Bahuleyan.C.B

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Bahuleyan.C.B 
Untitled 
Medium : acrylic on canvas 
Year: 2009 
Size: 48x36
BAHULEYAN.C.B born in 1972,cheruthuruthy,thrissur, Kerala, India 
#art #painting #conceptual #popularartist #bahuleyancb #artville #artgallery

Reena Saina Kallat

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Reena Saini Kallat
Title: Synonym A 
Year: 2009
Medium: Painted rubberstamps on acrylic
Size: 72 x 48”

Reena Saini Kallat is an artist wholly absorbed by the never-ending cycle of nature, and the fragility of the human condition in its hands. All of her works, whether installations, photographs, paintings or sculptures, reflect the constant shifts between building and collapsing movements, birth, death and rebirth and defeat and resurgence. There seems no greater inspiration in her works than the undefeatable and un-fatigable 'prakriti,' or nature. A force that is constantly creating and destroying, never resting as one world replaces another, only to end eventually itself.

Reena shows us how these dualities are functioning all the time, and how we are blind to them, by either illustrating the transience of our consumerist culture or by showing us how important it is that givens like food and shelter not be taken for granted.

Kallat gives the mundane a surreal twist, when she paints cars and houses in filled balloons, or towering structures made out of slices of bread faced by androgynous and fantastic creatures. "Balloons are fragile so putting these aspirational things inside them is a way of putting across how ephemeral are the objects we most chase," she says.

Babies and children also feature provocatively in several of Kallat's works. All these works touch on motifs found throughout her art - the cycle of life, and images presented in a highly exotic and unusual manner.

Kallat graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1996, and belongs to the new generation of Indian artists who have successfully reinterpreted and given a new facet to abstract art. In one of her more recent installations, a part of the 2002 Kala Ghoda Art Fest, she used beach sand to create seven uterine forms on the floor representative of the seven islands that came together to make the city of Mumbai. This piece, called the 'Seven Faces of Dust,' once again represents the transitory nature of all the things we long for, and of our momentary lives as well - it is to be effaced after the showing, and the sand returned to the beach.
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #portrait #contemporaryartist #popularart #reenasainakallat#artville #artgallery

Baiju Parthan

Artville Artist Of the Day 
Baiju Parthan
Title: Soft Graffiti
Year: 2010
Medium: Acrylic and gel on canvas
Size: 47.5 x 71.5 in

Initially, Baiju Parthan resisted a career as an artist. "In Kerala," he explains, "you are what your work is. And in Kerala's Communist schema, the artist is at the lowest rung of society." Parthan began as an engineer, but was drawn into the world of art in 1974, when he stumbled onto a book detailing the history of Western art. "With that book," he says, "the chronology and the institution of art became known to me." He became familiar with the movements of Impressionism, Expressionism, and so forth, and this new knowledge nourished his interest in painting.

"Painting gave me self worth," says Parthan. "In that pictorial space, I was king. I began to define myself through this act of painting: It was the only place where I could 'be'." Excited by the prospect of studying art, Parthan went to Goa and enrolled in a five-year course in the fine arts. Parthan's course, running from 1978-1983, overlapped with the final influx of Westerners coming to Goa in search of enlightenment.

"There were Germans, Brits, Italians - all sorts of people, mostly from Europe. I came across these hippies, and became exposed to a whole range of alternate world views," says Parthan, adding "I had always thought that reality is one unified thing."

Through one of his Western acquaintances, Parthan came across Sartre's "Age of Reason," a book that he describes as a major influence. Also affecting his work at the time was Goa's "soft drug culture". This, too, helped Parthan explore new ways of experiencing the world.

Parthan began to study the Indian mystical arts, exploring tantra, ritual arts, and Indian mythology. Simultaneously, Western art continued to exert an influence. Parthan names Larry Rivers, Miro, and the Cubist painters as important models.

In the early 1980s, Parthan decided to quit painting. "I felt like a missionary for Western art," he explains. Instead, he enrolled in a course on comparative mythology at Bombay University, and began working as a writer and illustrator. He returned to painting in the early 1990s, when he began to explore the imagery of mandalas and Tibetan tangas. These traditional subjects were balanced by his reading in post-modern theorists. The latter enabled him to "recontextualize things from my immediate environment. The post-modern theorists have accepted the localization of reality. We're now reconciled to the idea of an individual reality. Art is about local realities. Personally, I live in a post-colonial concept of space. The world exists as a flux."

In 1995, Parthan began to study computers, learning hardware engineering, building his own machine, and creating programs. "I didn't want to be afraid of technology," says Parthan. "The machine has become the Other for humans, and it raises philosophical issues that we have to grapple with." Parthan is especially interested in the influence of technology on religious beliefs, the implications of genetic engineering, and the possibilities of post-humanism (i.e. the development of symbiotic relations between men and machines).
Based on:
Catalogue by Ranjit Hoskote
Interview by Sylee Gore
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #popularart #contemporaryartist#baijuparthan #artville #artgallery

Subodh Gupta

Artville Artist Of The Day
Subodh Gupta
Untitled
Year: 2009
Medium: Stainless steel
Size: Height: 47 in (119.4 cm)
Width: 42 in (106.7 cm)
Depth: 17.5 in (44.4 cm)

In the early 1990s, several significant local and global socioeconomic transformations were set in motion, which manifestly altered the lives of people in India, particularly its growing middle-class. As geographical borders became increasingly nominal and the Indian economy opened its doors and windows to the world, the aspirations and mobility of the country's newly-affluent middle class soared to previously unimagined heights .

Through his art, executed in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, performance, video and photography, Subodh Gupta seeks to negotiate these changes, examining both the successes and failures they resulted in. In his large-scale, almost Duchampian installations of ready-mades like the present lot, the artist charts the frictions that have resulted from recent social and geographical migrations of 'The Great Indian Middle-Class', raising issues of identity, stereotyping, consumerism, the assignation of subjective values to particular goods, and the persistence of unique patterns of production and consumption in India. In so doing, the artist effectively underscores the distinctiveness and complexity of each country and community's development, negating single-model hypotheses.

To reflect India's unique growth and to voice his concerns about the new and undefined interstitial spaces that have come to exist between modernity and tradition, city and country, Gupta has fittingly chosen one of India's most unique commodities as his medium: the shiny stainless-steel kitchenware that is a familiar sight in homes and stores across the country. "For more than ten years, Subodh Gupta has been using the common steel goods of Indian kitchens as one of the primary materials for his art…Outside of India, in the world capitals of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, where culture is capital and artistic expression is the highest form of entrepreneurship, these steel objects look to be revelatory, as they certainly are in their superb encapsulation of form, function, materiality and economic rationality. Inside of India, these objects may appear as unsophisticated, old-fashioned, awkward and, to many, embarrassing and indicative of the inherited weight of the past (including poverty, the caste system, rampant corruption and a lugubrious Socialist State). The success of Subodh's sculptures using these objects is not this either/or situation…but that their meaning and reception in either locale emphasizes this crisis of identity India is now experiencing, both for itself and how it is perceived by others" (Peter Nagy, "Subodh Gupta: The Metaphorical Sublime", START.STOP, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2007, not paginated).
courtesy:saffronart
#art #sculpture #stilllife #steel #popularart #contemporaryartist#subodhgupta #artville #artgallery

CFJohn

Artville Artist Of The Day
CF.John
Title: Untitled
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 35"x36"
Year: 2010

C. F. John, one of southern India’s promising artists, is an ardent nature lover. His native state of Kerala and its lovely landscapes have enriched the artist’s visual angle. Apart from being an artist, he is also a social activist; he has lived and among the tribal people. The artist finds his inspiration from those who are close to nature.

Becoming an artist was a long cherished dream for him. He was obsessed with nature since his childhood, gazing at the twinkling stars at night, going fishing after midnight appealed to his artistic sensibility. Being with nature gave him a solace. For him nature was always the driving force of energy, an energy that he had experienced in the lap of nature.

He seeks to define the relationship of art with time and tries to find out whether or not art is bound by the present? John’s works have several pathways for longer journeys, not essentially visual but physical, belonging to different times, spaces and eras, all at once, according to the viewer’s preparedness.

In one of his projects titled ‘Walls of Memories’ he collaborated with fellow artist T. M. Aziz and dancer Tripura Kashyap. This project was centered around two dried up wells at Visthar on the outskirts of the city near Narayana pura village, Bangalore

According the artist, an unused car can be dismantled and sold as spare parts, a ruined building can be demolished, but what do we do with a dry well? Is it an empty space to be filled or a space filled with memories?

“My works are contextual but not topical,” he says. His work has a freshness that is not constrained by academic intrusions. John’s approach to his work is devoid of canonistic estrangements and is derived from a thought process based on his socio culture activist tendencies –refined and sensitively filtered down to basics. This approach has created a body of works that seeks an imagery that is positively individualistic.

He believes in celebrating the uniqueness of the materials he uses to paint. The works by John are broadly under two titles: “Fibres of Hope” and “Fragile Memories. In these works the material is an integral part of art. The material does not efface itself in being subservient to mere usefulness in making art. The art sets forth the material and the material sets forth the art, as the temple sculpture sets forth the stone and the stone, the sculpture. “Fragile Memories” is based on reflections and experiences of fibres, more specifically reflections on Indian national flag.

Since 1986 C. F. John has been organizing Art workshops and exhibitions on specific themes such as ‘the violence of modern-day living’, the worlds views of indigenous communities,’ celebration of cultural pluralism,’

The recent series of paintings C. F .John working on is titled ‘Four Corners of a Line’.

The paintings from ‘Four Corners of a Line’ focus on the negotiation and balancing we make with gravity and speed. This negotiation and balancing is a metaphor for human relations, connecting one another and with the earth. In this balancing act or connectedness we experience and celebrate beauty, love, understanding and freedom. This is the balance of planes, of geometrical lines and shapes, as well as of the rational and emotional in human existence. Here the emotions that are dynamic also meet with its stillness / silence.
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #figurative #contemporaryartist #popularart #cfjohn #artville#artgallery

Sudhir Patwardhan

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Sudhir Patwardhan
Title: Street Corner
Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Sudhir Patwardhan’s works, particularly his large format canvases such as the present lot, carry forward the simultaneously intimate and complex relationship that he has shared with his city, Mumbai, for several decades now. Today, Mumbai and its suburban sister, Thane, where the self-taught artist resides, form one of the largest, most congested, and certainly most contradictory conurbations in the world. As fellow Mumbai artist, Jitish Kallat, explains, it is “…at once dynamic and dysfunctional…a heady hodgepodge of languages, castes, religions and class difference. Life in the gargantuan metropolis goes on, precariously balancing commerce and corruption, affluence and abject poverty, swelling real estate prices and rampant homelessness”
courtesy:saffronart

#art #painting #cityscape #popularart #contemporaryartist#sudhirpatwardhan #artville #artschool

Takashi Murakami

Artville Artist Of The Day 
TAKASHI MURAKAMI
Titile: Tan Tan Bo—In Communication,
Year: 2014
Medium: Acrylic, gold leaf, and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel
Size: 141 3/4 x 141 3/4 inches 

Takashi Murakami was born in 1962 in Tokyo, and received his BFA, MFA and PhD from the Tokyo University of the Arts (formerly the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). He founded the Hiropon factory in Tokyo in 1996, which later evolved into Kaikai Kiki, an art production and art management corporation. In addition to the production and marketing of Murakami's art and related work, Kaikai Kiki functions as a supportive environment for the fostering of emerging artists. Murakami is also a curator, a cultural entrepreneur, and a critical observer of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, he organized a paradigmatic exhibition of Japanese art titled “Superflat,” which traced the origins of contemporary Japanese visual pop culture in historical Japanese art. He has continued this work in subsequent impactful exhibitions such as “Coloriage” (Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 2002) and “Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subcultures” (Japan Society, New York, 2005). In 2011, he organized the “New Day: Artists for Japan” international charity auction at Christie’s New York in response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
courtesy:gagosian

#art #painting #japaneseartist #contemporary #takashimurakami #artville#artgallery

Manisha Gera Baswani

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Artist: Manisha Gera Baswani 
Year: 2009
Title: Never ending story
Medium: Watercolor tea water pencil colors dry pastel guache on paper body 

Manisha Gera Baswani, a modern day artist brings forth the Age old Indian miniature, folk & wall painting tradition into the Contemporary art language. Her paintings draw inspiration from the iconoclastic images--be it from the pop world of Elvis, James Bond, Pizza to the Geet Govind depiction of Krishna.

Manisha has successfully integrated the use of space, flat use of colour, decorative friezes together with multi-dimensional perspectives employed in Indian miniatures to her advantage with Modern day elements of a "Hin-glish" culture. Her series of works span from Dial A Pizza, James Bond in a Nathdwara Haweli to her current foray in oils and watercolours on Space-scapes and Elvis Presley.

Manisha has trained under the guidance of her Guru A. Ramachadaran, a renowned veteran Indian Artist. She went on a French Government scholarship to study in Paris in 1993 and has also been awarded the National Scholarship and Junior Fellowship from the Government of India.

She has exhibited extensively in India and abroad and her work is part of the National Gallery of Modern Art.
courtesy:saffronart
#art #painting #mixmedia #contemporaryartist #popularart#artville#artgallery

Bharti Kher

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Bharti Kher
Title: The rinky-dink panther
Medium: Bindis on fiberglass
Size: 43 x 24 x 24 cm
Year: 2004

Bharti Kher’s is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her art. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.

Presently, Kher uses the ‘bindi’, a dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads, as the central motif and most basic building block in her work. Bharti Kher often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, the mass-produced, yet traditional ornaments, as ‘action paintings’. Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-coloured bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. The artist is also known for her collection of wild and unusual resin-cast sculptures, embellished with bindis, and her digital photography.
Courtesy:saffronart

#art #installation #bindis #contemporaryartist #popularart #bhartikher #artville#artschool

Shanthamani M

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Artist: Shanthamani M
Tittle:Kali 
Year:2012

Shantamani Master who was born in Bangalore in 1967 obtained her Bachelores degree in Art from CAVA, Mysore and Master of Arts (fine) in painting from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda.

Here is an artist statement on her current exhibition, Fluid Fragmnets. "Fluid Fragments is an installation of paper works revolving around female body displayed in layers. Today's medico- technological innovations like Genetic engineering, M.R.I and Gamma imaging have introduced new techniques of non-invasive examination and stirred new interest amongst us to look inwards, into our own body. Body has been put back on the examination table - every inch has been dissected and measured. Hence, the body technologically, conceptually and aesthetically becomes very fragmented; our image of the body no longer remains as a whole.

These techniques of M.R.I and Gamma imaging virtually slice every inch of live human body without touching. This fragmented way of seeing the body layer after layer interested me. When I applied the same technique of layering the body conceptually and aesthetically in my work it opened up tremendous possibilities. Possibilities of dealing with many issues of life, especially of female body in one go. The possibility of parallel opening of many aspects of life - like women's body as a metaphor, female body and its gender politics, and the way body is seen in religion, law and technology. When I combined with this the process of bringing out my own experience it ended in a rich outcome. Being a woman by birth and an artist I have observed many woman's attitude of looking inwards; a woman's compulsions of being highly conscious of her own body and the way she introspects the changes that the age brings was the reason I chose a female form.

Separating the painting from the wall I have devised a display pattern where viewer walks in between these layers. This offers an experience of being part of the work for a viewer; it reduces the gap between an onlooker and the displayed object. It's an experience of traveling inwards and responding to the issues in and around the body."
courtesy:saffronart
#art #installation #kali #popularart #contemporaryartist #shanthamani#artville #artschool

Giji Scaria

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Artist: Giji Scaria 
Title: Chronicle of the Shores Foretold 
Gigi’s giant bell installation at Kochi biennale
Year: 2014 

Gigi the artist has always done things differently with a cynical twist to urbanism and chaos and added his satirical slant to his genius. Delhi-based Malayali Gigi Scaria’s work drills into history & myth into his goant bell at Kochi.
Viewed from a distance and without referencing local history or folklore, the giant metal bell on the placid seaside would appear like an installation that simply heralds the experimental spirit of the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB).
That impression could deepen as the visitor at the 108-day extravaganza gets to know more about its themes and symbolisms that range from extolling the traditional dock-work techniques of Khalasis in Kerala to a colonial-era fable about a weighty bell that sank in a European ship while headed for the Malabar Coast.
‘Chronicle of the Shores Foretold’ is a performance-based work of sculpture which pools in hyperlink histories and myths which artist Gigi Scaria has sought to liberally interpret about labour, religion and maritime trade that have been woven into the socio-cultural fabric of his native state.
As a Malayali based in Delhi for two decades, 41-year-old Scaria has made the small dock in a water-front venue of KMB’14, lending a real-time value to his artwork that is among the 100 main exhibits at the second edition of the biennale which casts 94 artists from 30 countries. Fixed in the backyard of Pepper House, an 18th-century Dutch-style complex, that had been a point of trade between India and foreign lands, the 2.5-tonne bell hoisted by bamboo poles finds its place today just furlongs opposite an International Container Trans-shipment Terminal which is hardly four years old.
Moulded and welded in Coimbatore of east-central Tamil Nadu, the bell, which is 13 feet tall and measures a diameter of 16 feet at the base, has the Arabian Sea water jutting out through a string of holes drilled into it. This, Scaria notes, is a symbol of the times that Kochi has passed through, narrative of the changes in its character owing to medieval invasions and new-age development among others.
The bell was installed on the eve of KMB’14, which began on December 12, by Mappila Khalasis from upstate Malabar. “They are one traditional community who have been largely unaffected by change of labour equations in the era we life in,” notes Scaria, who has done his Masters in Fine Arts from Jamia Milia University in the national capital. “I sought their help in installing my work to also highlight the value of labour in the present times defined by easy pleasure.”
Thus, last Thursday, Khalasis from Beypore Coast off Kozhikode erected the bell with a crane—making it a performance by septuagenarian dockworker Hameed A N A and his team.
“We are a community of contemporary relevance,” points out Hameej, 77, noting that Khalasis were employed in the rescue operations of Kerala’s 1988 Peruman railway tragedy, where they brought up compartments that had sunk into the Ashtamudi Lake near Kollam after the train plunged off a bridge, killing 105 passengers on July 8.
Today, ‘Chronicles of the Shore Foretold’ stands against the backdrop of vibrant movements of the cranes at the container terminal in tiny Vallarpadam Island. The backdrop also looks busy with different kinds of ships and boats—both passenger and fishing—plying up and down the sea.
Scaria, a native of Kothanellore off Christian-dominated Kottayam, notes that the “bell-sinking myth” associated with churches in his central Travancore belt has also contributed to his installation. “Even today, there is this belief that the bell emerges annually from the deep sea on the festival day, and tolls on its own,” he adds with a smile.
Much like that ring, his biennale installation (whose titled was inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold’) awakens dormant memories of a community—in fact, for people across the world.
courtesy:timesofindia

#art #installation #giantbell #seashore #popularart #contemporaryartist#gijiscaria #artville #artschool

Azis TM

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Azis TM
Untitled (landscape)
Medium: Oil on canvas 
Size: 60 x 68 in (2part)
Year: 2005

I grew up in Trichur, Kerala, famous for its many temple festivals. For a child, Kerala is one of the best places to develop as an artist. Stunning landscapes that blossom quite naturally on your canvas the moment you dip your brush in paint surround one !so it was, I guess, natural to move to Thiruvananthapuram to my Bachelor’s in Fine Arts, and equally logical to move from the extreme south to Delhi for my Master’s! As an artist, exhibitions are an essential part of life. Solo and group shows have been regular since those college “chai-samosa” days. Shows that brought friends and critics to my studio, with appreciation and suggestions, alike they continued to inspire my experiments with figures. Some of my creative out pourings have adorned their homes and offices. Quite a few have become friends. But most others have a part of me – for a true painter is as attached to his works as he is to his children. Even though I don’t know them as intimately as I would have liked. Living and working in Bangalore, I suppose just doesn’t permit me the time to get to know all my aficionados. Perhaps in another time, another place I wistfully think, perhaps I will know them eventually, perhaps not yet I am content a part of me lives with them.
courtesy:artmajeur

#art #oilpainting #popularart #contemporaryartist #azistm #artville #artschool

K.G.Subramanyam

Artville Artist Of The Day 
K.G. Subramanyam
Title: Couple
Medium: Reverse painting on acrylic sheet 
Size: 24 x 36inch 
Year: 2014

K.G. Subramanyan
Painter, sculptor, muralist, K G Subramanyan was born in a village in north Kerala in 1924. While studying economics at Presidency College, Madras, Subramanyan became involved in the freedom struggle. He was imprisoned and debarred from government colleges. The turning point of his life came when he joined Kala Bhavan at Visva Bharati in Santiniketan in 1944. He studied at kala Bhavan till 1948.

Between 1951 and 1959, Subramanyan was a lecturer in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. During 1955 and 1956, he wen to the Slade School of Art in London to study as a British Council research scholar. From 1959 to 1961, Subramanyan was deputy director (design) at All India Handloom Board. Bombay. He continued to be a design consultant till 1966. He went back to Baroda as reader in painting between 1961 and 1965.

From 1966 to 1980, Subramanyan was professor of painting at Baroda. He went to New York as J D Rockefeller 111 fellow during 1966 and 1967. From 1968 to 1974, he acted as the dean of the faculty of fine arts, Baroda. In 1975 and 1976, he attended World Craft council meets as a delegate. In 1976, he was a visiting lecturer at various Canadian universities. In 1980 Subramanyan moved back to Santiniketan and till 1989 was professor of painting at Kala Bhavan. During 1987 and 1988 ' he lived at Oxford as Christensen Fellow in St. Catherine's College. In 1989, he was appointed professor emeritus at Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati.

A theoretician and art historian, Subramanyan has written extensively on Indian art. His writings have formed a foundation for the study of contemporary Indian art. He has also written some delightful fables for children and illustrated them.

A mm of multifaceted talents, Subramanyan demolished banners between artist and artisan. He experimented with weaving and toy-making. He also reinvested several mediums earlier used in Indian art. For example, the terracotta mural and glass painting found a new lease of life with his experiments.

The artist gave the human figure a new dimension. Drawing upon the rich resources of myth, memory and tradition, Subramanyan tempers romanticism with wit and eroticism. He has received the Kalidas Samman in 198 1, the Padma Shree in 1975, a D. Litt. (Honoris Causa) from the Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta in 1992 and became a Fellow of Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi in 1993.
courtesy:contemporaryindianart

#art #reversepainting #popularart #contemporaryartist#kgsubramanian #artville #artschool

Jeff Koons

Artville Artist Of The Day
Jeff Koons,
Title: Tulips,
Year: 1995–98,
Medium: Oil on canvas,
Size: 282.7 x 331.9 cm,
European private collection © Jeff Koons Photo: Jeff Koons Studio /Tom Powel

Jeff Koons (b.1955) is one of the best known artists today, but he is often derided for the gaudiness of his art. To repair what it considers an injustice, the prestigious Beyeler Foundation in Riehen stages a show that is powerful, playful and surprisingly pleasing.

“Jeff Koons brings great art to the general public. He is highly inventive in terms of ideas and extremely relevant as an artist,” declared the usually reserved Sam Keller, director of the Beyeler Foundation.

“This is a dream come true, an amazing adventure, one of the most memorable in my life,” he said of the collaboration with the artist. Coming from the man who directed Art Basel for 15 years until 2007 and founded Art Basel Miami, his enthusiasm is not taken lightly.

The Beyeler Foundation, Switzerland’s most-visited art museum, has succeeded in bringing together 50 works by Koons, which is no small feat considering that most have been loaned from private collections and many weigh several tons. The result is an exhibition where the exuberant art of Koons unfolds surprisingly well into the cool elegance of the Renzo Piano building.

Three distinct periods of the artist’s work are on display, all variations on the theme of the “ready-made” inspired by Marcel Duchamp, the French artist of urinal fame. Duchamp’s idea that art is in the eye of the beholder is central to Koons’ strategy. He said that his objects require our presence “to exist as art”, and that they are there “to expand our possibilities”.
courtesy: art-folio.ch

#art #painting #tulips #popularart #contemporaryartist #jeffkoons #artville#artschool

Vivek Vilasini

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Artist: Vivek Vilasini 
Title: You cannot of course, believe all this......
Year: 2013
Medium: Digital print on paper
Image size: 57 x 90 in

Born in 1964, in Trishur, Kerala, Vivek Vilasini trained as a Marine Radio Officer at the All India Marine College in Kochi, and then obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Kerala University in 1987 before turning to art and studying sculpture from traditional Indian craftspeople.

In his work Vilasini examines our existing social structures, adapting various expressions of cultural identity prevalent in society today to raise questions about the continually changing global scenario that every individual struggles to keep pace with. Vilasini’s large-format photographs evoke delicate ironies that impact existing ideologies, and influence the cultural and social consciousness of the viewer.
courtesy:saffronart

#art #digitalprint #popularart #contemporaryartist #vivekvilasini #artvile#artschool

Binoy Varghese

Artville Artist Of The Day
Binoy Varghese
Untitled 2
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 60" x 60"
Year: 2007

Binoy is an artist of few words who is adept at expressing his thoughts and concerns through painting. His earlier work included images of saints, churches and other familiar objects as well as self-portraits depicting torment due to violence prevalent in the society. Making a clear departure in his current work which appears more matured and measured, he creates carefully planned compositions in fine imagery though rotating around the same themes. The continuity of thought and basic tenure of the current work is seen to turn more intense and complex in its detailing as his protagonist often a young girl or a child, with an innocent look, smiling and playful, despite having been uprooted from his/her base or home. The accompanying foliage often in the background and occasionally in the foreground helps to soften the blow and make the alien locale appear more acceptable and adaptable. Social issues close to the artist’s heart are some of the fundamental concerns that are recurrently featured in his colourful and picturesque canvases mostly in large format that impart a distinct humane and compassionate oeuvre.
courtesy:binoyvarghese

Murali Chee

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Artist: Murali Cheeroth  
Untitled
Size: 122x213cm
Medium: oil on canvas

Murali Cheeroth (b.1966, Kerala)
Cheeroth received his BFA and MFA in Painting from Shantiniketan and was the recipient of the Kerala State Laid Kara Akademi Award (1998). He also held a Junior National Research Fellowship from 1997-1999. Cheeroth looks to development, re-construction and infrastructure as subject matter for his bold visual language. His work often engages with the notion of an urban identity as he examines the ever-changing interstices of local and global identities.
courtesy:indigoblueart
#art #painting #popularart #contemporaryartist #artville #artschool