Tuesday 26 April 2016

Anish Kapoor

Artville Artist Of the Day
Anish Kapoor
‘intersection’,
2012

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, he manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Forms turn themselves inside out, womb-like, and materials are not painted but impregnated with colour, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface, inviting the viewer to the inner reaches of the imagination. Kapoor’s geometric forms from the early 1980s, for example, rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures from the last ten years – kinetic and self-generating – ravage their own surfaces and explode the quiet of the gallery environment. There are resonances with mythologies of the ancient world – Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman – and with modern times, where 20th century events loom large.

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India in 1954 and lives and works in London. He studied at Hornsey College of Art (1973–77) followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London (1977–78). Recent major solo exhibitions include Chateau de Versailles, Versailles (2015); The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow (2015); Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2013) and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013). He represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila. He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has honorary fellowships from the London Institute and Leeds University (1997), the University of Wolverhampton (1999) and the Royal Institute of British Architecture (2001). He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts. Most recently he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford (2014).
courtesy: http://www.lissongallery.com/

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Thursday 21 April 2016

Nalini Malani


Artville Artist Of The Day
Nalini Malani
Splitting the Other
Polytych of fourteen panels, acrylic, ink and enamel reverse painting on acrylic sheet, 200 x 1400 cm, 2007
Malani's work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue.
Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.
courtesy: http://www.nalinimalani.com/

Saturday 16 April 2016

S.G Vasudev


Artville Artist Of The Day
S.G. Vasudev
Tree Worshippers,
123x154 cms,
2006
In his Cholamandal years, Vasudev lived close to the sea. There was the continual ebb and flow of the sound of the waves beating against sands, the hush of the Casuarina trees, filtering the strong winds through their needle-like leaves, and the scratch of crab-like forms moving across the hard dry crust of the beach. The house was filled with the deep bull-frog like voices of Carnatic maestros, just as the hammers and chisels pounded on the surfaces of the various metal plates and round brass vessels, trays and copper murals that Vasudev and Arnawaz, his artist wife at that time, created as part of the craft making activities that were an integral part of the Cholamandal Artists Village scheme. The idea was to produce an attractive, and at that time, innovative range of crafts, that would free the artists to experiment with their artistic vision, without fear of economic constraints. It was a time, when there was little, or no support at all, from the tradition bound public at Madras, for contemporary art.
courtesy:http://www.saffronart.com/

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Seema Kohli


Artville Artist Of The Day 
Seem Kohli 
Tree Of Life 
48" X 60"
Mixed Media on Canvas

Seema Kholi's vibrant use of colour draw the viewer into a world rich in spiritual dialogue, both explicit and implicit.
Her central theme of the "Golden Womb" is not only symbolic of procureation and the journey of life but also a mediation on the eternal self.
courtesy: http://www.mahuagallery.com/

#art   #contemporary   #seemakohli   #artistoftheday   #artville  

Friday 8 April 2016

Riyas Komu


Artville Artist Of The Day
Riyas Komu
TRAGEDY OF A CARPENTERS SON III
2007
Wood and iron 
210 x 54 x 42 in.
Riyas Komu produces politically charged paintings, sculptures and installations that channel difficult subjects including religion and identity. He grew up in Kerala, where both his father and uncle were politicians and subsequently influenced his world view—planting the drive to tackle and critique government policy and affairs. Perhaps best known for his portraiture, he captures extreme emotions, their intensity understood to be fuelled by the plights of contemporary India. The compositions are always cropped tightly around the face, lest we pay attention to anything but the human subject and the physicality of socio-political inequalities, or of war or of dissolute poverty. Recently, he has focused on several football-related projects, which includes a large scale sculpture installation at the Pompitue Centre in Paris in 2010 and a series of portraits of Indian National Team soccer players.

Wednesday 6 April 2016

Takashi Murakami


Artville Artist Of The Day
Detail of Takashi Murakami's 'The 500 Arhats' | PRIVATE COLLECTION, © 2012 TAKASHI MURAKAMI/KAIKAI KIKI CO., LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Mori Art Museum is had a special solo exhibition of contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. It has been 14 years since Murakami’s last large-scale exhibition in Japan, though he has been continually internationally praised, working on giant installations at prestigious venues, such as France’s Palace of Versailles and New York’s Rockefeller Center.

For this exhibition, he makes postwar Japan the main theme as he brings together the country’s otaku culture (anime, manga and more) with traditional Japanese art. His 2012 work “The 500 Arhats,” considered to be the largest painting in history (about 100 meters wide), is being shown in Japan for the first time and was originally produced as a way for Murakami to thank Qatar for providing aid to Japan soon after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
courtesy: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/
#art #contemporary #takashimurakami #artistoftheday #artville

Tuesday 5 April 2016

Hema Upadyay


Artville Artist Of The Day
Hema Upadhyay
Killing Site
2008
Acrylic, gouache, dry pastel, photograph on paper, aluminium sheets, resin
183 x 122 x 61 cm

Baroda born and Mumbai based Hema Upadhyay uses photography and sculptural installations to explore notions of personal identity, dislocation, nostalgia and gender. Upadhyay’s work Killing Site draws on the theme of migration and human displacement across Asia. The top of the work is based on Mumbai’s dilapidated shanty towns, here appearing upside down and protruding out like a canopy over Upadhyay’s decorated montage. Upadhyay draws on her own personal and family history of migration to express her concerns and this is expressed through the way she portrays herself in her works. The upturned slums reference the repercussions and socio-economic inequalities that emerge as a hidden consequence of the relentless tide of urban development in the city.
courtesy:http://www.saatchigallery.com/
#art #contemporary #hemaupadhyay #artistoftheday #artville

Monday 4 April 2016

T.V. Santosh


Artville Artist Of The Day
T.V. Santhosh
SPINAL CORD
2005
Oil on canvas
54 x 72 in
Through a silky, infra-red lens Santhosh creates emotional portraits in which the subject is, interestingly, part of the middle ground of the composition. Smoldering in reds and orange, the texture and color of their flesh evokes metal that glows orange as it’s heated. Tending towards imagery sourced from media coverage of terrorism and war, Santhosh provides us with provocative and challenging pieces. The inverse, monochromatic quality of the shadows and highlights allude to film negatives, suggesting an element of supervision and subjection by the media. Santosh is also an accomplished sculptor, using white fiber glass and scrolling neon messages to evoke the “banality of evil”—term coined by Hannah Arendt.
Images presented through high contrast pearly filters are characteristic of Santosh’s work. In a series of paintings from the late 2000s, red-orange and light bulb yellow is puddled with waxy, minty green impressions; the air is ablaze and the message is feverish. In the foreground “X”s and crosses and distant suns float in space as if between the subject of the piece and us the viewer, an apparition witnessed by both.
http://www.aicongallery.com/
‪#‎art‬ ‪#‎contemporary‬ ‪#‎tvsantosh‬ ‪#‎artistoftheday‬ ‪#‎artville‬ 

Saturday 2 April 2016

Prajakta Potnis


Artville Artist Of The Day
Prajakta Potnis
The Kitchen Debate, 2014
Video installation and chopping board
Queens Museum
Through her compelling and unsettling photographs, paintings, sculptures, and installations, Prajakta Potnis wants to reveal what she sees as the web of systems—familial, societal, governmental, temporal—in which we are held and by which we are affected. As she explains: “My endeavor is to build a relationship between the public and the private space, to see how the outside is affected by the inside, how various elements transgress and finally affect an individual.” Transgression of boundaries and the passage of time are themes that run throughout her work, expressed through images of mottled membranes, encroaching masses of mold, or everyday objects wrapped in packing material. In her solo exhibition, “Time Lapse” (2012), Potnis focused on the slight time difference between Mumbai and Kolkata, which she simultaneously exposed and attempted to bridge in her suite of works.
courtesy:www.artsy.net
‪#‎art‬ ‪#‎contemporary‬ ‪#‎prajaktapotnis‬ ‪#‎artville‬ ‪#‎artistoftheday‬

Jitish Kallat


Artville Artist Of The Day 
Jitish Kallat
Public Notice 2
2007
4,479 fibreglass sculptures
Dimensions variable

Within my practice, ’Public Notice 2’ (2007) links up with two key antecedents, ’Public Notice’ (2003) and ’Detergent’ (2004), both works wherein a historical speech is summoned as the central armature of the work. Blurred and sometimes forgotten due to the passage of time, the historical speech is fore-grounded and held up as an apparatus to grade our feats and follies as nations, as humankind. 
’Public Notice 2’ (2007) re-invokes the momentous speech delivered by Mahatma Gandhi on the eve of the historic 400-kilometer ’Dandi March’ lasting about 24 days during the Indian Freedom Struggle. On the 11th of March 1930, prior to setting out to break the brutal Salt Act instituted by the British, Gandhi laid out the codes of conduct for his fellow revolutionaries. He called for complete ’Civil Disobedience’; the only fierce restriction being that of maintaining ’total peace’ and ’absolute non-violence’. 
The speech has within it several themes that may aid our ailing world, plagued as it is with aggression. In today’s terror-infected world, where wars against terror are fought at prime television time, voices such as Gandhi’s stare back at us like discarded relics. The entire speech will be constructed out of about 4500 recreations of bones shaped like alphabets. Each alphabet in this speech, like a misplaced relic will hold up the image of violence in clinical clarity even as their collective chorus makes a plea for peace. 
Within the Indian context as well, we have the worst instance of subversion of Gandhi’s words in the year 2002 within his own home state of Gujarat. The historic ’Dandi March’ and the speech were delivered not far from the site where India saw one of the worst communal riots and bloodshed since the Indian Independence. 
Jitish Kallat 
Mumbai 

Public Notice 2 recalls the historic speech delivered by Mahatma Gandhi, on the eve of the epic Salt March to Dandi, in early 1930 as a protest against the salt tax instituted by the British. Through this speech he lays down the codes of conduct for his fellow revolutionaries, calling for complete civil disobedience, the only fierce restriction being that of maintaining ‘total peace’ and ‘absolute non-violence’. In Kallat’s work, Gandhi’s ardent speech is recreated as a haunting installation with around 4500 bone shaped alphabets recalling a turning point in the nation’s history. Each alphabet, like a misplaced relic, holds up the image of violence even as their collective chorus makes a plea for peace to a world plagued with aggression.
courtesy: http://www.saatchigallery.com

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