Sudarshan Shetty

Artville artist of the day: Sudarshan Shetty

Title: Lost Bodies
Year: 2007
Size: 71.5 x 47 in | 181.6 x 119.4 cm
Medium: Mixed media on Canvas

Sudarshan Shetty's body of work is animated by the twin themes of spectacle and disenchantment, idealism and actuality. The fact that these concepts are frequently at odds with each other has rendered the artist's output, whether painting, sculpture, photography or installation, particularly engaging. "Many of his works evoke strongly a fleeting memory of another space, other interiors, long lost except to that special faculty of memory that we all possess," (Radhika Desai, "All that is solid melts into air", Af-fair: 15 Contemporary Indian Artists, 1x1 Art Gallery, Dubai, 2008, pg. 57).

In Lost Bodies, a surreal architectural interior with an absurd rendering of a skeletal tyrannosaur - a common occurrence in the artist's body of work - evokes the dual dichotomy of spectacle and emptiness, which critic Anupa Mehta calls "a poetic of loss." (Anupa Mehta, "Unsteady Equilibrium", India 20: Conversations with Contemporary Artists, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2007, pg. 188).

"For over a decade now, he has been fascinated by the mechanics of toys and mechanized objects. Drawing upon the skill of craftsmen and technicians, Shetty creates large, yet immensely fragile sculptures: the evocation of unsteadiness is as intentional as the precarious balance of these gargantuan creatures" (Ibid., pg. 188).

Courtest: www.saffronart.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #sudarshanshetty #mixedmediaoncanvas #mixedmedia #art #artville

Yusuf Arakkal

Artville artist of the day: Yusuf Arakkal

Untitled
Year: 2000
Size: 121.9 x 121.9 cm. (48 x 48 in.)
Medium: Oil on Canvas

His early abstract paintings with colors reflecting the superficial glamour of city life were followed in the mid-' 70s by compositions with wheels, drainage pipes and other geometrisized structures which referred to wretched living conditions of the urban poor. Soon his concern with people and wider social issues made him focus on the human figure, though always seen as bound with, even defined by the environment. After a few canvases of a partly super realistic nature dealing with drought, famine, untouchability, etc. He reached his constant style which has a link with a realist basis but generalizes it with a graceful, if non-specific roughness. One of such paintings depicting inhabitants of pipes and pavements won him a national award in 1983. Arakkal works in series of related images- from sensual, icon-like ladies to sick in hospital beds and wheelchairs, urchins playing with kites and paper masks, ironic images of paper politicians and empty chairs bearing human presence. "Throughout he has depicted working -class and village people set against dilapidated walls, among shaky planar divisions, hazy texturing and diffused to sharp and vibrating arbitrary chiaroscuro, all partially enclosed by the frames-within-aflame motif. His figures in moods ranging from vaguely atmospheric to restless, dejection, quiet joy and sensuousness, are flattened as well as plastic, emerging from and nearly dissolving into their backgrounds. Arakkal has worked also with sculpture in wood, stone, ceramic and bronze, did collages, graphics and water colors. He writes poetry and articles on art.

Courtest: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #yusufarakkal #oiloncanvas #oilpainting #art #artville

Fred Tomaselli

Artville artist of the day: Fred Tomaselli

Title: Untitled

Year: 2013

Size: 60 x 60 in. 

Medium: Mixed media and resin on wood pane

Fred Tomaselli makes exquisitely rendered paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin. Medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants are combined with images cut from books and magazines: flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs and noses, for example, are worked into dazzling patterns that spread over the surface of the painting like a beautiful virus or growth.

Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe. “It is my ultimate aim”, he says, “to seduce and transport the viewer in to space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.” Tomaselli has also incorporated allegorical figures into his work – in Untitled (Expulsion) (2000), for example, he borrows the Adam and Eve figures from Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1426-27), and in Field Guides (2003) he creates his own version of the grim reaper. His figures are described anatomically so that their organs and veins are exposed in the manner of a scientific drawing. He writes that his “inquiry into utopia/dystopia – framed by artifice but motivated by the desire for the real – has turned out to be the primary subject of my work”.

Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica, California in 1956. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including ‘Open Ends’, MoMA, New York (2000), the Berlin Biennale (2001), the Liverpool Biennial (2002), the Whitney Biennial (2004), the 5th Site Santa Fe Biennial (2004, ‘Ecstasy’, LA MoCA (2006), ‘Prospect 1’, New Orleans Biennale (2008), ‘Universal Code’ Powerplant, Toronto and ‘The World in The Body’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009), ‘Between Two Worlds’, Kunstmuseum Thun and ‘The Beauty of Distance’, the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2011), 1st Kiev Biennale Arsenale(2014). Solo exhibitions include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (1999), Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida (2001), Site Santa Fe, New Mexico (2001), Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York (2003), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2004), IMMA, Dublin (2005), The Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts (2005), the Aspen Art Museum (2009), Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York and Frances Tang Teaching Museum, New York (2010), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2014).

Courtesy: www.artnet.com

#artvilleartistoftheday #art #fredtomaselli #mixedmedia #resinonwood #artville

CF John

Artville artist of the day: C. F. John

Title: Still and Silent - Lady
Year: 2010
Size: 18 X 22 Inches
Medium: Mixed media on canvas

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.

Some of his major exhibits include a solo show at Alliance Francaise, Bangalore (1991); ‘Celebrating Cultural Pluralities, workshop and exhibition of spiral painting, Ravindrakalakshetra, Bangalore (1993); ‘From the Nether, the ceaseless Dance,’ collective works, Kochi, Kozhikode and Kunnur (1993); Silence of Furies and Sorrows, workshop and exhibition of installations, Venkatappa Gallery, Bangalore (1995); solo Show in Mainz and Saarbrucken, Germany (1997). Apart from this he had his shows with other artists in France and London too. He also had his shows in Indian Habitat Center as well as Siri Fort Auditorium, Delhi.

Courtesy: www.saffronart.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #cfjohn #mixedmedia #art #artville

Anish Kapoor

Artville artist of the day: Anish Kapoor 

Title: Non-Object (Spire)
Year: 2008
Size: 119 x 118.13 x 118.13 in.
Medium: Stainless steel

Anish Kapoor (British/Indian, b.1954) is regarded as one of the most prominent British-Indian sculptors of his generation. He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s; Kapoor is well known for his intense, almost spiritual, outdoor and indoor site-specific works in which he marries a Modernist sense of pure materiality with a fascination for the manipulation of form and the perception of space. Kapoor, who was born in Bombay and moved to London in the 1970s to study art, first worked on abstract and organic sculptures using fundamental natural materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment, and plaster. His sculptures extend formal minimalistic precepts through catching the viewer’s attention with rich colors, sensuously refined surfaces, and optical effects of depth and dimension.

Since the mid-1990s, Kapoor has explored the notion of the void by creating works that seem to recede into the distance, disappear into walls or floors, or otherwise destabilize assumptions about the physical world. Through transforming properties of objects and materials, Kapoor’s recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture, design, and art. He received great critical attention in the United States for Cloud Gate, a permanent 110-ton sculpture of polished stainless steel created for Chicago’s Millennium Park in 2006, and for Sky Mirror, a 35-foot-diameter concave mirror shown in the same year at Rockefeller Center in New York.

Kapoor has reached international status, with solo exhibitions at venues around the world, such as the Tate and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In 2015, a major exhibition of his work was presented in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and received the Turner Prize in the following year. Kapoor’s work can be found in collections worldwide, notably in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Prada Art Foundation in Milan, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

He is represented by various galleries including Leslie Sacks Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA and Grosvenor Gallery in London.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #anishkapoor #sculpture #stainlesssteel #art #artville

Julian Schnabel

Artville artist of the day: Julian Schnabel

Title: Untitled (Yogi)
Year: 2008
Size: 121 1/2 x 91 1/2 in
Medium: Paintings, Spraypaint, resin on polyester

Julian Schnabel (America, b.1951) is an artist, filmmaker, musician, and writer, best known in the art community for his hasty rise to fame after the exhibition of his famous Plate Paintings at Mary Boone Gallery in 1979. Encouraged to draw by his mother during his childhood in Brooklyn, Schnabel’s artistic interest piqued as a teenager when he encountered the art of the Mexican muralists. After earning his BFA at Houston University in 1973, Schnabel enrolled in the very prestigious Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum, and began his career as an artist.

Rapidly achieving notoriety in the late 1970s, Schnabel became the infamous star of the internationalist Neo-Expressionist movement in the 1980s, with his works on unusual materials such as velvet, and garnering as much attention through his brash remarks and self-aggrandization as through his art. Along with fellow Neo-Expressionists David Salle (American, b.1952), Eric Fischl (American, b.1948), and Sigmar Polke (German, 1941–2010), Schnabel’s art can be seen as a reaction against the cool compositions of Minimalism and Conceptualism, in its rough texture and violently expressive return to addressing the human condition in painting. In 1996, he began a career as a filmmaker with Basquiat and his movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly based on the novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby had a great success. Since 2010, a selection of his Polaroids taken since 2002 has been held in London, Milan and Paris, which are repainted to underline the highlights of the pictures. He still lives and works in New York.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #julianschnabel #spraypaint #resinonpolyester #art #artville

Pipilotti Rist

Artville artist of the day: Pipilotti Rist

Title: Herbstzeitlose (Saffron Flower or Fall Time Less)
Year: 2004
Size: Dimensions variable
Medium: Installations, Video/Film, video/audio installation, 4 projectors, 4 DVD players, 2 sound systems, part of a wooden house, branch from a maple tree, backlit panorama (photo print on Plexiglass), table and 3 chairs.

Pipilotti Rist (Swiss, b.1962) is an artist known for her colorful, fantastical, and sensual videos and installations. She studied commercial art, illustration and photography at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1982 until 1986, developing an aesthetic reminiscent of MTV and advertising. One of her best-known videos, I’m Not a Girl Who Misses Much (1986), shows her singing and dancing hysterically to the Beatles song ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun.’ Rist integrates the loose narrative with the technical possibilities of video by speeding up, slowing down or distorting the image. In her Ever is Over All (1997), a woman smashes the windows of parked cars with a tropical flower, a playful gesture that also addresses the role of femininity in a media-saturated world. Her recent installation Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008) engulfed the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a 25-by-200 foot video of pink tulips and nudes. Unlike other Conceptual artists who take a more intellectual approach, Rist conveys the critical element of her work by creating an intensely sensual experience. She received the Joan Mirò Prize in 2009, and her work has been exhibited internationally in institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the biennials of São Paulo, Venice, Istanbul and Santa Fe. She completed her first feature film called Pepperminta in 2009. She currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #pipilottirist #installation #art #artville

Damien Hirst

Artville artist of the day: Damien Hirst

Title: Sensational
Year: 2008
Size: 6 x 6 in. (15.2 x 15.2 cm.)
Medium: Paintings, Butterfly with household gloss on canvas

Damien Hirst (British, b.1965) is one of the leaders of the Young British Artists—a group of contemporary British artists, including Fiona Rae, Liam Gillick, Sarah Lucas, Ian Davenport, and Michael Landy—the winner of the 1995 Turner Prize, and, as of 2009, the wealthiest artist in history. He rose to fame after the success of two warehouse shows he organized featuring his friends and his own work; at his second show, advertising executive Charles Saatchi purchased Hirst’s A Thousand Years, which features a glass case enclosing a rotting head of a cow swarmed with flies. Saatchi promoted Hirst and the Young British Artists for several years, until the relationship ended in 2003.

Hirst’s work has generated enormous controversy, in part, for its morbidity and fascination with medicine, which is evident in several of his series: the encased dead animals in various states of preservation, the incorporation of butterfly wings into stained glass-like images, cabinets filled with pharmaceuticals, and diamond-encrusted skulls. A team of assistants help Hirst carry out his projects; his spot paintings and spin paintings are almost entirely the work of others. In the 1990s, Hirst was also a public figure for drunken and drugged spectacles, but he has since stopped drinking and smoking. In 2012, his works were exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, and his spot paintings were part of a world exhibition The Complete Sport Paintings 1986–2011 held by the Gagosian Gallery in 11 of its galleries simultaneously, from January 12 to February 18, 2012.

#artvilleartistoftheday #damienhirst #butterfly #gloss #art #artville #contemporary
Courtesy: www.artnet.com

Leon Ferrari

Artville artist of the day: Leon Ferrari

Title: Erotic Figures in Japanese Art Shunga
Year: 1987
Size: 9.5 x 10.75 in. (24.1 x 27.3 cm.)
Medium: paper collage

Born in Buenos Aires, Ferrari employed methods such as collage, photocopying and sculpture in wood, plaster or ceramics. He often used text, particularly newspaper clippings or poetry, in his pieces. His art often dealt with the subject of power and religion; images or statues of the saints, the Virgin Mary or Jesus may be found in cages, sinks, meat blenders or frying pans. He has also dealt with issues of United States influence — in his best-known work, La civilización occidental y cristiana ("Western-Christian Civilization", 1965), Christ appears crucified on a fighter plane, as a symbolic protest against the Vietnam War.

Ferrari also wrote many articles for left-leaning newspaper Página 12. His work and his politics brought him much controversy and notoriety. He was forced into exile in São Paulo, Brazil from 1976 to 1991 following threats by the military dictatorship, which "disappeared" his son Ariel in 1977. In 2004, his exhibition in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, was forced to close following intervention by Pope Francis (then Archbishop of Buenos Aires) and a subsequent court order. Protests and government action allowed the exhibition to reopen.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #leonferrari #papercollage #art #artville

Gerhard Richter

Artville artist of the day: Gerhard Richter

Title: Bagdad II
Year: 2014
Size: 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.)
Medium: Prints and Multiples, c-print mounted on aluminum

Gerhard Richter is a German painter who originally trained in a realist style and later developed an appreciation for the more progressive work of his American and European contemporaries. Richter increasingly employed his own painting as a means for exploring how images that appear to capture "truth" often prove, on extended viewing, far less objective, or unsure in meaning, than originally assumed. The other common themes in his work are the elements of chance, and the play between realism and abstraction. Working alongside but never fully embracing a quick succession of late twentieth century art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism, American/British Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, Richter has absorbed many of their ideas while remaining skeptical of all grand artistic and philosophical credos.
Richter has maintained a lifelong fascination for the power of images and painting's long, uneasy relationship with photography: while either medium may claim to reflect or express reality truthfully, either ultimately suggests only a partial, or incomplete view of a subject.
Richter borrows much of his painted imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums. Often he begins by mechanically projecting such an image onto the canvas, a technique for thinking about how images often seem to have a life of their own, like mysterious ghosts haunting our psyche. This act of visual compression, in which photography, projection, and painting merge to make a finished art work, suggests that all vision is a kind of conversion of the "real" into the "imaginary."

Courtesy: www.artnet.com

#artvilleartistoftheday #gerhardricter #prints #printsonaluminium #art #artville

Georg Baselitz

Artville artist of the day: Georg Baselitz

Title: Yellow Song
Year: 2013
Size: 306.5 x 146.5 x 109 cm. (120.7 x 57.7 x 42.9 in.)
Medium: Sculptures, Bronze, 890 kg

Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most prolific and well-known living artists. Born in Saxony in 1938 – painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. Selecting subject matter (figures, animals, birds, landscapes and still-lifes) and placing them in dramatic settings, Baselitz’ works also place the viewer in a world of heightened self-consciousness to confront the being with the brutalities of history and the human tragedies.

He also partakes of a particular rebel sensibility and – like Camus Homme révolté - examines several countercultural figures and movements to cast anti-heroes as a strategy to liberate the subject matter, from the grotesque one, to the broken soldiers of the Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of the disturbing upside-down paintings.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #georgbaselitz #sculpture #bronze #art #artville

Vasundhara Tewari

Artville Artist of the day: Vasundhara Tewari 

Untitled
Year: 2004
Size: 14 in x 20.5 in   |  35.56 cm x 52.07 cm
Medium: Mixed media on paper

Vasundhara Tewari is one among the young generation painters who have indulged into exploring the potential of figurative paintings. Here it is worth mentioning that her images surface out of the perception of a woman and the psycho-political existence of the female body.
Vasundhara first drew attention for her sensitive mixed media work in which an interpretation of the suppressed womanhood within the existing societal structure in contextualized by her female nude images. Her treatment and use of the female nude soon diffused she creates are abstraction and are often emblematic of the inner life or contemporary women. Her paintings are characterized by tensions arising out of the naturalistically modeled figures and the flat pictorial space which is enriched with small focuses of tonal recessions.

In the more recent works of Vasundhara, a sensibility towards the understanding of the internal and external psychological spaces of the artist alias the ‘woman’ is displayed lucidly. In these works the human figure does not occupy the space of the protagonist, but shares a equi-focal space with the background objects, where both are of equal significance. The identifiable artist psyche and experiences surrounding it stands as meaningful reality for Vasundhara. Her paintings are a celebration of a contemporary woman, unafraid to reveal her soul and at the same time, participate in the daily life-patterns unencumbered.

Courtesy: www.saffronart.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #vasundharatewari #mixedmedia #art #artville

Ernesto Neto

Artville artist of the day: Ernesto Neto

Title: Egg Bed Crystal Shell A

Year: 2014

Medium: Installations, Plywood, fabric, polyurethane foam, semiprecious stones and pulleys

Size: Bench: 16 x 78 x 92 inches; Dome: 90 x 102 x 145 inches; Overall: 166 x 102 x 152 inches

Ernesto Neto is known for his biomorphic sculptural environments. Originally inspired by the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Neto moved from hardedge iron sculptures to his signature pendulous nylon sacks filled with aromatic spices, lead, sand, and Styrofoam balls. Neto mixes the highbrow formalism of minimalism with the sociability and fun of relational aesthetics. Viewers are encouraged to poke, touch, and—in some cases—even walk through these plush organic forms. Neto has had solo shows at major art institutions around the world, including London's Institute for Contemporary Art, Site Santa Fe, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He represented Brazil in the 2001 Venice Biennale.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com

#artvilleartistoftheday #ernestoneto #art #artville #installation #plywood #fabric #polyurethanefoam #semipreciousstones #pulleys  

Atul Dodiya

Artville artist of the day: Atul Dodiya

Title: Cage
Year: 2003
Size: 68.5 x 43.5 in | 174.0 x 110.5 cm
Medium: Watercolor, charcoal and acrylic with marble dust on paper

Born in Mumbai in 1959, Atul Dodiya, one of the most sought after contemporary artists today, completed his Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Sir J. J. School of Arts in 1982. He says, "I was passionate about painting from childhood. I come from a liberal Kathiawadi family and was brought up on old Guru Dutt (Legendary Indian Film maker) movies and classical music of Kumar Gandharva (Classical Singer). Even though nobody in the family has an aesthetic background, they were very supportive. When I was 13, my father, a civil contractor, bought me a first class local train pass, so that I could go for art exhibitions. One of my elder sisters wanted me to be an architect. But I failed my Secondary School Certificate exams twice because I was weak in math. Finally, they allowed me to join the Sir J.J. School of Art."

Atul met his wife Anju --- also an artist --- at the Sir J. J. School of Art where he used to teach after completing his graduation. She was his student. "We are critical of each other`s work. It`s a great thing because it means a lot to have an opinion you can completely trust, coming from someone who understands you completely and knows what you are trying to say",

Both work out of what used to be Atul`s father`s home in Ghatkopar, in Central Mumbai. "While I work, neighbors keep coming in to look at my paintings and comment on them. These people, with their various priorities and concerns, do not come to the painting with any prejudice. They may say the work look like their bed cover. I do not consider their response useless. It can be hilarious and also very enlightening," he says.

Courtesy: www.saffronart.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #AtulDodiya #watercolor #charcoal #acrylic #marbledust #mixedmedia #art #artville

David Choe

Artville artist of the day: David Choe

Title: Secret Sanctuary
Year: 2007
Size: approx. 50 x 50 inches
Medium: Paintings, Mixed media on wood

David Choe (born April 21, 1976) is an American figure painter, muralist, graffiti artist and graphic novelist of Korean descent. His figure paintings, which explore themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation, are characterized by a raw, frenetic tone that he has termed "dirty style." In the graffiti world, he is identified with the bucktoothed whale he has been spray-painting on the streets since he was in his teens. David also hosts DVDASA (Double Vag Double Anal Sensitive Artist), a lifestyle, relationship and entertainment podcast with co-host Asa Akira.

Choe's work appears in a wide variety of urban culture and entertainment contexts. For example, he provided the cover art for Jay-Z and Linkin Park's multi-platinum album Collision Course, and created artwork to decorate the sets of Juno and The Glass House. In 2005, internet entrepreneur Sean Parker, a longtime fan, asked him to paint graphic sexual murals in the interior of Facebook's first Silicon Valley office, and in 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commissioned him to paint somewhat tamer murals for their next office. Those murals were loosely re-created by Choe's friends Rob Sato and Joe To for the set of the film The Social Network. During the 2008 presidential race, Choe painted a portrait of then-Senator Barack Obama for use in a grassroots street art campaign. The original was later displayed in the White House.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #DavidChoe #paintingonwood #mixedmedia #art #artville

Jasper Johns

Artville artist of the day: Jasper Johns

Title: Voices II
Year: 1982
Size: 15 x 23 in. (38.1 x 58.4 cm.)
Medium: Prints and Multiples, Lithograph on Siegenthaler Paper

Painter Jasper Johns (American, b.1930) was born in Georgia and attended the University of South Carolina before moving to New York City in his 20s. In New York, he met artist Robert Rauschenberg, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and composer John Cage, all of whom profoundly influenced each other. In 1958, Johns entered the public eye when dealer Leo Castelli visited Rauschenberg’s adjacent studio; Johns was awarded a show at Castelli’s gallery, which then lead to his first sale at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Famous for his paintings of flags, targets, maps, and numbers, Johns painted seemingly mundane but powerful symbols in a variety of media, such as oil, encaustic, ink, pencil, collage, and relief. Though Johns is sometimes labeled Neo-Dada or the father of Pop Art, his work displays a deep concern with questions of representation and the nature of mark-making within art.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #jasperjohns #prints #art #artville 

Takashi Murakami

Artville artist of the day: Takashi Murakami

Title: Homage to Francis Bacon (Study of Isabel)
Year: 2003
Size: 52 x 52 cm. (20.5 x 20.5 in.)
Medium: Prints and Multiples, Lithograph on UV paper

Takashi Murakami, born February 1, 1962) is an internationally prolific contemporary Japanese artist. He works in fine arts media—such as painting and sculpture—as well as what is conventionally considered commercial media —fashion, merchandise, and animation— and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. He coined the term superflat, which describes both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture and society. Superflat is also used as a moniker to describe Murakami’s own artistic style and that of other Japanese artists he has influenced.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #TakashiMurakami #print #lithograph #art #artville 

Shibu Natesan

Artville Artist of the day: Shibu Natesan

Untitled

Year: 2004

Size: 57.5 x 45.5 in

Medium: Watercolor on paper

Shibu Natesan belongs to a generation of artists from Kerala who studied at the College of Fine Arts in Trivandrum during the early eighties, a time of continuing change and rebellion against a bureaucratic and stultified art establishment. The films of John Abraham and G. Aravindan were one aspect of the cultural climate of the time, and formative, along with translations of Latin American and African literature, of the minds and attitudes of young artists. His first significant body of work, a series of paintings entitled "The Futility of Device" derives from a feudal history excavated in painstaking detail, the relics displayed in the grim chambers of memory, symbols of aggression which repeat themselves with oppressive regularity. The atmospheric quality of these works, some of them based on photographs of archaeological remains such as the caves at Ajanta, is heightened by the use of metallic paint on canvas.

Shibu spent two years, between 1996 - '97 at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and his recent "Missing" series of paintings is representative of the change that occurred during the time. The use of photography here is even more literal, though still adhering to a stubborn involvement with the processes of painting, their capacity to shift and re-focus the gaze to glean hitherto unperceived information.

There is a simulation which resembles the original to a startling degree, but which in fact prompts a set of readings which are contrary to what was intended, thus displacing the meaning without significantly altering it's appearance. Things are not what they seem to be; the actuality and sanity which these images once claimed is suddenly suspect.

Courtesy: www.saffronart.com

#artvilleartistoftheday #shibunatesan #watercolor #art #artville

Seema Kohli

Artville artist of the day: Seema Kohli

Untitled
Year: 2011
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Size: 10 in x 10 in

Seema Kohli's works reveal a claiming of feminine subjectivities, an altered concept of feminine sexuality. Her works bring into focus a woman's physical attributes, her intellect, thought, dreams and realities. The domain of sacred feminine geography with an effulgence of energy emanates from the paintings, where myth, memory and imagination have become the handmaiden of her own artistic oeuvre. Within the genres of sexuality and desire, one can't ignore the parallel journeys of discovery that she has made. Being a student of philosophy, she has inhaled and experienced myriad notions of existence, and has lived emotional and psychological reality. Seema has recently been facilitated by Lalit Kala Akademi for being an achiever as a woman in Contemporary Indian Art. She lives and works from her studio in Delhi.

Courtesy: www.saffronart.com
#artvilleartistoftheday #seemakohli #mixedmedia #art #artville

Ritu Kamath

Artville Artist of the day: Ritu Kamath

Title: Masked friend 1
Year: 2013
Size: 2 x 2ft
Medium: Oil And Acrylic On Canvas

Ritu Kamath has been working on varied themes for the past few years yet the underlying message is 'the social focus' which predominates. She has evolved as a sensitive artist as she treads along her path , expressing joys and pain of one who chooses to dream, to experience and to render. Ritu has traversed a varied field from floral dreams to biting satire.
courtesy:NVYA
#artvilleartistoftheday #ritukamath #OilAndAcrylic #art #artville