Tag Archives: contemporaryart

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
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)”

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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

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 *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

 

WOW – Work Of the Week – Alexander Calder “Our Unfinished Revolution” Portfolio

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Sun

ALEXANDER CALDER
Untitled (Sun), from Our Unfinished Revolution Portfolio
1975
Lithograph
22 x 30 in.
Edition of 175
Pencil signed and numbered

About This Work:

Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century.
Born in Pennsylvania, Calder was interested in creating movable objects from a young age. His father and grandfather were both well-known sculptors, his mother was also a professional painter.
Calder’s parents did not want him to suffer the life of an artist, so they made him study mechanical engineering. However he decided to pursue a career as an artist, and moved to New York City to study painting.

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.
Influenced by Miró for the playful shapes and by Mondrian for the use of strong and primary colors, Alexander Calder’s work is generally known for its playful dynamism and, following the principles of Abstraction, his paintings were always non-objective and abstract.
Inspired by the work of his fellow artists, he incorporated abstract and kinetic elements into his sculptures, the artworks that he is best known for, today. Calder’s sculptures of movable parts were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both “motion” and “motive”. 

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.
One can get a sense of Calder assembling elements that balance themselves naturally by weight, surface area, and length of wire “arm” through these prints and studies.
This work shows the equilibrium and harmony of his work. All the forms, size of the shapes and colors are perfectly and effortlessly balanced inside the space of the paper.

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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American Dream 5 2

ROBERT INDIANA
American Dream #5
1980
Screenprint
26 3/4 x 26 3/4 in. each sheet (84 x 84 in. overall)
Edition of 100
Pencil signed and numbered

About This Work:

“Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city”
– W. C. Williams

Robert Indiana is one of the original 6 American Pop artists who, back in the 1970s, literally changed the world of art.
Born Robert Clark, in Indiana, he later changed his name to Robert Indiana. He spent his younger years in New York City, where he came in contact with several artists who were living there as well, at that time, like Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman, just to name a few.

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.
His work is a look into Indiana’s personal life, and American life, history, and American values and hopes. His work is all very American. He painted the story of American history in a very powerful and unique style. As a Pop artist, Indiana depicted America at its core when, after World War II, industrialism, capitalism and consumerism were the key issues of the American lifestyle.
His work features masterful use of color and a simplistic yet brilliant use of geometric shapes, letters and numbers. All of his work is extremely personal and autobiographical and, for this reason, very poetical and significant.

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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Portraits of the Artists

ANDY WARHOL
Portraits Of The Artists
1967
One hundred polystyrene boxes in ten colors, each screenprinted
20 x 20 in. (2 x 2 in. each box)
Edition of 200
Initialed and numbered incised on a box printed with Warhol’s portrait

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.

 
Warhol’s celebrity portraits, elevated their celebrity status in our culture. Celebrities were used in advertising, and other means of promoting products that were part of our pop culture. Warhol introduced celebrity into our pop culture through his portraits. In essence, one can say that Warhol’s portraits may arguably be some of Warhol’s most important work. Thus, it was a no brainer when Leo Castelli came to Warhol, and asked him to create a work of art celebrating his 10th anniversary of his gallery.

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.  
Printmaking allowed Warhol to mass produce and mass market art. He was a master of marketing. This allowed Warhol to explore the concept of democratizing art.  Something that Warhol strived to do throughout his career. It was not just pop culture products and items, but portraits of the celebrities as well. He took the celebrity off the TV/movie screen and brought it into your house, and closer to your personal world. 

It was this marketing that led to Andy Warhol becoming a celebrity himself. 

WOW – Work Of the Week – Jasper Johns “Two Flags”

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Two Flags 2

JASPER JOHNS
Two Flags
1970-72
Lithograph
27 3/8 x 32 1/4 in.
Edition of 36
Pencil signed and numbered

About This Work:

“Jasper Johns did not make a painting of the American flag,  he made the American flag a painting” – Ron English

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Georgia, and from an early age, he grew up wanting to be an artist. When in New York City, where he moved to in his twenties, he met the artist and future long-term lover Robert Rauschenberg, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and composer John Cage, all of whom profoundly influenced each other.
In 1958, Johns entered the public eye when dealer Leo Castelli, impressed with the creativity and simplicity behind Johns’ works, noticed him; at age 28, Johns was awarded a show at Castelli’s gallery, which then lead to his first sale, 3 paintings bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Jasper Johns is now one of the most acclaimed and influential American artists of the 20th century.

His career began with a desperate act. At 24, in 1954, two years after he was discharged from the U.S. Army, he destroyed nearly all his art. Then came a kind of vision. “I dreamed I painted a large American flag”. The next morning he began doing just that. His thoughts must have been racing; the enamel house paint he was using wasn’t drying fast enough to capture them. So he switched to wax encaustic. This ancient medium, made of heated beeswax mixed with pigment, dries almost immediately, preserving and showing every brushstroke. 

This painting was the first of about 100 works that Johns has said were inspired by the dream of the American flag, the painting for which Johns is best known.
Jasper Johns’s selection of the American flag allows him to explore a familiar two-dimensional object, with its simple internal geometric structure and a complex symbolic meaning. He was attracted to painting “things the mind already knows“, and claimed that using a familiar object like the flag (but also targets, letters or numbers) freed himself from the need to create a new design and allowed him to focus on the execution of the painting. 

Jasper Johns’ flag is not just an artwork; it has become one of the most important symbols in the American art. When the first flag was released, critics were unsure whether it was a painted flag or a painting of a flag; Johns later said it was both. For this reason, this work is often described as  a piece of Neo-Dadaist and Conceptual art. Due to the playfully subversive appropriation and use of a commonplace icon, it also anticipates aspects of Pop Art.
In the middle of the 1950s, the flag found itself as the bridge between the expressive artistic flow of the dominant Abstract Expressionism and the recognizable icons of the rising Pop Art culture.
Working with a semiotic ambiguity and a variety of meanings, Johns produced an artwork that was meant to be resolved within the mind of the viewer. This flag is not a realistic representation. It is frozen in its motion. This flag will never waver. It is not a flag, it is a monument to a flag. It serves to question what a painting is, and how it is to be differentiated from the object it represents.

This print, Two Flags, represents two vertical flags and it shows how the artist used to produce flags through variations of not only palette but also position, and repetition, divorcing the flag from its symbolic meaning and focusing on the materials and on the concept.


It is also clearly monochromatic. This monochromatic image introduces another important feature of Jasper Johns’ career. Jasper Johns painted 11 monochromatic flags, of which 7 are gray. In Two Flags, Johns used gray to establish uniformity between flat surfaces and dimensional objects. The color gray has been a singular and unparalleled preoccupation for the artist, and it became the protagonist of Jasper Johns’ so-called Gray Period, which goes from 1961 to the 1970’s. The year 1961 is significant, since it is the year in which Johns’s influential working relationship with the artist Robert Rauschenberg dissolved.

Initially serving as a means of emphasizing the physical properties of an object by draining it of color and emotions (he often used to say that he liked “to paint with no emotions“), the artist’s employment of gray has evolved into a larger concern. Gray, black, and white exist in Johns’ work not just as colors, but also as ideas and materials. Jasper Johns, indeed, believed the process to be the most important part of making an artwork (This fact led him to experiment with countless media, such as oil, encaustic, ink, pencil, collage and relief, and a prolific career in print making).

In November 2014 one of Johns’ encaustic flag paintings was auctioned off for $36,000,000 at Sotheby’s New York.


It is unbelievable that, back in 1955, Jasper Johns completed a painting that seems to take a second to see but a lifetime to come to terms with.
Jasper Johns’ flags will always encapsulate the ambivalence of “Is this a flag or is it a painting?”. Flag will never conclusively answer the question.

WOW – Work Of the Week – Alex Katz “Julia And Alexandra”

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Julia And Alexandra
 
ALEX KATZ
Julia And Alexandra
1983
Screenprint
37 x 74 in.
Edition of 75
Pencil signed and numbered

 

About This Work:

Alex Katz is an American painter of portraits and landscapes. He started working on these themes during years dominated by non-figurative art, which he always strongly avoided.
Living in New York City, since the 1950s Katz spends his summers in Maine, which has been his source of inspiration for many of his famous landscapes.
As for his portraits, the people he depicts are colleagues that surrounded him during his career, members of his family, friends or neighbors.

Alex Katz’s portraits are always very recognizable. They are all characterized by an unmistakable flatness and lack of detail. To represent a shadow or light, he uses  slight variations of colors. Many times, monochrome backgrounds represent another defining characteristic of his style.
These portraits do not own a clear narrative – it is not important for the viewer to know the person or the story behind the artwork. What Katz tries to emphasize is actually the beauty of the subjects. The use of gentle colors and the emphasis of fashion details in his paintings turn the coldness of the sharp lines, lack of detail and flatness into an artwork warm for the viewer to enjoy.

This work, Julia And Alexandra, represents a perfect example of Katz’s style. The flatness and lack of details are juxtaposed by the gradual shading of colors, creating a sense of dimensionality and a conceptual complexity. One important factor that makes his simplistic works more complex is the representation of fashion. It may seem minimal – a couple of lines for a necklace, some polka dots on a scarf – but these details of fashion are most important.

As we can see, in this particular work, Julia And Alexandra, Katz not only depicts this portrait in his unique style made of monochromatic colors, flatness and lack of details, but also ties them together with this unifying element of fashion. Despite their apparent simplicity, these details make the faces extremely expressive and perfectly capture the essence of the subjects.

It is this element of detail in his work that the artist has always been passionate about. His interest in fashion increased in 1960s, when he began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor as well as theater and dance shows. Costumes, hairstyles, glasses, clothes, shoes, scarves or bathing caps are meticulously considered, as well as the gaze of the subject and his/her position; whether sitting or standing.

The genius of Alex Katz’s style is derived directly from one of Katz’s biggest influences, the Master Japanese woodblock artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753 – 1806). Utamaro’s woodcuts are in the Ukiyo-e tradition, which means “pictures of the floating world” and represent everyday life scenes, capturing a specific person or a particular moment.

Utamaro is one of the most highly regarded practitioners of the genre of woodblock prints. He is known for his portraits of beautiful women. This Japanese aesthetic is typically flat and bi-dimensional. He influenced Katz particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade.

As with all of Katz’s works, Julia And Alexandra definitely follows along the style and influence of Utamaro’s artworks.

Below are a few examples of Utamaro woodblock prints.

Takashima Ohisa using two mirrors to observe her coiffure

Takashima Ohisa Using Two Mirrors To Observe Her Coiffure

A Beauty After Her Bath

A Beauty After Her Bath

              

WOW – Work Of the Week – Francis Bacon “Study For Bullfight #1”

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Study For Bullfight 1

FRANCIS BACON
Study For Bullfight #1
1971
Lithograph
62 3/4 x 46 7/8 in.
Edition of 150
Signed and numbered

About This Work:

This dynamic print by Francis Bacon is based on the first of three bullfight studies that Bacon painted in 1969 following several trips to South of France and Spain.
In these works, the artist explores the subject of the corrida, after he had the opportunity of encountering the bullfight first hand. This subject became more and more significant for the artist, and a large number of books and postcards on bullfighting were found among the items in Francis Bacon’s studio.

In Study For Bullfight #1, one can see several elements typical of Francis Bacon’s style. One among others, the disfigured head of the bullfighter, which conveys pain and the hectic movement of this cruel fight. Bacon’s great admiration for Picasso’s work, especially the Tauromachie (Guernica), is visible not only in the cubistic style head, but also in the body of the bull, depicted as knot of lines and shadows, in which just one horn, the tail and the bull’s rear legs are recognizable.
His style is also characterized by flat backgrounds and sense of motion, derived from the frequent use of photography and film stills as sources for portraiture. Here we can see a very unsettling orange background, used in several subsequent works, and some curved lines around the bull, indicating the rotatory movements of the fight. On the right, an open panel reveals a crowd of onlookers witnessing the violent scene.

Bacon frequently contemplates the fragility and suffering of the human condition. Bacon’s Study For Bullfight #1 is a work in which the artist speaks of an unalterable condition of human struggle through the visual allegory of a bullfight. Bacon was actually influenced by the violence and drama of the sport.

Francis Bacon was a dominant figure of postwar art, and his artworks remain unmistakable for their contorted emotion and visceral physicality. “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, leaving a sort of human presence” he once said.
Mostly self-taught, Bacon nonetheless drew influence from an wide range of artists, from Vincent van Gogh to Diego Velázquez, making explicit visual references to many of their works in his art. His lasting influence can be seen among Young British Artists, in particular Damien Hirst.

Click here to see Damien Hirst speaking of Francis Bacon’s work