All Things Art & Photography
It’s not everyday that we get a new Van Gogh. Long thought to be a fake, Sunset at Montmajour has just been officially “discovered” as a Van Gogh original mostly because of new techniques the museums use to make these determinations. This one was painted by Vincent in Arles, in 1888 and is more of a traditional landscape composition but in terms of painting style is very much a Van Gogh.
via The NYTimes
Working in the vein of the abstract expressionist’s but mostly known for his work with crushed auto bodies John Chamberlain was a master sculptor who could turn the ugly into the sublime in a monumental way. Watch him work in a wheelchair on one of his last exhibitions.
Survey via The Guggenheim
Photography is a language and most important advances in the language/art of photography come from artists not photographers. ( See David Hockney for example)
Thomas Ruff is an exception to that rule. His entire career has been dedicated to challenging what we think a photograph is or could be. His recent photograms were not photograms at all but computer generated works based on the idea of photograms. Both the objects and the light in Ruff’s photograms derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program. He also did an entire series of images based on pixelated jpegs as well as a series of 3D and manipulated NASA Space images.
A survey of over 60 works are here.
A good interview about his photograms is here.
“For 20 years now, New York-based photographer Spencer Tunick has been creating human art installations all over the world, calling together volunteers by the hundreds or thousands, asking them to remove their clothes, and photographing them in massive groups. His philosophy is that “individuals en masse, without their clothing, grouped together, metamorphose into a new shape.” He aims to create an architecture of flesh, where the masses of human bodies blend with the landscape, or juxtapose with architecture. Collected here are images from several of his installations as they were being composed”.
Via The Atlantic
My favorite Chinese artist’s don’t copy tired and old western styles of painting like Zhu Jinshi (who for some reason is a very successful painter). I like Chinese Artists who exhibit their Chinese DNA in their work.You can’t help but love these subversive self-portraits about Yue Minjun’s cynical take on the “new” China. The kind of artist you want to have a beer with.
Immediately humorous and sympathetic, Yue Minjun’s paintings offer a light-hearted approach to philosophical inquiry and contemplation of existence. Drawing connotations to the disparate images of the Laughing Buddha and the inane gap toothed grin of Alfred E. Newman, Yue’s self-portraits have been describe by theorist Li Xianting as “a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China.”
via Galleri s . e