Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
Fang Lijun
Title: Mary
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 400x525cm
One of the leading proponents of the early 1990s Cynical Realist movement, Fang Lijun’s work encapsulates the disillusionment of China’s youth; a generation defined by the events at Tiananmen Square and China’s internal domestic policies. Constructed around loose narratives Fang’s images personalise sentiments of disenchantment, angst, and rebellion; his fictional suggestions conveyed through his illustrative style and re-occurring bald-headed protagonist.
Fang’s practice exhibits a rarefied technical skill rigorously studied through his Social Realist training; his combination of this aesthetic with references to contemporary comics, folk art, and dynastic painting characterise a national identity in flux, distilling a position of integrity from tradition and the modern world.
Fang’s monumental sized prints revive the ancient Asian practice of woodblock printing -- a complicated and exacting process of carving a ‘negative’ image into a panel, coating the surface in ink, and impressing the image onto paper; each different colour and tone requires a separate plate and order of printing. Due to their immense scale, Fang’s images are composed on several adjoined scrolls; the elongated strips create both an emotive fragmenting of the image, and create a reference to memory and historical testimony. Thematically, each of these prints describe the plight of the individual against the ‘mass’, creating a spiritual contemplation of solitude the quest for personal probity in the face of adversity.
Fang’s painting 30th Mary evokes these same sentiments with a humorous effect. Reminiscent of European church ceiling paintings, Fang portrays an order of ascendancy of same-same kewpie figures, each based on his own image. Executed with painstaking hyper-realism, the clouds formulate as a tempestuous funnel rather than a portal of billowing promise. Contrasted with the kitsch palette and pop rendering of the grotesque cherubs, Fang’s painting approaches the sanctity of ideological assurance with an empathetic cynicism.
courtesy:saatchigallery
#art #oilpainting #Chineseartist #contemporaryart #fanglijun#artvillecontemporary #artgallery
Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day Jane Alexander Title: Butcher BoysMedium: Reinforced plastere, oil, paint, animal bone, horns, wooodSize: 501/2x84x35 in
The Butcher Boys is a plaster sculpture by South African artist Jane Alexander. The work consists of three lifesize humanoid beasts with powdery skin, black eyes, broken horns, and no mouths sitting on a bench. The beasts are devoid of their outside senses - their ears are nothing more than deep gorges in their heads and their mouths are missing, appearing to be covered with thick roughened skin. The artwork represents the brutal dehumanizing forces of Apartheid in South Africa. The animal parts show how people stripped themselves of their humanity and put themselves above others, thinking they were better. The sculpture means it is and should only be animals that would be so cruel to each other and not humans.
courtesy: wiki
#art #plaster #scupture #southafricanartist#butcherboys #janealexander #artvillecontemporary#artgallery
Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day Anish Kapoor Title: 'Tall Tree and the Eye' Medium: Stainless Steel Size: 13x5x5 metersYear: 2009
When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said,
“ I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.
courtesy:wiki
#art #sculpture #publicart #popularart #contemporaryartist #anishkapoor#artvillecontemporary #artgallery
Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day Jasper johnsTitle: zero - nine Medium: Mix media Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954–55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.
Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice – for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.
Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning subscribed to the concept of a macho "artist hero," and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.
courtesy :wiki
#art #oilpainting #americanartist #popularart #abstractexpressionisim#neodada #modernart #contemporaryartist #artvillecontemporary #artgallery
Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day Shahzia Sikander Tittle: Ready To Leave Year; 1997Medium: transparent and opaque water colour , tea water and graphite on marbelled paper.Size: 97/8 x 79/16 in
Shahzia Sikander received her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Pakistani-born and internationally recognized, Sikander's pioneering practice takes Indo-Persian miniature painting as a point of departure. She challenges the strict formal tropes of miniature painting as well as its medium-based restrictions by experimenting with scale and media. Such media include animation, video, mural, and collaboration with other artists. Her process-based work is concerned with examining the forces at stake in contested cultural and political histories. Her work helped launch a major resurgence in the Miniature Painting department in the Nineties at the National College of Arts in Lahore, inspiring many others to examine the miniature tradition.
courtesy:shahziasikander
#art #mixedmedia #miniaturestyle #figurative #popularpainting#contemporaryartist #feminine #shahziasikander #artvillecontemporary#artgallery.
Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day Neo Rausch, Heilstätten,Year: 2011,Medium: oil on canvas,
Size: 98 ½” x 118 ¼” x 2 ½”
Neo Rauch (born 18 April 1960, in Leipzig, East Germany) is a German artist whose paintings mine the intersection of his personal history with the politics of industrial alienation. His work reflects the influence of socialist realism, and owes a debt to Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, although Rauch hesitates to align himself with surrealism Rauch's paintings suggest a narrative intent but, as art historian Charlotte Mullins explains, closer scrutiny immediately presents the viewer with enigmas: "Architectural elements peter out; men in uniform from throughout history intimidate men and women from other centuries; great struggles occur but their reason is never apparent; styles change at a whim."
Artist note:
"I view the process of painting as an extraordinarily natural form of discovering the world, almost natural as breathing. Outwardly it is almost entirely without intention. It is predominantly limited to the process of a concentrated flow. I am deliberately neglecting to contemplate all of the catalytic influences that would have the power to undermine the innocence of this approach because I would like to express a degree of clarity in these lines by way of example. I view myself as a kind of peristaltic filtration system in the river of time .."
courtesy:wiki
#art #oilpainting #surrealist #contemporaryart#popularartist #neorauch #artvillecontemporary#artgallery
Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day Bernhard HeisigMedium: Oil on cardboardYear: 1925Size: 19,6 x 26,7 in
Bernhard Heisig by life settlement achieved with the traumatic experiences of the war and dictatorship, after which there was another dictatorship and the Cold War. Prevailing in Germany after the fall of the wall resentment towards the "official art" impossible objective to assess the works in which the author already in the sixties of the last century broke with the doctrine of socialist realism in the GDR - in the paintings of doubt and despair over physical MANAGING, mental and intellectual ravages that in Germany left by the war. Sixty years after its completion discover in Bernhard Heisigu German painter, who both madness of the last war, as well as in her personal involvement made the subject of his art like no other artist.
courtesy:bernhard-heisig.de
#art #oilpainting #germanpainter #landscape #popularartist#contemporaryart #Bernhard Heisig #artvillecontemporary #artgallery
