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SHELTER SERRA About This Work: Shelter Serra is an artist born in Bolinas, California, in 1972, nephew of post minimalist artist Richard Serra. Shelter Serra studied art at the University of California and then earned his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His eccentric and nonconformist style gained attention in the New York art scene in 2009, when he started to transform objects into multimedia works that investigate the cultural status symbol. Although made in a wide range of materials and media, Shelter Serra’s work is based on only two core concepts: that art should be accessible to everyone and that art should reflect the desires and concerns of everyday people in everyday life. With his work, Serra tries to question our system of values, particularly concentrating on the concept of luxury and high-end society. He is known for his thought-provoking recreation of iconic objects that symbolize a cultural status, such as the Hermes Birkin bag or the Rolex, one of his most famous subjects, as seen here. Roley is an object that carries a determined cultural status. The image of the Roley is nothing but an irreverent representation of luxury, materialism, and consumption. By representing this seemingly mundane watch, Serra tries to question the functionality and the meaning, or lack there of, behind an expensive object. Serra created a plastic ‘Fake Rolex’, to be worn on the wrist. A homage to the ultimate watch of status. These Fake Rolex watches are basically the idea of replicating something and making it available to the everyday consumer. They can be bought for less than $40, clearly mocking the real Rolex and all its social and cultural meanings. The image of the Roley is one built on questions rather than based on ideas. By representing this worldwide recognizable object in a neutralized and homogenous form, the artist urges the spectators to rethink, and question their values, to discover the absence in an object that we value, and to reflect on the deeper cultural meaning of things and their social, economical or environmental aspects. |
Tag Archives: contemporaryart
Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art featured on Widewalls
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Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art featured as one of the best Miami galleries on Widewalls
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WOW – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Sidewalk FS II.304”
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ANDY WARHOL About This Work: Much has been said about Andy Warhol, his art and his decadent personality. Warhol’s fascination for fame and celebrities shows up in this work, that he masterfully simply calls Sidewalk. The image of this work is from a series of photographs taken by Andy Warhol himself. 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. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Julian Opie “Walking In The Rain, Seoul”
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JULIAN OPIE About This Work: Julian Opie was born in London, where he currently lives and works. Movement has always been central to Opie’s full body of work, whether it is movement around and through the artworks or the movement of the artworks themselves. In 2015 Julian Opie was invited to participate in a show in South Korea, when he created Walking In The Rain, Seoul. “With the umbrellas included, the images became large and complicated with a layering of different movement from top to bottom. This was probably the most complicated picture I had managed to compose so far. The rainy season was over and when the rain came it was light and the weather was warm. The resulting image is very personal and unique in feel, mood and color. I usually make paintings in two or more sizes […] but I could not imagine such a complex image being small so instead of a smaller size I decided to make an editioned silkscreen print on paper“. The humongous size and the strong color palette create a Pop allure, while the bold black contour lines make each element of the composition stand out. Depicting human figures has always been a challenge for artists. However, Opie managed to find a new, original, personal way to represent people. His extremely recognizable style have gained him a place among the most famous contemporary artists of our time. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Frank Stella “Del Mar”
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FRANK STELLA 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. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Damien Hirst “Methyl Phenylsufoxide”
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DAMIEN HIRST About This Work: “There are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. Of them all, science seems to be the one right now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end” – Damien Hirst Damien Hirst has become one of the most prominent artists of our times. Throughout his work, Hirst investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience. Hirst explores the complex relationship between art, life, death and religion. His work calls into question our awareness and convictions about the boundaries that separate desire and fear, reason and faith, love and hate. Methyl Phenylsufoxide is part of the spots series. The idea behind this work is completely based on color. Hirst studied color theory as every art student does. Color theory began in the 18th century with Issac Newton, who came up with a practical guidance to color mixing and the visual effects of a specific color combination. Hirst applies Newton’s theory of color to the spots and pairs them with the effect of the specific drug, by arranging the colors in a well calculated pattern and combination. The result is that, when viewed, the viewer subconsciously feels like he/she would feel if he/she took that specific drug. Hirst explains that “…mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where color can exist on its own, interacting with other colors in a perfect format”. Hirst’s spots are amongst his most widely recognized works, with the Pharmaceutical Series being the first and most prolific of the 13 spots sub-series. After having started with paintings, Hirst slowly refined his creative process. Any physical evidence of human intervention – such as the compass point left at the centre of each spot – was removed, until the works appeared to have been constructed mechanically. This is the reason why the printing process suits the spots even better than the painting technique. It is pretty incredible how the images of the spots seem so simple, at the same time representing the product of such complex artistic concept and study. In 2012, Gagosian gallery exhibited over 300 spot paintings in all their 13 galleries worldwide. The artist explained that the idea of an installation of multiple spot paintings, “it’s an assault on your senses. They grab hold of you and give you a good shaking. As adults, we’re not used to it. It’s an amazing fact that all objects leap beyond their own dimension”. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Ingrid Bergman, The Nun FS.II 314”
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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. |
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. |