LN Tallur

Artville Artist Of The Day
LN Tallur
Man with Holes (detail), 2010
wood and silicone
98 x 4 x 31 inches

L.N. Tallur was born in Koteswara, a small Indian village of about 14,000 people, in 1971. Tallur’s work represents an amalgamation of influences, ranging from those of the sheltered, traditional and rural farmlands he grew up on, and those he encountered and was exposed to during his many later visits to various foreign countries. Tallur studied art in various institutions, each of which has helped to shape the way he works today. In 1996, he received his Bachelor’s degree in painting from the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA) at Mysore University, and then followed it with a Master’s degree in museology from Maharaja Sayyajirao University of Baroda in 1998. In 1999, he was awarded a scholarship from Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK, to complete another Master’s degree in Contemporary Fine Art Practice.

Through exposure, experimentation and influence, the artist has managed to create a truly unique artistic vocabulary and style. As a result, each piece is complex and physically diverse. Tallur’s time at Leeds proved beneficial to his exploration of medium, material manipulation, and working on a large scale – all of which are are visible in the works he creates today. Incorporating a dynamic mix of ideas relating to politics, culture, tradition, spirituality, technological deterioration and environmental depletion, the artist’s three-dimensional works capture the absurdity of every-day village life and the anxiousness that characterizes contemporary Indian society.

Tallur was also able to grasp the importance of subtle mannerisms from the esteemed painter Bhupen Khakhar, after training under him. His work proves to be a surreal amalgamation of Indian signs, symbols and traditions held close to the heart in the country’s rural areas, focusing primarily on poverty and farmland issues. His pieces, though thought provoking to the viewers, are either a grotesque take on reality or portray a certain beauty which he has the ability to capture and create from the use of damaged objects and distorted materials.

Not only has L.N. Tallur’s work been exhibited all over the world, but he is also the winner of multiple prestigious awards. These include the Emerging Artist Award from Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, in 1999, and the Sanskriti Award from the Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi, in 2003. His paintings have been displayed in solo and group exhibitions in India and other countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, China, Cuba, South Korea and Canada. Tallur currently lives and works between India and South Korea.
courtesy: http://www.saffronart.com/

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Sudarshan Shetty

Artville Artist Of The Day
Sudarshan Shetty
From "Eight Corners of The World"
2006
Fiberglass. red tinted liquid, steel, wood, motor.
img: http://www.criticalcollective.in/

Born in 1961 in Mangalore, Sudarshan Shetty completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai (1980 to 85). He received Fellowship at the Kanoria Centre for Arts, Ahmedabad.

Sudarshan Shetty has been regularly creating artworks since 90s and mostly works on sculpture and installations. His work envisions a lyrical world full of playfulness and freedom liberated from political issues. It displays an intriguing combination of the representational and the abstract.

The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum invited Sudarshan Shetty for the series of exhibition, 'Contemporary Asian Artist' in September 2001. In the exhibition, the installation consisted of chairs, a desk, boats, stringed instrument, airplane, all with mechanical device and movable. In the installation composed of those objects 'For Here or To Go', Shetty created a new kaleidoscopic story. In the 'Amusement Parlor' created by him, anticipation for future possibilities as well as anxieties for irrationality and unknown precincts, or eeriness behind contemporary society and amusements were projected.

The artist strives to escape from the social framework, and at the same time, tries to collect scattered fragments of daily life. Through the process of editing and applying these (fragments), he superimposes various facets of contemporary society. In fact, though formally trained as a painter, Shetty progressively became interested in sculpture and installation, and began to combine his paintings with found objects that he painted. In 1996 he attended a sculpture workshop in Scotland that resulted in a spontaneous showing of swiftly executed watercolors; sketches in which the predominant leit motif was that of a carrier bag embellished by whimsical images and memories of the surroundings.

His art-world reflects contemporary urban life. By stimulating the memories of people's childhood and their playful-mind filled with curiosity, he cleverly escapes from the globalism that homogenizes the world and innocently plots to overthrow the value system led by politics and the economy.

He is also attracting a great deal of public attention as one of the leading artist in the Indian art scene internationally. He participated in the 'Private Mythology: Contemporary Art from India' (Tokyo) in 1998, 'Kwangju Biennale' (Korea) in 2000, and 'Century City' (UK) in 2001. Among his major art exhibitions are III Biennale of Indian Art, Roopankar Museum, Bhopal (1990), Solo show at the Holland Art Gallery, Rotterdam (1993), 'Paper Moon', solo show at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai (1995), Tryst with Destiny', Singapore Art Museum (1997), 'Art in the World', hosted by Beaux Arts Magazine, Paris (1998) and 'Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis', Tate Modern (2001)

Sudarshan Shetty is currently based in Mumbai.
courtesy: http://www.saffronart.com/

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RaviKumar Kashi

Artville Artist Of The Day

RaviKumar Kashi

Cast cotton rag pulp,

photocopy transfer,

ink, archival print, wooden stand.

Ravikumar Kashi is an artist whose works defy easy categorisation. He has done painting, sculpture, photography and installation, but they combine or cut across defined expectations from these mediums. His idea / concept driven works are layered and connect with the viewer in multiple ways. Introspection is an important aspect of his works which touch upon the idea of self and its many facets. He has also explored the themes of desire, gratification, consumerism and destruction in individuals and at the societal level.

courtesy: http://www.ravikashi.com/

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Pushpamala.N

Artville Artist Of The Day
Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni
The Ethnographic Series: (Details)
2000-2004
Sepia-toned silver gelatin prints
Bangalore based Pushpamala N is a photo- and video-performance artist who is the subject of her own compositions. In this series of works, the artist explores photography as a tool of ethnographic documentation and humorously challenges the authenticity of the photographic image. Created in collaboration with photographer Clare Arni, The Ethnographic Series draws attention to the choreographed stylistics of early anthropological studies, enacting and thereby transforming stereotypes of women. Dressing in period costume, Pushpamala refashions these stereotypes to subvert and critique the forensic classification of humanity. The strength of The Ethnographic Series lies in Pushpamala’s wit in reconstructing such scenes and playfully deconstructing them, acting both as subject and object to the camera.
Courtesy: http://www.saatchigallery.com/ #art#contemporaryartist #pushpamala #artistoftheday#artville 

Pipilotti Rist

Artville Artist Of The Day

Pipilotti Rist

Lip Service (Offering for the political prisoners in North Korea)

Installation view, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, ‘Blutbetriebene Kameras und quellende Räume’, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2012

Photo: Stefan Rohner

Copyright © 2016 Hauser & Wirth

During her studies Pipilotti Rist began making super 8 films. Her works generally last only a few minutes, and contained alterations in their colors, speed, and sound. Her works generally treat issues related to gender, sexuality, and the human body.

Her colorful and musical works transmit a sense of happiness and simplicity. Rist's work is regarded as feminist by some art critics. Her works are held by many important art collections worldwide.

In I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) Rist dances before a camera in a black dress with uncovered breasts. The images are often monochromatic and fuzzy. Rists repeatedly sings "I'm not the girl who misses much," a reference to the first line of the song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" by the Beatles. As the video approaches its end, the image becomes increasingly blue and fuzzy and the sound stops.

Rist achieved notoriety with Pickelporno (Pimple porno) (1992), a work about the female body and sexual excitation. The fisheye camera moves over the bodies of a couple. The images are charged by intense colors, and are simultaneously strange, sensual, and ambiguous.

Ever is Over All (1997) shows in slow-motion a young woman walks along a city street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a large hammer in the shape of a tropical flower. At one point a police officer greets her. The audio video installation has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Rist's nine video sesegments titled Open My Glade were played once every hour on a screen at Times Square in New York City, a project of the Messages to the Public program, which was founded in 1980.

Pour Your Body Out was a commissioned multimedia installation organized by Klaus Biesenbach and installed in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in early 2009. In an interview with Phong Bui published in The Brooklyn Rail, Rist said she chose the atrium for the installation "because it reminds me of a church’s interior where you’re constantly reminded that the spirit is good and the body is bad. This spirit goes up in space but the body remains on the ground. This piece is really about bringing those two differences together."

courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org

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L N Tallur

Artville Artist Of The Day

L N Tallur
Esophageal Reflux Part 2
2006
Burnt wood and silver
Height: 78.5 in (199.4 cm)
Width: 35 in (88.9 cm)
Depth: 63 in (160 cm)

Category: Sculpture
Esophageal Reflux Part 2

Through exposure and experimentation L.N. Tallur has developed a truly unique artistic vocabulary over the last decade. His works are complex and physically diverse, and each evokes multiple readings and interpretations. "Throughout his production run the durable threads of well-considered content but also an astonishing discernment in regards to formal attributes. So we, the viewers, must consider any number of possibilities when encountering his creations: history, theisms, concrete manifestations of the divine and ephemeral expressions of human desire, silhouettes, patinas, the transformation of forms through migratory paths or the inevitable decay of organic substances, even noise and tonnage as sculptural components, packaged with a particular legerdemain that has come to be the artist's nom de plume (to pit metaphors against one another, a Tallurian trait)" (Peter Nagy, "The Acumenical Pursuits of Mr. L.N. Tallur", the artist's website, accessed February 2013).

The time that the artist spent at the Maharaja Sayyajirao University of Baroda and Leeds Metropolitan University deepened his understanding and manipulation of material, encouraged his engagement with symbolic ambiguity, and also pushed him to broaden the conceptual and physical scale of his works - all of which are reflected in his practice today. Incorporating a dynamic mix of ideas relating to philosophy, politics, culture, tradition, spirituality, technology and the environment, the artist's works capture the absurdity of everyday life and the anxiousness that characterizes contemporary society.

On several occasions, Tallur has turned to the digestive system as an allegory for contemporary patterns of consumption and waste in his practice. This metaphor informs early inflatable installations like Ablution (2003), as well as later works like Digesting Times (2005), Bulimia (2005), Bon Appetite (2006) and Alzheimer's (2006). The present lot, a burnt wood figure of an elephant excreting silver, is titled after an ailment of the digestive tract where acid from the stomach leaks into the esophagus, leading to heartburn and other painful symptoms. Visually representing a possible consequence of excess and greed, the work could be a contemporary reminder of the fable about the goose that laid golden eggs.

Tallur, also a trained museuologist, perhaps intends the scorched and degraded figure of the elephant to be a symbol for the state of tradition or heritage today, and particularly the ways in which it is commoditised in contemporary society.
Courtesy: http://www.saffronart.com/
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Jeff Koons

Artville Artist Of The Day

Jeff Koons

Title: Gazing Ball (Antinous-Dionysus)

Media: plaster and glass

Size: 60 3/8 x 44 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches

153.4 x 112.7 x 69.9 cm

© Jeff Koons

Edition of 3 plus AP

Year:2013

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976. Koons lives and works in New York City.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, Koons’s work has been shown in major galleries and institutions throughout the world. His work is the subject of a major exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (June 27 - October 19, 2014), which traveled to the Centre Pompidou Paris (November 26, 2014 - April 27, 2015) and the Guggenheim Bilbao (June 12 - September 27, 2015). Recent exhibitions in Europe include Jeff Koons in Florence installed at Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy (September 25 - December 28, 2015) and Balloon Venus (Orange), which is currently on view in the rotunda of the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria (September 30 - March 13, 2016). Gazing Ball Paintings, Koons’s most recent series, was exhibited for the first time at Gagosian Gallery, New York (November 12 - December 23, 2015).

Koons earned renown for his public sculptures, such as the monumental floral sculpture Puppy (1992), shown at Rockefeller Center and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Another floral sculpture, Split-Rocker (2000), previously installed at the Papal Palace in Avignon, Château de Versailles, and Fondation Beyeler in Basel, was most recently on view at Rockefeller Center in 2014.

Jeff Koons has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his cultural achievements. Notably, Koons received the Governor’s Awards for the Arts “Distinguished Arts Award” from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; the “Golden Plate Award” from the Academy of Achievement; President Jacques Chirac promoted Koons to Officier de la Legion d’Honneur; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton honored Koons with the State Department’s Medal of the Arts for his outstanding commitment to the Art in Embassies Program and international cultural exchange. Koons has been a board member of The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) since 2002, and co-founded the Koons Family International Law and Policy Institute with ICMEC; for the purpose of combating global issues of child abduction and exploitation and to protect the world’s children.

Courtesy: http://www.jeffkoons.com

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Damien Hirst

Artville Artist Of The Day

Damien Hirst

Title: Cock and Bull

Year: 2012

Media Glass, painted stainless steel, silicone, bull, cockerel and formaldehyde solution

Size: 2310 x 3326 x 1381 mm | 90.9 x 130.9 x 54.4 in

Sculpture

Formaldehyde

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.

Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.[1]

Hirst developed his interest in exploring the “unacceptable idea” of death as a teenager in Leeds. From the age of sixteen, he made regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School in order to make life drawings (‘With Dead Head’ (1991)). The experiences served to establish the difficulties he perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in his work (‘A Thousand Years’ (1990)) he has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour.”[2]

At Goldsmiths, Hirst’s understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture changed significantly, and he began work on some of his most important series. The ‘Medicine Cabinets’ created in his second year combined the aesthetics of minimalism with Hirst’s observation that, “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.”[3]This is one of his most enduring themes, and was most powerfully manifested in the installation work, ‘Pharmacy’ (1992).

Whilst in his second year, Hirst conceived and curated ‘Freeze’ – a group exhibition in three phases. The exhibition of Goldsmiths students is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst, but for a generation of British artists. For its final phase he painted two series of coloured spots on to the warehouse walls. Hirst describes the spot paintings as a means of “pinning down the joy of colour”, and explains they provided a solution to all problems he’d previously had with colour. It has become one of the artist’s most prolific and recognisable series, and in January 2012 the works were exhibited in a show of unprecedented scale across eleven Gagosian Gallery locations worldwide.[4]

In 1991 Hirst began work on ‘Natural History’, arguably his most famous series. Through preserving creatures in minimalist steel and glass tanks filled with formaldehyde solution, he intended to create a “zoo of dead animals”.[5] In 1992, the shark piece, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) was unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Young British Artists I’ exhibition. The shark, described by the artist as a “thing to describe a feeling”, remains one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and popular culture in the 90’s. The series typifies Hirst’s interest in display mechanisms. The glass boxes he employs both in ‘Natural History’ works and in vitrines, such as ‘The Acquired Inability to Escape’ (1991), act to define the artwork’s space, whilst simultaneously commenting on the “fragility of existence”.[6]

Since his involvement in ‘Freeze’ in 1988, curatorial projects have remained important to the artist. In 1994 he organised the international group exhibition ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’ at the Serpentine Gallery. Over a decade later, and explaining that he considers collections to constitute a “map of a man’s life”, he curated an award-winning exhibition of work from his ‘Murderme’ collection: ‘In the darkest hour there may be light’ (2006, Serpentine Gallery).

Stating: “I am absolutely not interested in tying things down”, Hirst has continued over the last decade to explore the “big issues” of “death, life, religion, beauty, science.”[7] In 2007, he unveiled the spectacular, ‘For the Love of God’ (2007): a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds, at the White Cube exhibition ‘Beyond Belief’. The following year, he took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement in selling 244 new works at Sotheby’s auction house in London. Describing the sale as a means of democratising the art market, the ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’ auction followed Hirst’s Sotheby’s event in 2004, in which the entire contents of the artist’s restaurant venture, Pharmacy, were sold.

Since 1987, over 80 solo Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide and his work has been included in over 260 group shows. Hirst’s first major retrospective ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ was held in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples in 2004. His contribution to British art over the last two and a half decades was recognised in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work staged at Tate Modern.

Hirst lives and works in London, Gloucestershire and Devon

Courtesy: http://www.damienhirst.com/

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