YearOfCulture

Saturday 8 September 2007

Antony Gormley:Sculptor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Gormley

British sculptor Antony Gormley uses the human form to explore man's existence in and relation to the world.

Block Works
(2003 - 2007)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=23&page=1

Domain Series
(1999 - 2007)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject?page=1&projectid=24

Feeling Material
(2003 - 2007)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=26&page=1

Waste Man
Margate, UK (2006)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=62&page=1

Time Horizon
Parco Archeologico di Scolacium, Roccelletta di Borgia, Catanzaro, Italy (2006)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=60&page=1

Breathing Room
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France (2006)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=61&page=1

Clearing
(2004 - 2005)

http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=17&page=1

Domain Field
(2003)
http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=20&page=1

http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=10&page=1

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gormley/

Broken Column
Stavanger, Norway (2003)

http://www.antonygormley.com/viewproject.php?projectid=16&page=1

Diane

Tuesday 28 August 2007

Ernesto Saboia de Albuquerque Neto; Ernesto Neto (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil 1964) is a plastic contemporary artist.

One of his most acclaimed installation is the one at the Panthéon in Paris called Léviathan Thot.

For exhibition program see below
http://www.festival-automne.com/fr/programme.php?programme_id=79

For more images see

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Ernesto+Neto
http://images.google.com/images?q=Ernesto+Neto&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi&oi=property_suggestions&resnum=0&ct=property-revision&cd=1
http://www.fortesvilaca.com.br/artistas/ernesto_neto/index.html
http://www.tomiokoyamagallery.com/artists/neto/jpn/ENeto_j.html

Diane

Tuesday 17 July 2007

Nan Goldin: Photographer

Nan Goldin (born 1953) is a notable American fine-art and documentary photographer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin

Nan Goldin describes her photographs as a 'visual diary'. She has stated: 'These are my friends, these are my family, this is myself. There is no separation between me and what I photograph.' The self-portrait Nan one month after being battered was taken to prevent Goldin from forgetting the damage caused by her boyfriend's violence. She applies the same frankness to the lives of her close friends. Goldin is attracted to the glamour of the world of drag-queens and transvestites. In Jimmy Paulette and Taboo! Undressing, NYC 1991, two men are caught in the midst of their gender transformation. Characteristically, this moment of exposure is presented with candour and empathy.

"It’s an interesting part of her work because her work is so much about her life and the people that surround her and it’s easy to see her work as being something voyeuristic. Why I think ‘Nan…..battered’ is quite an interesting turn in her work is because literally she turns the camera upon herself and is voyeuristic with herself in her own crisis as she is with other people in theirs. And she used that photograph in that situation to look at herself, not in a mirror but as a document so that you can see it and then move on from it and it was only looking at those photographs of herself that enabled her to see how bad her situation was and then to sort of move on."

Sam Taylor- Wood on Nan Goldin

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/goldin_nan.php

http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php

http://www.matthewmarks.com/index.php?n=1&a=128&im=1

http://oseculoprodigioso.blogspot.com/2007/01/goldin-nan-fotografia.html

Diane

Gwen John: Painter

Gwen John (June 22, 1876 – September 18, 1939) was a Welsh artist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_John

Gwen lived in Meudon, near Paris, and at first kept a studio in Montparnasse. In the years between 1914 and 1925 she devoted her life to painting and religion. She sold pictures to her American patron John Quinn until his death in 1924, and exhibited and sold at the Paris Salons from 1919, but kept apart from the art world and lived alone. In private she developed a unique way of painting, producing different versions and repetitions of her one preferred subject. Nothing is known about most of her sitters.

Gwen travelled in France, often staying in villages in Brittany. Here she asked children to pose for rapid figure-studies in chalk and wash. She valued these drawings, and later displayed them in her own mounts and coloured folders.

A commission from the Convent in Meudon for a replica portrait of their founding mother led her to portray the nuns, and to make different versions of ‘Mere Poussepin’. She drew the orphans and nuns in church, adding watercolours in her studio. These paintings are profoundly meditative. They seem midway between portraiture and abstraction, the dry application of chalky colour as expressive as the impassive image.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/john/room1.shtm

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/ithinkwepictures.htm

Ronald Moody: Sculptor

Ronald Moody (1900-1984) was a Jamaican born sculptor, specialising in wood carvings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Moody

Moody’s earliest and most dramatic works were carved from wood. With the most monumental of these Johanaan and Midonz Moody challenged the usually small scale imposed by the nature of wood. Because of lack of money he had to acquire wood from a variety of unusual sources – scrounging from yards and in one case, carving an old railway sleeper. The work shows his profound understanding of the nature of wood. He uses the pattern of the grain with great sensitivity to enhance the forms of the works – the broad grain of elm for example accentuate the curves of Johanaan’s chest and belly.

It’s said that Moody wanted to become a sculptor after encountering the magnificent Egyptian figures in the British Museum. These and the carvings of a wide variety of ancient and non-western cultures continued to inspire his work. This is probably one of the elements that gave them a universal quality, resisting any obvious racial or ethnic identification.

Moody is quite a neglected artist although he did have moderate success during his life, especially in the 1930s when he was first carving and living in Paris. He was born in Jamaica in 1900 but came to Britain to become a dentist.

http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue4/reputationrestored.htm

http://www.iniva.org/harlem/ronald.html

Diane

Monday 16 July 2007

Equivalent VIII: Carl Andre(1966)

Carl Andre (1966)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Andre

In 1976, Tate was attacked by the British Press for buying a work by the American sculptor, Carl Andre. Headlines dismissed his brick sculpture, ‘Equivalent VIII' which cost the Tate £2,297 as a load of old rubbish, and brick-a- brack art. Encouraged by the media furore, publicity seeking stunts were performed outside the Tate at Milbank such as bricklayers making their own brick sculptures in a matter of minutes and at a fraction of the price of the original Carl Andre. Simon Wilson of Tate: ‘The greatest row that's ever been in the history of Tate over a work of art was certainly that which took place in the mid-1970s over Carl Andre's brick sculpture ‘Equivalent VIII'. This consisted of a hundred and twenty fire bricks, with a kind of pure rectangle. They don't have that dent in them which is called the ‘frog' as a normal house brick has, which is where you put the cement, and they are just simply laid together in two layers of sixty each in a rectangle. It offended deeply, the very entrenched notion that the value of a work of art resides to a large extent in the amount of work that the artist has put into it. People generally tend to see art as being craft, you know, or that the craft elements of being very, very important in art, the skill element if you like. Andre's ‘Equivalent VIII' has had an enormous amount written about it and it's been enormously discussed since Tate acquired it in the early 1970s You have to consider it as a work of art in the very long tradition of Abstract Art, which offer all by the time Andre made ‘Equivalent VIII' was fifty years old essentially.”

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=508

Diane