Jeff Koons

Artville artist of the day: Jeff Koons

Title: Gazing Ball (Demeter)
Year: 2014
Medium: Plaster and glass
Size: 124.1 x 86.7 x 107.6 cm. (48.9 x 34.1 x 42.4 in.)

Neo-Pop artist Jeff Koons (American, b.1955) inspires conflicted reactions to his over-sized sculptures of banal and sometimes shocking objects; some consider his work to be historically significant, while others view him as an attention-seeker who panders to the high-end art world. Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Maryland, he was initially supported by his career on Wall Street. By the early 1980s, Koons was able to establish a studio staffed by assistants.

He quickly cultivated a media persona by hiring image consultants and placing strategic advertisements in high-class art publications; his scandalous marriage to and subsequent divorce from the Hungarian-Italian porn star Ciccolina also brought much public attention. Most famous for enlarged objects such as Puppy and his huge sculptures of inflated balloons, Koons also works in series of paintings, prints, and collage, stating that he is attempting to make a body of work that anybody could enjoy.

Courtesy: www.artnet.com

Fred Tomaselli

Artville artist of the day: Fred Tomaselli
Title:Starling
Year: 2010
Size: 80 x 80 in. (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
Medium: Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel

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: whitecube.com

#artvilleartistoftheday #art #fredtomaselli #acrylic #acrylicandresinonwood #photocollage #artville

Gerhard Richter

Artville artist of the day: Gerhard Richter
Untitled
Medium: Oil on paper
Size: 10 cm x 13.5 cm
Year: 2010
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.gerhard-richter.com

#artvilleartistoftheday #gerhardricter #oilpainting #oilonpaper #art #artville

Minal Damani

Artville artist of the day: Minal Damani
Title: I need a boat in my house
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 72" x 96"
Year: 2008
Born in 1979, Minal Damani received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 2000 and 2002 respectively. Working in a wide range of media, from ink and watercolour to gouache and acrylic, Damani’s works are an exploration in colour and form.

Stemming from a deeply autobiographical narrative, her works are peppered with images of stars, flowers, flying birds and other objects that make personal references to her environment. Each painting has a new pattern for the story which reveals the inner life of the 'self' and the hopes, optimism, dreams, opportunities, fears, pulls and pressures it experiences. Gradually, the visuals in Damani’s work changed from fantasy-like narratives to highly patterned visuals, in which the arrangement of images is done in such a way that they form an 'even -pattern' and thus give an abstract feel to the painted surface.

Damani’s solo shows include 'Drawing Lines' at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2008; and ‘Refilled’ at Gallery Beyond, Mumbai, in 2006. Her work has been also a part of several group shows, including 'Size Matters or Does it?' at Latitude 28, New Delhi, in 2010; ‘Evidentia' at Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, in 2009; and 'Vicissitudes of the Constructed Image' at Tangerine Art Space, Bangalore, in 2009.

Damani was honoured with the ‘J.J. Teachers Award', by her alma mater in 2002, and also received the Human Resource Department’s Young Artist Scholarship from the Government of India, New Delhi, for 2001-03.
Courtesy: www.vadehraart.com

Vivek Vilasini

Artville artist of the day: Vivek Vilasini
Title:Unconstitutional
Year: 2012
Medium: Digital print on paper
Size: 68.5 x 34 in | 174.0 x 86.4 cm
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.

Vilasini’s work has been exhibited in several solo shows including several editions of ‘Between One Shore and Several Others’ at Birds Gallery, Trivandrum, Arushi Arts, New Delhi, Sumukha Gallery, Bangalore, and the Visual Arts Gallery, New Delhi, in 2007-08; and at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Lalit Kala Academy, Kochi, in 2001. The most recent group shows in which his work has been featured include ‘Beyond the Form’ presented by Bajaj Capital Art House at the Visual Art Gallery, New Delhi, and Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2009; ‘In Focus: Contemporary Indian Photography’ at Crimson - The Art Resource, Bangalore, in 2009; ‘Re-Claim/ Re-Cite/ Re-Cycle’ presented by Latitude 28 at Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2009; ‘Metamorphosis: Change and Continuity in Indian Contemporary Art’ at PAC Gallery, Phyllis Weston-Annie Bolling Gallery and the Krohn Conservatory, Cincinnati, in 2009; ‘Bapu’ at Saffronart, Mumbai, in 2009; and ‘Who Knew Mr. Gandhi?’ at Aicon Gallery, London, in 2008. The artist lives and works in Bangalore.

courtesy:www.saffronart.com

Prajakta Palav Aher

Artville artist of the day: Prajakta Palav Aher
Title:Spreading
Medium:Acrylic & gesso on canvas
Size: 60" x 84"
Year: 2010

B.F.A. in Painting, Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, 2000
M.F.A. in Portraiture, Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, 2003
Prajakta, through her works, penetrates into the intermediate spaces, spaces between the inside and the outside, of middleclass households, dump yards, swimming pools and wedding pandals. She tries to paint every detail from the photographic references that she has collected over time.
The images she employs come from her own middleclass background and reflect its insecurities and complexities though they seem very simple and undisturbing at first glance. There are staircases decorated with plastic flowers; fake beautifying objects hanging outside the door; suitcases and airbags pushed onto the cupboard; newspaper stacks lying behind the wooden cabinets; old wall units filled with torn papers, documents, and covered with plastic sheets. Prajakta captures such moments of imbalance where she is very attentive about the details. She reveals the vulnerabilities of middleclass life through such confined and subtle moments.
Prajakta paints the detail with photographic precision but her works never become documentary in any sense. Rather, these objects transcend their present meaning and context, unveiling greater realities, and their formal effect provokes a sense of irony and quirkiness, which is omnipresent in her work. In her paintings she plays with various perspectives, creating images that subvert our understanding of everyday objects. Her paintings reflect surroundings filled with conflict and perseverance, reminiscent of the environs that Palav grew up in on the outskirts of Mumbai. The works often show slums, some of which have been ‘eradicated’ by multi-storeyed buildings, and local commuter trains, which are not much of a spectacle but a lifeline for the working class.
Prajakta Palav Aher lives and works in Mumbai.
Courtesy: vadheraart.com

Shanthamani Muddaiah

Artville Artist of the day: Shanthamani Muddaiah

Title: Back bone
Year: 2012 
Medium: Charcoal With Cotton Rag Pulp
Size: 915 x 82 x 52 cm 

Born in 1967 at Mysore, Karnataka, Shanthamani Muddaiah received her Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA), Mysore and her Master’s from MS University, Baroda. She also did a course in Paper-making at Glasgow, Scotland and worked for brief periods as an art teacher and on conservation of wall paintings in India, before taking to her full time art practice. Exploring materiality within transcendental matter, her sculptures, often made of charcoal, resemble stone monuments, appearing stable and strong from a distance, but their fragility becoming apparent on closer inspection. The markings of wood are still borne by the black blocks, as traces of memory of the fire it consumed or that consumed it. The carbonized forms begin to reveal their frailty and the possibility of their disintegrating back into dust. Shanthamani, who has made rustic charcoal into a metaphor of what has been described as ‘lingering material manifestations’, has also worked on video, photography and other media. Recipient of National Junior Fellowship from Ministry of Tourism and Culture, and the Charles Wallace Scholarship for study in Glasgow, her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Sri Lanka, Paris, Miami, Dubai, Norway and Tel Aviv amongst others. Her works are part of many private collections in India and abroad including the Venkatappa Art Gallery and the Government Museum, Bangalore. Shanthamani lives and works in Bangalore.
courtesy: staging.artslant.com
#artville   #artvilleartistoftheday #shanthamanimuddaiah #charcoal   #cottonragpulp #art