Archives For Art

Once upon a time in the art world if you started your career selling your work at a home furnishing chain store it might have been a career killer. In the past year Restoration Hardware has opened an Art Gallery in Manhattan showcasing a large stable of artists. One of them, Samantha Thomas, is doing work far beyond her years and really reminds me of some of the works by the late, great artist Antoni Tapies ( see image below).

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OCRE I NEGRE AMB TELA ENCOLADA (OCHRE AND BLACK WITH PASTED ON CLOTH) by ANTONI TÀPIES (B. 1923). Image via Christies

Samantha Thomas has a more intimate relationship to fabric when sculpting it into bold, undulating abstract works that deftly and powerfully intersect the worlds of painting and sculpture in a series she calls: LandscapificationIf she keeps up this type of amazing output my bet is she will not be at RH much longer… 

 

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Samantha Thomas 8

All images via RH Contemporary

 

The Art of Samantha Thomas

Just caught Brian Sanders’ Junk new work Suspended for the 2014 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. I have not had this much fun since La Fura Dels Baus at BAM years ago. It’s a great show that mixes much humor, art, eroticism, gender bending role playing, trapeze and the politics of violence. I was not bored for one minute.

Just go!!!

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Fringe Arts 2014: Brian Sanders’ Suspended

With his beautiful, crazy, confusing, monumental and must see retrospective winding down at MOMA I could not help thinking about the final project Sigmar Polke spent the most time on. Forget that everyone has found it impossible to decode his enormously confusing body of work (see review links below). It turns out Polke use to be a stained glass artist and he spent the last 3 years of his life designing stained glass windows for the Grossmünster Church in Zurich using a variety of techniques including thinly sliced geodes. Much like the MOMA retrospective that Peter Schjeldahl calls, “the most dramatic (and important) museum show of the century to date”, the final stained glass works are a wonder. 

Sigmar Polke

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Sigmar Polke Elijah Chariot

 All Images via http://www.grossmuenster.ch/polke.html

 

A PDF (from the church web site) explaining the entire project can be viewed here.

via Sigmar Polke – Church Windows Grossmünster Zürich from ikonoTV on Vimeo.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/shock-artist

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/many-colored-glass-2

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117806/sigmar-polkes-alibis-reviewed-jed-perl

http://galleristny.com/2014/03/connecting-polkes-dots-moma-decodes-the-work-of-a-tricky-postwar-master/

 

 

The Final Art Work of Sigmar Polke

Gabriele Rothemann: Bird Cages 2009

video with sound, 6 min (looped)

via http://www.gabrielerothemann.com

Can an untrained person paint a Vermeer?

This is a wonderful and quirky film about a very smart inventor with a truly unique Johannes Vermeer obsession. Maybe one of the best documentaries concerning art and optics (and especially the way the lens and eventually photography has completely changed painting and drawing forever). David Hockney is consulted in this film because of his brilliant book Secret Knowledge which explores how optics changed painting forever (and thus dispelling most of the mythical “great painters” in art history).

 

 

 

Film Review: Tim’s Vermeer