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Banksy About This Work: Banksy is a British street artist and activist who, despite worldwide fame, has maintained anonymity. Although details of the artist’s life are largely unknown, it is thought that Banksy was born in Bristol more or less around 1974, and started his career in this city as a graffiti artist. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humor with graffiti executed in a very personal and distinctive stenciling technique. Banksy’s work features striking and humorous images, occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Subjects often include rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly. This work, Donut (Chocolate), needs no explanation. It is simply a spoof on the stereotype that American policemen are infatuated with donuts. In 2014, Banksy was regarded as a British cultural icon, with young adults from abroad naming the artist among a group of people that they most associated with UK culture, which included William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth II, David Beckham, The Beatles, and Elton John. His works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. As of today, his work can be found in countless cities, from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit. |
Tag Archives: WOW!
WOW – Work Of the Week – Alex Katz “Dog At Duck Trap”
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Alex Katz 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. He is mostly known for his portraits: the people he depicts are colleagues that surrounded him during his career, members of his family, friends or neighbors. These portraits do not own a clear narrative – it is not important for the viewer to know 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 a few but significant details turn the coldness of the sharp lines, lack of detail and flatness into an artwork warm for the viewer to enjoy. 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), the master of Japanese woodblock color printing. His 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. This work, Dog At Duck Trap, it is slightly different from Katz’s portraits. This time, the subject is not a person but an animal. Sunny is portrayed in a surrounding that is nothing but the coasts of the Duck Trap, a river located in Waldo County, Maine, where Katz still spends his summers. Alex Katz’s works can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Major exhibitions of Katz’s landscape and portrait painting in America and Europe followed his 1986 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective and 1988 print retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Roy Lichtenstein “Reflections On Girl”
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Roy Lichtenstein About This Work: Pop art legend Roy Lichtenstein, born in Manhattan in October of 1923, began his studies in New York but finished at Ohio State University and thereafter began teaching at different universities, a profession he continued until 1964. He became known for his bold colors, thick lines, and use of comic strips to influence his work. His very personal and unique style derived from comic strips which portray the trivialization of culture, endemic in contemporary American life. Using bright, strident colors and techniques borrowed from the printing industry, he ironically incorporates mass-produced emotions and objects into references to popular icons and art history. Lichtenstein has often explored the theme of Reflections, incorporating them in various paintings and several print series. In 1988 Lichtenstein began working on a group of Reflections paintings, in which the central image is partly obscured by reflective streaks, as if behind glass or reflected in a mirror. This week’s work of the week, Reflections On Girl, is considered to be an iconic work. It is a perfect example of Lichtenstein’s style. A style made of primary colors – red, yellow and blue, heavily outlined in black. Instead of shades of color, he used the ben-day dot, a method by which an image is created, and its density of tone modulated, through the position and size of a myriad of dots during the printing process. Lichtenstein used an image he found in an edition of the comic book Falling In Love as the basis for the female figure in this image. Lichtenstein seems to create an intentionally stylized and stereotypical image of a 1960’s beauty. In the original cartoon, text above the image read: ‘Fire seethed through my body … fanning … spreading’, while the girl’s thought-bubble reads, ‘H-He couldn’t kiss me that way and love someone else!‘. Reflections On Girl is a very important print from a very important series by Lichtenstein. It has everything that one would want in a Lichtenstein work. The lines, the benday dots, the bright colors, the cartoonish girl figure, and the bubble letters. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Andy Warhol “Ingrid Bergman With Hat”
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ANDY WARHOL About This Work: Andy Warhol was an American artist who has always been a leading figure in the visual art movement known as Pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960’s. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn and Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans are some of the most recognized and collectible of his artworks. However, after the success of the Campbell’s Soup series in the early 1960’s, Warhol began creating screenprints focused mostly on 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. This important movie role is made even more dramatic in this iconic print. The strong color palette and the bright blue background are just striking, together with the deep and nostalgic expression on her face. 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. Pop Art marked an important new stage in the breakdown between high and low art forms. Warhol’s paintings from the early 1960’s 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. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Hank Willis Thomas “Black Power”
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HANK WILLIS THOMAS About This Work: Hank Willis Thomas is an American artist who employs the familiar, or “what-goes-without-saying”, to draw connections and provoke conversations about issues and histories that are often forgotten or avoided in our commerce-infused daily lives. He gained wide recognition with highly provocative artworks which address the commodification of African-American male identity by raising questions about visual culture and the power of logos. Black Power, as well as other works by Willis Thomas, deals with issues of grief, black-on-black violence, the contributions of corporate culture to the crisis of black male identity, and African-American representation in advertising and media. Something very important about Willis Thomas’ work is that it has been heavily influenced by the tragic loss of his young cousin, Songha Willis Thomas, who was murdered by another black man outside a Philadelphia night club in an incident of violence involving a gold chain. Hank Willis Thomas (born in Plainfield, New Jersey, 1976) received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. With his characteristic strong dark humor, every time Willis Thomas creates a visual dialogue about the pressing issues of race, representation, and a sort of present day enslavement through consumerism which applies to the American society, with a focus on African-American youth. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Claes Oldenburg “Sculpture In The Form Of A Bicycle Saddle”
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CLAES OLDENBURG About This Work: Claes Oldenburg is an American sculptor, commonly associated with the Pop Art movement, who has always been at the forefront of the Conceptual and Pop Art art culture. Using familiar, everyday objects as his recurring theme, the artist developed his soft sculptures idea in 1957—a practice he would return to throughout his career. Many of Oldenburg’s works depict ‘mundane’ objects and, at first, they were ridiculed before being accepted by the art world – but they were also defined ‘brilliant’, due to the reaction that the pop artist brought to a ‘tired’ abstract expressionist period. Sculpture In The Form Of A Bicycle Saddle is a great example of Oldenburg’s personal way of making art. A saddle is just a saddle, but when carved in to a mountain, held in place by a sand box, it becomes something else and we can look at it in the form of a work of art. The way in which the sculpture is carved, the glossy ceramic, the base made of sand and wood, the strange position of the saddle itself: every element in this sculpture seems to decontextualize the object and help it to become estranged, so that we are finally able to look at it in a different perspective – as a work of art. Oldenburg has said himself that “If I didn’t think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn’t go on doing it“. Oldenburg has exhibited extensively around the world and his works appear in almost every major international art museum. His famous oversized outdoor sculptures, done for civic and public purposes, changed the terrain of countless cities worldwide. To possess an edition or multiple from this great artist is a unique opportunity. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Shepard Fairey “Power Bidder”
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SHEPARD FAIREY About This Work: Tomorrow, finally, will be Election Day. Both candidates have very high unfavorable poll numbers. Both candidate are flawed. Questions about politicians and just how ethical they are, and how ethical the whole system is, have been raised. Charges of unlawful and unjust “dealings” have been tossed around for the whole world to see just how much of a mockery this election is. Due to tomorrow’s elections, we feel that this particular artwork is very fitting and we found its message very appropriate for this occasion. This weeks work of the week is called Power Bidder, by Shepard Fairey At the bottom of the work it reads “Democracy sold to the highest bidder”. With all the craziness, and nonsense that has surrounded this election cycle, it seem that truer have never been spoken! — Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary graphic designer and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” Fairey created the “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker campaign in 1989, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). This later evolved into the “Obey Giant” campaign. As with most street artists, the Obey Giant was intended to inspire curiosity and cause the masses to question their relationship with their surroundings. His work became more widely known in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, specifically his Barack Obama “Hope” poster. The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl called the poster “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You'”. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today’s best known and most influential street artists. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2011 Time Magazine commissioned Fairey to design its cover to honor “The Protester” as Person of the Year in the wake of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other social movements around the world. This was Fairey’s second Person of the Year cover for Time, his first being of Barack Obama in 2008. |
WOW – Work Of the Week – Jim Dine “Zein Robe”
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JIM DINE About This Work: Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati, the Boston Museum School, and in 1957 he received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Ohio University. In 1962 Dine’s work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud and many more, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first “Pop Art” exhibitions in America. Often associated with the Pop art movement, Jim Dine features everyday objects and imagery in his paintings, drawings, and prints. His works focuses on certain subject matter, bathrobes and hearts amongst them. However, unlike many Pop artists, he focuses on the autobiographical and emotive connotations of his motifs. Dine began painting bathrobes in 1964; some of them were titled or subtitled “self-portrait”. The bathrobe became a motif in his repertoire which he has returned to on many occasions, in prints as well as paintings. Though he claimed never to wear a bathrobe, nonetheless these are all, in a way, portraits and self-portraits. Zein Robe illustrates the enduring importance of the bathrobe motif in Dine’s work, a motif that he has been using over the years in countless printed works to depict mostly himself, but also his wife and people around him. This lithograph depicts a belted robe that features casual, painterly strokes, hand painted in deep reds and oranges. This robe, once again, represents the alias of a person. This robe faces us, with the invisible hands over the hips, affirming Zein’s presence and personality. After a 1984 trip to The Glyptothek in Munich, Jim Dine was inspired to create a series of figurative drawings based on Greek and Roman antiquities, the so-called Glyptotek Drawings. This project required a lot of technical work, a process that would ultimately end in the production of heliogravure prints. When elaborating the Glyptotek Drawings, Kurt Zein, a master printer in Vienna, was fundamental in the production of this project. An accomplished printmaker, Dine remains one the most famous American artists of today. His work is part of numerous public collections all over the world. He still lives and works in New York City. |
Work Of the Week – James Rosenquist “Firepole”
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JAMES ROSENQUIST About This Work: Born on November 29, 1933 in Grand Forks, ND, James Rosenquist attended the University of Minnesota, before earning a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York in 1955. James Rosenquist is one of the key figures in America’s Pop Art movement. Rosenquist takes fragmented, oddly disproportionate images and combines and overlaps them in his works to create visual stories, in the most abstract and provocative ways. Rosenquist’s paintings and prints are often made in unusual proportions and giant dimensions. For example, one of his prints, called Time Dust (1992), is thought to be the largest print in the world, measuring approximately 7 x 35 feet. In 1967, Rosenquist painted Firepole, a monumental mural commissioned for the American Pavilion at the Montreal World Exposition. This mural featured gargantuan blue-uniformed legs wrapped around a fireman’s pole. Firepole refers to Rosenquist’s idea “that it was unnecessary for U.S. to police the world or be the fireman of it“. Indeed, Rosenquist has always been very much involved with political and social issues of that time, especially criticizing the Vietnam war and the political positions of the US government in terms of global relationships and conflicts. Today Rosenquist is considered one of the greatest American artists still alive. |
Work Of the Week – Tom Wesselmann “Wildflower Bouquet”
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TOM WESSELMANN About This Work: Tom Wesselmann was born on February 23, 1931 in Cincinnati, OH. In New York, he started earning his living by working as a cartoonist for several journals and magazines as well as by teaching at a high school in Brooklyn. Even though he disagreed with being labeled a “Pop” artist, Wesselmann’s work is considered belonging to the Pop art movement. During his artistic career, he experimented with materials and imagery; both collage and sculpture found their way into his assemblages. When he was not working on stylized female nudes (these works are actually what he is best known for), common objects were the main theme of his art work. This is the case of this work of the week, Wildflower Bouquet. Wildflower Bouquet is one of Wesselmann’s famous so-called Steel Drawings. With the invention of the Steel Drawings, Wesselmann began to focus more on drawing for the sake of drawing. For the first time he was approaching art on a new basis, where the scribble was the final product. The drawings that would be transferred into steel were selected carefully and their crisp outlines resonated with the immediacy of a neon sign. The drawings were usually the preliminary sketches to his other works, like paintings or prints. However, when making a comparison between the same image done in two different media, for example a steel cut-out and a painting, one can notice how the artist subtly played changes on his formal language in the treatment of the outlines, or in the spaces in between. Wesselmann was also deeply influenced by Matisse, who had long been a source of inspiration for him. In the metal works, Wesselmann can be understood to have devised his own equivalent to the paper cut-outs that had marked Matisse’s equally bold and life-affirming last phase. The steel drawings represent Wesselmann’s best-known technical innovation. Wesselmann’s Steel Drawings caused both excitement and confusion in the art world. After acquiring a piece in 1985, the Whitney Museum of American Art wrote to Wesselmann asking why he had labeled the work a drawing and not a sculpture. His response was that while he considered it a pure drawing, it was “an example of life not necessarily being as simple as one might wish”. |