Thursday, 22 October 2009
Friday, 9 October 2009
tord boontje
Studio Tord Boontje for Nani Marquina. i remember reading years ago on the design museum website a c.v. biography by Tord Boontje and thought it was sweet and very personal. not stuffy and formal. i have always admired his work and now he has an amazing website and has been appointed head of product design at the royal college. http://www.tordboontje.com/ see his work here, projects are the best.BIOGRAPHY
Tord Boontje by Tord Boontje
1968 born in Enschede, Netherlands on 3 October at 23.50
1969 finished with breast feeding.
1970 drew a purple cow for my sister on her bedroom wall.
1971 refused to speak until the age of three and then I said: “Mama, I’m hungry, when are we eating?”
1972 was an indian.
1973 experiment one: smashed all the windows of our house that I could reach with a hammer.
1974 could do a perfect mimic of Kung Fu Dancing from the TV.
1975 experiment two: stuck two nails in an electrical socket.
1976 went happily to the Sunflower School.
1977 buried my guinea pig in the garden.
1978 wore any clothes, as long as they were blue (cornflower blue).
1979 experiment three: involving a moving train and toilet rolls.
1980 cycled 300 kilometres through Holland.
1981 went to my first real disco parties
1982 painted my room black, white and red.
1983 wore any clothes, as long as they were black, white or red.
1984 made a new earring every day.
1985 spent Saturday nights at Eureka.
1986 made sunglasses from perforated aluminium and sold them on the streets of Paris.
1987 spent Saturday nights at the Effenaar.
1988 scavenged the Phillips’ industrial rubbish dumps.
1989 work placement and clubbing in New York.
1990 worked for Studio Alchimia in Milan.
1991 graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven.
1992 came to London, met Emma.
1993 had a great year.
1994 graduated from the Royal College of Art, London.
1995 designed exhibitions with Ulf Moritz in Amsterdam.
1996 moved to Peckham, south London and set up my first studio.
1997 started recycling bottles under the name tranSglass.
1998 started designing products for Alexander McQueen.
1999 exhibited my Rough-and-Ready furniture at Tate Modern.
2000 my daughter Evelyn is born. Spent six weeks in a Swedish forest.
2001 became fascinated by bunnies, horses, flowers and started the Wednesday collection.
2002 went back to the RCA to teach. Made chandeliers for Swarovski.
2003 nominated for the Design Museum's Designer of the Year award.
2004 presented the Happy Ever After exhibition at Moroso in Milan.
2005 stages the opening exhibition of the Moss gallery in New York.
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Friday, 2 October 2009
annette messager
http://www.oneroom.org/sculptors/messager.html
The individual elements of these catalogs are like small snapshots of the themes Messager deals with- issues of sexual and physical abuse, fragmentation of the body, sin, obsession with appearances, fairy tales, children, symbols, effigies, disguise, distortion, repetition. These all connect to issues surrounding women. The work is often executed using "women's" materials and techniques.
Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor'
Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor's anthropomorphic creatures congregate and come to life. Overall, O'Connor's larger than life characters have temperaments like mischievous house pets, each with a unique and memorable personality. The artist builds her sculptures by attaching well-worn scraps from upholstery, clothing, and bedding to lumber armatures. The conglomerate of domestic fabrics lends her otherwise menacing creatures an air of comfortable familiarity. Standing beneath them, we're stimulated by an array of textures that seems barely contained by the twine, yarn, and quilting pins that hold them together.
O'Connor manipulates textiles to give her sculptures the same painterly quality existing in her earlier two-dimensional work. Paint drips translate into segments of unraveling yarn or dangling fringes. When she traces vacant eye cavities and grimacing mouths with layers of fabric it's as if she is drawing, using seams instead of charcoal. Unlike the her drawings, the sculptures feature decorative pattern. Color is contained in large and small patches like chromatic shapes in a French Nabi painting.
O'Connor stuffs her pieces with materials that would normally end up in a land-fill: worn-out carpet padding, cut-up mattress pads, and used upholstery. Some materials were collected from thrift stores while the members of the artist's community donated others. The mishmash assembly is more coordinated than first meets the eye. Simply look at the fashion statement made by a tarp and a moving blanket on No-Name (moving blanket head), a particularly impish member of the No Names who sports a hooded cape ensemble that matches her audacious stance.
photo dimensional
Les Zozios is a series of photographs of sculptures which Millet quickly assembles from objects found in his home. He approaches the work with spontaneity, taking no more than ten minutes to complete and photograph each piece. His delight in shape and color brings to mind the works of Joan Miró and Cy Twombly. Millet compares the lines of his sculptural creations to a skeleton, and suggests that the act of photographing grants it life.Now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago is PhotoDimensional. The Exhibition features Works by John Coplans, Katalin Deer, Leslie Hewitt, Bettina Hoffmann, Pello Irazu, David Ireland, Melinda McDaniel, Heather Mekkelson, Laurent Millet, Vik Muniz, Susana Reisman, Lorna Simpson, and Florian Slotowa.
The exhibition features works by contemporary artists who investigate the relationship between sculpture and photography, between two and three dimensions, and explore perceptual issues intrinsic to those relationships. Their works resist the notion that the world simply gets folded into the two-dimensional surface of the photograph. As a result, their works are almost always layered, with subjects translated in ways that invite one to imagine passing from the experience of one dimension to another, and sometimes back again. Thus, perceiving their works provokes feelings of unsettledness, a wavering between seeing and knowing in our minds, a tension that becomes an engaging condition of their artwork.
Highlights amongst the myriad of works on view are, Melinda McDaniel (American, b. 1978) and Susana Reisman's (Venezuelan/Italian, b. 1977) offerings. Both make sculptures out of photographic materials. Reisman prints photographs onto long strips of canvas and molds the strips into forms that allude to the photograph's original subject matter. McDaniel places strips of photographic paper outside for days at a time to achieve varying degrees of exposure and imprints of weather, revealing the subtle color gradations inherent in the paper's chemistry. She then exhibits the uniformly shaped strips in the gallery in a deliberate, regimented manner that recalls minimalist sculpture and creates a tension with the random, abstract patterns of the weather marks on the paper.
matthew stone
British artist Matthew Stone's current solo exhibition, Interconnected Echoes, is the inaugural show in Galerie Paul Freches' series on the British art scene. Stone, a graduate of Camberwell College of the Arts, has become known for his involvement in the !WOWOW! collective, a group of young British creatives who have been staging events and parties in unoccupied South London buildings.
Stone's own work is perhaps simultaneously a re-phrasal of art historical tropes and an exploration of myspace-style youth cultural. He installs his photographs sculpturally, a move that echoes the interactive nature of his many of his projects, and he often uses friends as his models.
Stone regularly updates his blog, Optimism as Cultural Rebellion, and has recently been interviewed by a number of arts and culture publications, including Vice Magazine and Flasher. Interconnected Echoes will be on view at Galerie Paul Freches through May 30th.
micheal raedecker
Michael Raedecker shot
1997, Acrylic and Thread on Linen
50 x 70cm
Michael Raedecker deep
1998, Acrylic and Thread on Linen
56 x 76cm
Themes of solitude, tranquillity and emotional isolation run through Michael Raedecker's work. In his paintings, Raedecker conceives nature as an idealised environment, both as a luxurious privilege of escapism and a sinister realm of the foreign. In deep, he paints a fragmented view of a lake. The solid steely blue surface seduces in its rich colour, the texture of ripples is formulated by painting over stitched designs. Michael Raedecker fabricates this scene with attenuate sensitivity to the painting's surface, as if trying to postpone the inevitable thought of what lies beneath.
toby ziegler
Toby Ziegler
The Grand Cause
2006
Oil, pencil and gold leaf on canvas
210 x 242.5 cm
Toby Ziegler’s paintings and sculptures reflect a personal negotiation with the synthetic and the exotic. Fabricating his images on a computer, traditional motifs such as landscapes, still-lifes, and cultural artefacts are removed from the familiarity of popular consciousness and reconfigured as templates of abstracted information. Translated into a purist language of repetitive geometric patterns, the romantic associations Ziegler’s subjects are recomposed as sublime fields, incorporating references to virtual reality, Islamic mosaics, and 60s trippy pop.
In his paintings, Ziegler carefully reproduces these digitised models entirely by hand; each painstakingly rendered shape reveals tell-tale traces of the artist’s intervention, marking its space as an individual point of contemplation. Corrupting the consummate perfection of mechanical aesthetics with the intimacy of human fallibility, Ziegler develops a unique position to engage with the act of painting in the contemporary world.
Divorcing his subjects from the weight of their historical context, Ziegler’s fragmented motifs offer virgin terrains for painterly degeneration. In Designated For Leisure, this contradiction between the value of technological precision and its degradation through imperfect translation are reinforced through the painting’s overwhelming scale and holograph-like surface. Composed on reflective industrial fabric, the painting’s surface shifts and transforms when viewed from different angles, revealing the landscape within as a chimera of light and perspective.
In the Grand Cause, Ziegler’s abstracted sunset subverts the rigidity of graphic design with the spontaneity of painterly expression. Vying between attenuate detail and intuitive mark-making, the perfunctory qualities of his repetitive patterning evolve as personalised statements of authenticity and affectation. Defiling the gold leaf surface with materiality of paint, Ziegler capitalises on the rich and luxurious quality of his ground to draw connotations to beauty and the grotesque.Raquib Shaw
Raqib Shaw, Lady Guilford, 2007
Born in Calcutta in 1974, in 2001 Shaw attended school in London and has lived there ever since. His work shows the influences of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. He uses porcupine quills to apply metallic industrial paint and rhinestones to paper and canvas creating extraordinary works which at first appear simply beautiful but in which much of the imagery is violent –showing the beastly nature of human beings. In 2006 he was invited by The Tate to respond via his work to an exhibition on view by Hans Holbein the Younger. In these responses now on view otherworldly creatures appear in Holbein’s architectural spaces. Also on view is a new series by Shaw called, “Absence of God.” His work is stunning; initially it appears showy and a bit gaudy, but the viewer becomes mesmerized by the “bling” factor of the work. The sparkle and intense detail draw you in. Similar to Kehinde Wiley’s work in the decorative quality, Shaw’s work also has a deeper message. The juxtaposition of these works with Holbein’s woodcuts in the same room helps showcase the talent, creativity and imagination of Shaw.
