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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. |
Tag Archives: wynwoodmiami
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. |
WOW! – Work of the Week – Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Green Black Red” 10/13/15
Ellsworth Kelly – Blue Green Black Red
Ellsworth Kelly
Blue Green Black Red
1971
Offset lithograph
29 3/4 x 27 1/4 in.
Edition of 100
Pencil signed & numbered
About This Work:
For more than fifty years, Ellsworth Kelly has worked to refine elements of the observed world into rigorous abstraction with a bold clarity and elegance. “My work has always been about vision, the process of seeing,” he notes. “Each work of art is a fragment of a larger context… . I’ve always been interested in things that I see that don’t make sense out of context, that lead you into something else.”
Maintaining a persistent focus on the dynamic relationships between shape, form and color, Kelly challenges viewers’ conceptions of space. He intends for viewers to experience his artwork with instinctive, physical responses to the work’s structure, color, and surrounding space, rather than with contextual or interpretive analysis.
His flat, immaculate compositions of pure line, simple forms, and saturated, unmodulated color are, in essence, found images, distillations of architectural details, shadows, plants, and other subtle forms that often might be overlooked. The contour of a leaf, the arch of a bridge and its reflection in water, and the soft curve of a hillside seen from the road have inspired paintings, sculptures, and prints alike. His art work represent a subjective interpretation of reality, rather than a descriptive copy of it.
Kelly’s arrangement of the complementary colors, which work to intensify one another at their intersections, is also an essential component of the work. In the 1971 lithograph Blue, Green, Black, and Red rectangles are laid, one on top of the other, in arrangements that suggest fragments of a remembered landscape. Perhaps it is several stories of a building, or perhaps a billboard looked, from a certain angle, or the way a shadow once fell.
Ordinary memories such as these, Kelly has said, prompt many of his works. ”As we move, looking at hundreds of different things, we see many different kinds of shapes. Roofs, walls, ceilings are all rectangles, but we don’t see them that way. In reality they’re very elusive forms. The way the view through the rungs of a chair changes when you move even the slightest bit – I want to capture some of that mystery in my work.”
About The Artist:
“I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.” – Ellswoth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form.
Although Kelly can now be considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American abstraction art movement, he was not always seen in such a positive light. It was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly’s art and the dominant stylistic trends For Example, observing how light fragmented on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance.
He created a new freedom of painterly expression. He began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. As a painter he worked in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the Minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s.
Kelly has distilled his palette and introduced forms never before. He starts with a rectangular canvas that he carefully paints with many coats of white paint; a shaped canvas, usually painted in a single bright color, is placed on top. The quality of line seen in his paintings and in the form of his shaped canvases is very subtle. The use of form and shadow, as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible implies perfection.
For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com
WOW! – Work of the Week – Clandestine Culture “I Came Back” 10/05/15
Clandestine Culture, I Came Back
Clandestine Culture
я вернулся, (I CAME BACK)
2014
Acrylic on Wood
81 x 48
Signed on verso
About This Work:
This work titled “I Came Back” or “я вернулся” (in Russian), by Miami Street Artist CLANDESTINE CULTURE,could not be more relevant today then ever before. “For those 25 years of age or younger, the Soviet Union symbol of the Hammer and Sickle, mean nothing. There is an age group that has never seen that symbol, or even knew of a Soviet Union” says the artist.
What this work represents is exactly what the artist wants that age group, 25 years or younger, to understand. That message is that history repeats itself. Painted in 2014, during Russia’s invasion into Crimea, and aggressive military intervention in Ukraine, this painting forewarns the world of what is to come. Russian President Putin flexes his political muscles, and lets the world know that he, and Russia are coming back. They are not the weakened Russia, that perhaps the world sees them as.
Fast forward to 2015, and we see President Putin is at it again, aligning himself with Syria, and positioning his stronghold in the Middle East. Showing that Russia is still a “super power”, and standing up to America
Painted in the old Soviet Union colors of red and gold, this painting is rather simple, but very powerful in its message. Depicting the iconic Hammer and Sickle, with star and olive branches as the main focal point, they symbol says it all. The words “I Came back” written in Russian lets us know, that this is a message about the present, and a warning about the future.
This is exactly what street art intends to do. Historically, street art has always contained a social, a political, and an environmental message. The art challenges the viewer to react not only to the artwork, but to the substantive issues, and surroundings that is being discussed.
Make no mistake, Street Art is not just pretty paintings on a wall. That would be simply called a mural. Street Art is much more important than that. Street Art has substance, context, and a concept. Whether it is Haring talking about AIDS, or Apartheid, Basquiat discussing issues of racism, drugs, and struggle of daily life, or Banksy’s witty paradoxical installations and wall drawings, Street Art has become a depiction and a reaction to the world most important issues, and struggles. Its “in your face” style, is arguably the most reactionary art movement that the art world has yet to witness.
Never before has an art movement, been so literal, and purposeful. Like his predecessors Haring and Basquiat, and his contemporaries Banksy and Shepard Fairey, CLANDESTINE CULTURE focuses on the world’s issues around us, and challenges us to acknowledge, question, and react.
About The Artist:
The artist chooses to remain anonymous. He hits the street with his face and head completely covered. He believes that the painting and the message is more important then the artist. He uses everyday people, images and words, to show that in the end, we are all part of one world wide culture…A CLANDESTINE CULTURE
For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.co
WOW! – Work of the Week 9/21/15
Robert Rauschneberg, Signs, 1970
Robert Rauschenberg
Signs
1970
Screenprint
43 x 34 in.
Edition of 250 Pencil signed & numbered
About This Work:
Robert Rauschenberg’s “Signs” 1970, is one of the most sought after Rauschenberg screenprints because of the artwork’s incredible iconographic imagery and historical significance. Signs was originally commissioned by Time Magazine, with the intention that it would be used as the January edition cover for the year 1970. After considering the final composition, the executives at Time Magazine found the piece was more politically charged than they had hoped and decided against using it. It was felt that the composition, though stunning, was more of a recapitulation of the 1960’s than a welcome to the new decade.
After the dismissal by Time Magazine, Robert Rauschenberg’s trusted dealer Leo Castelli convinced him to print a limited edition screenprint of Signs. The edition was published by Leo Castelli in New York in an edition of 250; each signed, dated ‘70’, and numbered in pencil.
Signs is an astounding collage encompassing the monumental events and people of 1960’s America. Rauschenberg masterfully juxtaposes scenes of innovation like the moon landing with the destructive violence of the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. The revolutionary nature of the era is pronounced through the images of peace protestors at the top, whose rallies for change and peace are echoed by the voice of Janis Joplin deeply singing into her microphone. The iconic leaders of the era including JFK and his brother Bobbie Kennedy challenge the divisive violence of the wars and civil unrest, even as their forms and images transition into the faces of martyrs. The “Signs” of this transformative decade are woven seamlessly by Rauschenberg, and this screen print is known as one of his most important works of art.
About The Artist:
Robert Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic revolution. Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting.
By 1958, at the time of his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his work had moved from abstract painting to drawings like “Erased De Kooning” (which was exactly as it sounds) to what he termed “combines.” These combines (meant to express both the finding and forming of combinations in three-dimensional collage) cemented his place in art history.
This pioneering altered the course of modern art. The idea of combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has remained at the core of Rauschenberg’s work.
As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation.
These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.
In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum put on its largest exhibition ever with four hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the century.
For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com
WOW! – Work of the Week 9/14/15
Tom Wesselmann, Fast Sketch Red Stockinged Nude
Tom Wesselmann, Fast Sketch Red Stockinged Nude, 1991
Tom Wesselmann
Fast Sketch Red Stockinged Nude
1991
Screenprint
26 x 36 5/8 in.
Edition of 100 Pencil signed & numbered
About This Work:
Considered by many to be a Pop artist, Tom Wesselmann would rather be called an artist of the post-Matisse era, according to his wife Claire. Nothing can be truer, as evidence by his screenprint entitled Fast Sketch RedStockinged Nude. This work screams of Matisse, in a contemporary setting.
After a dream concerning the phrase “red, white, and blue”, Wesselmann spent his entire career trying to depict the Great American Nude. Many of these nudes show an accentuated, more explicit, sensuality. Often times, Wesselmann did not even need to paint the entire female body to exude sensuality. He would simply depict a woman’s mouth with intensely red painted lips with cigarette smoke coming out of it, or red painted fingernails holding a smoking cigarette to imply or suggest sexual fulfillment. At the same time, Wesselmannincorporated the use of negative space (the white or colorless area) as the image, and the positive (use of color) to direct our eyes to this negative space.
Fast Sketch Red Stockinged Nude is a perfect example of Wesselmann’s concept. Here the viewer is drawn to this modern day Odalisque, by her vibrant red stockings, but the main image is that of the negative space. The choice of the color red for her stockings suggest sensuality, as well as her reclining position. Is she just relaxing with her hand on her breast, or does he suggest a form of titillation? Lets leave that for the viewer to interpret.
In the early 1980’s Wasselmann was consumed with the idea of creating a drawing by using steel. These were know as his “steelcuts” His fast sketched designs would be the basis for these works. These fast sketches would enable him to form, and cut his images out of steel, while still maintaining a resembled gestural brush stroke, or a drawn line.
Again, Fast Sketch Red Stockinged Nude is created with this technique in mind. The simplistic clean lines reduces the work, where it could be considered pop art, but the real intention of the artist was to simplify the work enough just to accentuate the sensuality and sexuality of his women.
About The Artist:
Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati in 1931, and studied art first in Cincinnati, then in New York at the Cooper Union. When he was a student at Cooper Union, he was much influenced by Abstract Expressionism, especially Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. However, he turned away from that style because he determined these artists had become so introspective that there was little room for creative exploration by others.
His reaction took him to Pop Art, the other extreme of action painting to a tightly controlled style and subject matter that was mundane–the antithesis of psychological complexities. Wesselmann, like Andy Warhol and Wayne Thiebaud, asserted that everyday objects had significance unto themselves and that they were worthy of depiction because of a common understanding about what they were. Wesselmann was one of the contributors to the three original portfolios that launched the Pop Art Movement
Thus, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, Wesselmann started experiments in 1959 with small, abstract collages. Then, in 1960, he adopted advertising images to make bold amusing still lifes and interiors, collages and assemblages using commonplace household items, and often, a highly stylized female nude. This is what brought him fame and notoriety as a founder of American POP ART.
In the late 1960s an increasingly dominant eroticism emerged in works, with its more literal but still intense colours and tight, formal composition. The pictorial elements, exaggerated in their arabesque forms and arbitrary coloring, became significantly larger in scale in his works of the 1970s. Enormous, partially free-standing still-lifes moved into sculptural space, and finally became discrete sculptures of sheet metal. In the 1980s he returned to works for the wall with cut-out steel or aluminium drawings.
He has pioneered a number of art forms now strongly associated with him, namely his ‘drop outs’ where negative shapes become positive shapes and his ‘cutouts’ which utilize laser cut metal to create extraordinary three-dimensional drawings. He too, has been a remarkable printmaker having created large, spectacular silkscreens and lithographs.
His works are in most major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., the Walker ArtCenter and the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts in Minneapolis, the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Worcester Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Atkins Museum of Fine Arts in Kansas City MO, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and many others. His works can also be seen in important public museums in Germany, France, Denmark.
For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com
WOW! – Work of the Week 8/24/15
Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape with Boats
Roy Lichtenstein
Landscape with Boats
1996
Lithograph and screenprint in colors on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper
27 7/8 x 58 1/8 in.
Edition of 60
Pencil signed, dated and numbered
About This Work:
In Roy Lichtenstein’s Landscapes in the Chinese Style, Lichtenstein’s engagement with the Chinese landscape tradition, in this case the Chinese tradition of the Song Dynasty, appears to reflect both light-hearted irony and a more somber appreciation for the beauty of the form.
Lichtenstein was greatly influenced by Edgar Degas’ 1944 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. He was struck by Degas’ ability to suggest the features of a landscape with just a few strategic swathes of gray, thus allowing an unformed, nebulous shape to stand for exacting form.
This work is first a landscape: you can see a little boat in the corner where two men are trying to find their way. It’s very moving because of the disproportionate scale between the sea and the figure. On the other hand, this image is really quite abstract, the shapes dramatically flowing around the space. It summarizes many of the issues that interested Lichtenstein throughout his career, particularly this tension between the figurative and the abstract.
Lichtenstein re-interpreted the traditional scenes and motifs using his own established methods and materials. He reflects on the harmony and balance of the ancient works through his unmistakable and edgy lexicon of modern visual effects. Carefully stylized, Landscapes in the Chinese Style are formed with simulated Benday dots and block contours, rendered in hard, vivid color. The overt irony of his earlier Pop works cedes to aestheticism and formal delicacy: the Benday dots do not mimic the arbitrary techniques of commercial illustration, but rather appear in cloud-like patches that express the effervescence of space and form, as in this dreamy, abstract work called Landscape with Boats.
About The Artist:
Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner.
In 1961, Lichtenstein began his first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965, and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking. His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots was Look Mickey in 1961. This piece came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; “I bet you can’t paint as good as that, eh, Dad?”
Lichtenstein had his first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened. It was at this time, that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America, but worldwide. His work featured thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. However, rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his style began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before. His style was replaced with more surreal works. His “mirror” paintings consist of sphere-shaped canvases with areas of color and dots. Lichtenstein also created a series of still lifes (paintings that show inanimate objects) in different styles during the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lichtenstein began to mix and match styles. Often his works relied on optical (relating to vision) tricks, drawing his viewers into a debate over the nature of “reality.”
Lichtenstein’s work is included in numerous museums, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Foundation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com
WOW! – Work of the Week 7/27/15
John Baldessari, Two Unfinished Letters
John Baldessari
Two Unfinished Letters
1992-93
Screenprint and lithograph on Arches 88 paper with slight deckle
33 1/2 x 21 in.
Edition of 80
This piece is signed and numbered in ink.
About This Work:
John Baldessari makes art that forces people to think. He presents the viewers with enigmatic compositions that suggest manifold interpretations but dictate none. Perhaps his most consistent objective over a half-century of work has been his desire to redirect ways of seeing, challenge how we look at the world, by proposing unexpected scenes or spotlighting the mundane and underrecognized.
In Two Unfinished Letters, John Baldessari depicts eight movies scenes where people are holding pieces of paper, bringing our attention to the various ways people both handle and read letters. Something that more often than not goes unnoticed, but has been integral in the way we communicate.
About John Baldessari:
Throughout his career, 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 in 1931, John Baldessari studied art, literature, and art history at San Diego State College and the University of California, Berkeley. Baldessari initially studied to be an art critic at the University of California, Berkeley during the mid 1950s, but growing dissatisfied with his studies, he turned to painting. Inspired by Dada and Surrealist literary and visual ideas, he began incorporating photographs, notes, texts, and fragments of conversation into his paintings. Baldessari remains fundamentally interested in de-mystifying artistic processes, and uses video to record his performances, which function as “deconstruction experiments.” These illustrative exercises target prevailing assumptions about art and artists, focusing on the perception, language, and interpretation of artistic images.
Allowing pop-cultural artifacts to function as “information,” as opposed to “form,” Baldessari’s works represented a radical departure from, and often a direct critique of, the modernist sensibility that dominated painting for decades.
WOW! – Work of the Week 7/13/15
Damien Hirst, Methylamine-13c
Damien Hirst Methylamine-13c 2014
Damien Hirst
Methylamine-13c
2014
Screenprint with glaze and diamond dust
33 1/16 x 27 in.
Edition of 100
This piece is signed and numbered in pencil on verso.
About This Work:
Hirst’s spot paintings and prints are amongst his most widely recognized works, with the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings first and most prolific of the 13 spots sub-series.
His work with spots, specifically when named after synthetic and natural compounds in drugs and pharmaceuticals, explores themes fundamental to the his work. Namely the complex relationships between nature and science, myth and reality, art and beauty, and life and death.
No one color spot is the same color as another. The colors he uses in conjunction with drug and pharmaceutical titles suggests they represent different emotions/states e.g. red means love, white means purity, black means death, blue means the blues, green means jealousy. Alluding to that fact, that all human emotions or sensations or natural science can be expressed, aesthetically, in the spots.
About Damien Hirst:
Damien Hirst has become one of the most prominent artists of his generation. Many of his works are widely recognized, from the shark suspended in formaldehyde, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, and his spot, spin and butterfly paintings, through to later works such as the diamond skull “For the Love of God”.
Throughout his work, Hirst investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience. Hirst takes a direct approach to ideas about existence, exploring 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.
By using the tools and iconography of science and religion, he blurs the lines between science, religion, and art, giving the viewer the horror of immortality and the brilliance of reality.
Death is a central theme in Hirst’s art work. He gives his audience an open mouth astonishment while challenging the viewer to confront the inevitability of existence. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The best known of these being The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine.
In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries. The auction exceeded all predictions, raising $198 million, breaking the record for a one-artist auction.
Since 1987, over 80 solo shows of Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide, and his work has been included in over 260 group shows. His contributions to art over the last two and a half decades was recognized in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work at the Tate Modern.
WOW! – Work of the Week 6/22/15
Julian Opie, Walking in the Rain, London
Julian Opie Walking in the Rain, London 2015
Julian Opie
Walking in the Rain, London
2015
Screenprint on Somerset Satin tub sized 410 gsm paper
59 x 86 3/8 in.
Edition of 50
This piece is signed and numbered.
About This Work:
In his newer works, like Walking in the Rain, London, we start to see more complexity in Opie’s figures when compared to his very minimal and simplistic figures of the past. In his newest works, Walking in the Rain, London and Walking in the Rain, Seoul Opie is introducing elements of consumerism, technology and 21st century issues.
This can be seen by his use of brand names in both works. For Walking in the Rain, London he shows us a bag with Tate Museum’s logo and a Tesco shopping bag, which is a supermarket in the UK, as well as people listening to their ipods and smart phones.
While his figures are still void of facial features, Opie brings our attention to the fact that the clothes and shoes we wear, the places we patron and the gadgets we use in a way define us as individuals, as a city and as a society. This work in a sense is anthropological as it speaks to the time and the current state of how we interact and live by capturing different people going different directions and all in the same place.
About Julian Opie:
Julian Opie is a visual artist, and one of the New British Sculpture movement.
He is one of the most significant artists of his generation whose artistic preoccupation has investigated the idea of representation and the means by which images are perceived and understood. Throughout his practice, Opie has developed his own reductive formal language which seeks to reflect, not reality itself, but rather the way in which reality is represented: his distinctive language of discipline and formal consistency which is employed in his current portrait and landscape work.
He says, he sets out to strip things down, the purpose being to reflect and play on not just other art, but on the artifice that he thinks frames contemporary experience: how what is seemingly natural in human behavior is made up of learned performance codes, how artistic conventions constrain artistic practice.
In his portraiture, the human face is sometimes characterized by black outlines with flat areas of color, and minimalized detail, to the extent that an eye can become just the black circle of the pupil, and sometimes a head is represented by a circle with a space where the neck would be, Opie tries to portray someone’s personality in as little detail as possible.
Opie uses computers in art for other works. His Imagine you are… series, demonstrated how activities such as driving, walking and climbing could be represented by simple reductions. In addition, Opie uses sculpture and light installations to present items of everyday life.
Opie themes: engagement with art history, use of new technology, obsession with the human body. Opie loves to work with one idea across different media; painting, granite, silkscreen and LED animation.