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ANDY WARHOL 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. 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. 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. |
Tag Archives: art
WOW – Work Of the Week – Josef Albers “SK-ED”
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JOSEF ALBERS About This Work: Kn |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Marilyn Minter “Prism”
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MARILYN MINTER About This Work: Marilyn Minter (born in 1948) is an American contemporary photographer/artist. 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. 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. Prism is a refined version of Minter’s early works, which despite still having pornographic undertones, exudes a sense of glamour and high-fashion. 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”
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GREGG SHIENBAUM FINE ART is proud to present its second editioned work with Miami Artist AHOL SNIFFS GLUE |
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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 The details of this new edition are below.
Ahol Sniffs Glue signing the REDRUM screenprints.  Ahol Sniffs Glue in front of his work REDRUM
Click HERE to see the video of Ahol signing the screenprints.
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WOW – Work Of the Week – John Baldessari “Person On Horse And Person Falling From Horse (With Audience)”
%20stock.jpg "Intersection Series (Person On Horse Person Falling From Horse with Audience) stock") |
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JOHN BALDESSARI 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
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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
WOW – Work Of the Week – Robert Rauschenberg “Chow Bags Series”
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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG About These Works: Robert Rauschenberg’s Chow Bags portfolio (1977) consists of six screen prints with graphite and plastic thread, each featuring a different domesticated animal. The prints are based on paper collages that Rauschenberg created from actual bags of animal feed manufactured by Ralston Purina (now Purina Mills), a company best known for its Dog Chow and Cat Chow brands. He chose the packaging for the less common feeds, based on bags for a livestock feed. They all share the distinctive red-and-white checkered pattern (except Monkey Chow, which has the green and white checkered pattern), made famous by Purina’s more familiar products. By incorporating this pattern and other prominent design elements of the bags, Rauschenberg’s Chow Bags call attention to the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of Purina’s graphic identity. Photographs of the finished collages were used as the basis for the screen prints. Although Rauschenberg selectively cut and partially flattened the paper feed bags to create his collages, he retained their rectangular shape and allowed this form to dictate the overall configuration of each print. The bold, graphic renderings of the animals at the center of these works are surrounded by various arrangements of fainter transfer images such as flowers and leaves, cars stuck in traffic, Coca-Cola bottles, and a woman’s glossy, manicured finger. The resulting compositions present the animals gazing out as in traditional portraiture, playfully framed by colorful graphics and strong geometric shapes. After the silkscreen process, additional collage elements were applied to each print, including small pieces of fabric and plastic stitching that mimics the pull-strings used to open feed bags. The Chow Bags series was printed by Styria Studio in New York, and issued in an edition of 100. Rauschenberg was impressed by the history of Purina Mills. Founded by William Danforth in 1884, the company produced Purina Chow, a line of food for animals that prospered for well over a century. The name of the product has an explanation. The word Purina (from pure) was coined to describe the purity of the grain made by the Danforth mills, and Chow is the name that soldiers during World War I used to refer to food. The Chow Bags series embraces the very essence of what Robert Rauschenberg has been trying to capture and convey in his art, and in the Pop Art movement in general. Rauschenberg’s Chow Bags series seemingly embraced the post World War II manufacturing and media boom. His choice of Purina Chow as imagery is an enthusiastic endorsement of the capitalist market and the goods it circulated, while at the same time denotes an element of cultural critique, playing on the concept of consumerism that was at an all time high after the war, and also elevating the everyday to high art: tying the commodity status of the goods represented to the status of the art objects themselves. Which is exactly what the Pop Art movement is about. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Alexander Calder “Our Unfinished Revolution” Portfolio
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ALEXANDER CALDER About This Work: Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. Subsequently, upon moving to Paris in 1926, Calder began creating large-scale mechanical installations of intricate circus scenes, featuring wire sculptures with moving parts that he would operate over a two-hour performance session. Building off of his so-called Cirque Calder, he began sculpting portraits and figures out of wire, and received critical attention, exhibiting these works in gallery shows in New York, Paris, and Berlin. While in Paris, he befriended several important Abstract artists, including Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian, and was invited to join the group Abstraction-Création in 1931. Many of Calder’s works on paper and his printwork are studies, tests and theories about his sculptures. As Calder’s sculptures moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the early 1930s, so did his works on paper and prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. This work from the portfolio Our Unfinished Revolution, is a two-dimensional insight into Calder’s three-dimensional world. Alexander Calder has had several retrospectives, and, among many other awards, was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Bicentennial Artist Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1976. The Guggenheim Museum showed a retrospective of his work in 1964. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Robert Indiana “American Dream #5”
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ROBERT INDIANA About This Work: “Among the rain Robert Indiana is one of the original 6 American Pop artists who, back in the 1970s, literally changed the world of art. Subsequently, he moved to Vinalhaven, a place that has acquired an allure of almost mystical isolation, throughout the years. Here Indiana has retired from the world since 1978, although still actively working and producing art. In 1964, when he was still living in New York City, Indiana moved from his first place, a building called Coenties Slip, to a five-story building in the Bowery. In 1969, he began renting the upstairs of a building called “The Star of Hope”, in the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine, as a seasonal studio, from the photographer Eliot Elisofon. This place was wider and very functional for his big works. Half a century earlier, Marsden Hartley, the main source of inspiration for Indiana’s Hartley Elegies suite, had made his escape to the same island. When Elisofon died, Indiana moved in full-time. Indiana’s work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words. His best known example is LOVE, used in countless paintings, prints and sculptures. American Dream #5 is not only referring specifically – through its title – to another painting by another major American painter, Charles Demuth, but it is also a pictorial hymn to a poem by William Carlos Williams, that inspired Demuth himself. Charles Demuth painted a work titled I Saw The Figure 5 In Gold, inspired by Williams’ poem The Great Figure. The poet, in turn, was inspired by seeing a fire truck passing down the street at full speed, with a big gold silhouette of a 5 on the background. One can clearly see the shades of gray that make stand out the other bright and strong colors. The geometrical shapes of stars and circles, and the progressive size of the figure 5, create an optical illusion of movement and speed, making the figure 5 pop and vibrate off the paper as the view stares at it. This chain of poetical and pictorial allusions is enriched in this work by a whole other chain of references to birth or death dates that form a web of intricate numerological references based on various coincidences: Demuth’s painting is dated 1928 – also the year of Indiana’s birth. Indiana’s painting is dated 1963 – also the year of Carlos Williams’ death. The succession of rows of three 5s suggests the figure 35: Demuth died in 1935. This succession of 5s is also describing the sudden progression of the firetruck in the poet’s experience. American Dream #5 itself is composed like a poem, and its cruciform shape remains Indiana’s unmistakable mark. The monosyllabic words like EAT, HUG, ERR, DIE, also belong to Indiana’s own poetry. Again, here autobiography occupies an important role as well: EAT & DIE refer to his mother’s last word before she died. American Dream #5 is Indiana’s most impressive and important work. The poetical, numerological, biographical associations embedded in this work make this jazzy though straightforward artwork one of the most complex works of Indiana’s career and in American Pop art. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Portraits Of The Artists”
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ANDY WARHOL 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, 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. Warhol was part of a very exclusive group of artists that the famous and influential New York dealer, Leo Castelli, represented. In 1967 Warhol created Portraits of the Artists, a work that depicts the portraits of 10 artists chosen and represented by Castelli. Sticking with Warhol’s signature style of repetition, he multiplied the artists’ portraits ten times in ten different colors on 3-D polystyrene boxes, each measuring at approximately 2 x 2 inches. The 100 boxes totaled to approximately 20” x 20” when lined up. The artists include Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol himself. Warhol used the power of the portrait to bring forth the idea of America’s infatuation with celebrity, and the effects of the celebrity in our culture. Pop culture was not only just about Coca Cola bottles, Campbell’s Soup Cans, and Brillo boxes, but also about taking TV, film, music, or literary personalities and exploiting the concept of celebrity. What a better way to pay homage and respect to the most important artists of the time by having Andy Warhol create a work of art that said so much about the artist’s influence on our culture, with just their portraits. No words were needed. The use of repetition is also typical of Andy Warhol. Warhol used silkscreen as his medium of choice. It served as a way to remove the hand of the artist in art, a concept Marcel Duchamp introduced to the art world in the early part of the century. Warhol’s biggest influence in art was Duchamp. Repetition also allowed the artists to further their concepts, by reaching a greater amount of people. Printmaking was the best way to achieve this. By making multiples of a work, more people can own the work, sell the work, and are exposed to the work. It was this marketing that led to Andy Warhol becoming a celebrity himself. |