaposed, each one with a different theme and title. The superposition of several image sections results in a complete “cinematic” sequence: under the eyes of two applauding spectators a cowboy falls from his horse, while the Indians remains firmly in power.

In order to subvert common associations, John Baldessari brings one’s attention to minute details, absurd juxtapositions, and obscured or fragmented portions of such imagery. His artistic process focuses on the perception and interpretation of visual elements and text, while often employing irony to make playful assertions about how meanings and interpretations are formed. 

The Intersection Series work blends photographic materials such as these film stills, which Baldessari takes out of their original context, and rearranges their form.

We have also attached a link to a video Called the “History of John Baldessari”.

It is a 5 minute video narrated by muscian Tom Waits.

It is very entertaining, informative, and very funny!!! 

Please have a look and enjoy!  

Biscayne Boyz New Music Video

 *BISCAYNE BLOCK BOYZ*
NEW MUSIC VIDEO
by AHOL SNIFFS GLUE and OTTO VON SCHIRACH
Ahol Sniffs Glue has just released a new music video with Otto Von Schirach.

 

The video has been featured in the Miami New Times… Link to the full article HERE