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A Look Inside the Studios of Artists We Love
Take a look into the private realms of contemporary art as we explore the studios of revered artists. Behind closed doors, these intimate spaces serve as the birthplace of creative visions.
From bustling workspaces to serene hideaways, we delve into the sanctuaries that shape the artistic landscape. Uncover the untold stories and inspirations that inhabit these sacred grounds as we venture into the studios of beloved contemporary artists. Prepare to be captivated by the hidden world where artistic brilliance unfolds and where the seeds of extraordinary creations are dispersed.
Alicja Kwade
Alicja Kwade’s studio serves as a captivating space where her innovative artistic concepts come to life. Situated in a bustling artistic hub, the studio embodies Kwade’s intellectual and creative prowess. It is a place where she meticulously crafts her thought-provoking sculptures and installations, exploring the fundamental nature of reality, time, and perception. Kwade’s studio is filled with an array of materials and objects, each carefully chosen to bring her ideas into tangible form. With a keen eye for precision and a meticulous attention to detail, she transforms ordinary objects into extraordinary works of art. The studio is an incubator of creativity, reflecting Kwade’s tireless exploration of the boundaries between science, philosophy, and art, and serving as a testament to her significant contributions to the contemporary art world.
Alicja Kwade’s artworks are characterized by their ability to challenge our understanding of the physical world and our place within it. Through her sculptures and installations, Kwade examines concepts such as time, space, and the interplay between reality and perception. Her works often involve the manipulation of familiar objects or natural elements, presenting them in unexpected and thought-provoking configurations. Kwade’s art prompts viewers to question the nature of reality, prompting them to consider the complexities of existence and the limitations of human understanding. With her unique ability to blend scientific inquiry with artistic expression, Kwade’s works have gained international recognition, solidifying her as a prominent figure in contemporary art. Her studio serves as the birthplace of these captivating creations, where her vision and technical prowess intertwine to redefine our understanding of the world around us.
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz is celebrated for his distinctive and provocative artworks that challenge artistic conventions. Baselitz’s works are characterized by their bold and expressive style, often featuring subjects depicted in a raw and figurative manner. He is known for his upside-down paintings, where he intentionally flips the images to disrupt traditional perspectives and evoke a sense of disorientation. Through his art, Baselitz explores themes of identity, history, and cultural heritage, offering a profound reflection on the human condition. His paintings convey a sense of emotional intensity and a fearless exploration of the boundaries of artistic representation. With his unique artistic language, Georg Baselitz has made a significant impact on the art world, leaving a lasting legacy of thought-provoking and visually striking artworks.
Georg Baselitz’s studio space is as dynamic and energetic as his art itself. Located in the scenic countryside of Germany, the studio serves as a sanctuary for Baselitz’s creative process. It is a spacious and light-filled environment, providing ample room for him to work on his large-scale paintings and sculptures. The studio is adorned with an array of tools, brushes, and canvases, showcasing Baselitz’s commitment to craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail. With a combination of order and chaos, the studio becomes a space for experimentation and artistic exploration. Baselitz’s studio is a reflection of his relentless pursuit of artistic excellence, where he engages in constant dialogue with his materials and subjects, pushing the boundaries of his practice and leaving an indelible mark on the contemporary art world.
Louise Giovanelli
Louise Giovanelli’s creative process involves a meticulous exploration of art history, particularly the visual language and techniques of Old Masters. Giovanelli’s paintings are characterized by her unique approach of reinterpreting and recontextualizing art historical motifs within a contemporary context, resulting in visually striking and thought-provoking compositions. Giovanelli’s artistic journey begins in her studio, where she immerses herself in a rich and diverse range of source materials, including books, photographs, and images of classical paintings. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Caravaggio and Vermeer, she carefully selects and distills these references, extracting specific elements such as poses, drapery, and lighting. These fragments of art history are then seamlessly integrated into her own compositions, creating a dialogue between the past and the present. By incorporating these historical references, Giovanelli imbues her works with a sense of timelessness and invites viewers to contemplate the enduring power and relevance of classical imagery in contemporary art.
In her artworks, Giovanelli employs a distinctive technique that involves layering thin washes of oil paint, building up a complex surface of luminous color and delicate brushwork. This meticulous process allows her to capture the subtle interplay of light and shadow, as well as the intricate details of textures and fabrics. Through her skillful manipulation of paint, Giovanelli creates a sense of depth and volume, giving her figures a sculptural quality that further enhances their presence and impact. The juxtaposition of the refined brushwork and the contemporary reinterpretation of art historical motifs in Giovanelli’s paintings generates a tension between tradition and innovation, inviting viewers to engage with the dialogue between past and present that permeates her work.
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer known for his profound and evocative artworks that explore themes of history, mythology, and memory. Kiefer’s works often employ a diverse range of materials, including lead, straw, and ash, resulting in textured and layered compositions that carry deep symbolic significance. Through his monumental paintings and sculptures, Kiefer confronts Germany’s complex past and grapples with broader existential questions about human existence. His art reflects a deep engagement with literature, philosophy, and cultural history, capturing a sense of both personal and collective consciousness. Anselm Kiefer’s works have had a significant impact on the art world, pushing boundaries and challenging viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and profound existential dilemmas.
Nestled in the serene countryside of Barjac, France, lies Anselm Kiefer’s remarkable studio space, La Ribaute. The studio occupies a sprawling former silk factory, providing an expansive and immersive environment for Kiefer’s creative endeavors. The vast space allows him to work on large-scale artworks, including his monumental canvases and towering sculptures. La Ribaute is not only a physical workspace but also serves as a repository of Kiefer’s artistic exploration and experimentation. The studio is filled with a vast array of materials, tools, and references, reflecting the artist’s meticulous approach to his craft. It is within this sanctuary that Kiefer continues to push the boundaries of his artistic practice, capturing the essence of his profound artistic vision and cementing his status as one of the most significant contemporary artists of our time.
Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone’s studio in Harlem, New York, stands as a sanctuary of artistic exploration and inspiration. Nestled within the vibrant neighborhood, the studio reflects the dynamic energy and cultural richness of its surroundings. Bathed in natural light that streams through its large windows, the spacious studio provides an ideal setting for Rondinone’s multidisciplinary practice. Here, he engages in the creation of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and immersive installations that embody his unique artistic vision. The studio’s walls are adorned with a tapestry of sketches, photographs, and visual references, fostering a visual dialogue that fuels Rondinone’s creative process. Within this space, the artist delves deep into introspection, continually pushing the boundaries of his practice and cultivating ideas that captivate audiences worldwide.
Ugo Rondinone’s creative process is one of profound introspection and exploration. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as literature, nature, and personal experiences, he weaves together elements of time, mortality, and the human condition into his art. Rondinone’s works often feature repetitive gestures and the layering of materials, invoking a sense of meditative rhythm and contemplation. Through meticulous craftsmanship and a keen sensitivity to aesthetics, he creates artworks that evoke a transcendent and emotive response in viewers. The studio in Harlem provides a fertile ground for Rondinone’s artistic experiments, allowing him to merge mediums and challenge conventions, resulting in transformative experiences for both himself and those who engage with his art.
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois had an extensive and influential career spanning over seven decades. She is best known for her sculptures and installations that explored themes of sexuality, femininity, and the human condition. Bourgeois’s works often incorporated organic forms and materials, such as fabric, wood, and metal, which she transformed into powerful and evocative pieces. Her sculptures were deeply personal and drew from her own experiences, emotions, and memories, often reflecting on her childhood and family relationships. Bourgeois’s art captured the complexities of the human psyche, addressing themes of vulnerability, desire, and psychological trauma.
Bourgeois’s studio space played a significant role in her creative process and became an extension of her artistic expression. Located in New York City, her studio was a sanctuary where she could experiment, explore, and bring her ideas to life. The studio itself became a work of art, filled with tools, materials, and unfinished pieces that provided insight into Bourgeois’s working methods. It was a space of solitude and introspection, where she could delve into her memories and emotions, allowing them to shape her artistic vision. The studio also served as a gathering place for fellow artists and intellectuals, fostering collaboration and exchange of ideas. Louise Bourgeois’s studio space was a testament to her dedication and commitment to her craft, and it continues to inspire and influence artists to this day.
Martha Jungwirth
Martha Jungwirth is a distinguished Austrian painter known for her extensive and diverse career spanning several decades. Born in Vienna in 1940, Jungwirth emerged as a prominent figure in the Austrian art scene in the 1960s. Her works showcase a remarkable range of styles, from abstract expressionism to gestural painting, and often explore themes of nature, memory, and personal experience. Jungwirth’s paintings are characterized by their vibrant colors, energetic brushwork, and intuitive compositions. Throughout her career, she has continuously pushed the boundaries of her practice, experimenting with various techniques and materials. Jungwirth’s art has garnered international recognition, with her works exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums worldwide.
Jungwirth’s studio space serves as a dynamic and inspirational environment for her creative process. Located in Vienna, her studio is a place of artistic exploration and experimentation. Filled with canvases, brushes, and tubes of paint, it reflects the artist’s commitment to her craft. The studio’s walls are adorned with sketches, drawings, and photographs that provide insight into Jungwirth’s working process and artistic evolution. It is a sanctuary where she can immerse herself in her art, allowing her intuitive impulses to guide her brushstrokes. The studio also serves as a gathering place for fellow artists and intellectuals, fostering a vibrant exchange of ideas and creative energy. Martha Jungwirth’s studio space is a testament to her passion and dedication to painting, and it continues to be a source of inspiration for her artistic journey.
Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara is a highly acclaimed Japanese artist known for his extensive career and iconic works that have captivated audiences around the world. Born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Japan, Nara rose to prominence in the 1990s with his distinctive style characterized by deceptively innocent-looking yet subtly unsettling figures. His art draws inspiration from various sources, including manga, anime, punk rock, and his own experiences growing up in postwar Japan. Nara’s works often feature solitary, wide-eyed children and animals, evoking a sense of vulnerability, defiance, and introspection. Through his paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Nara explores themes of identity, isolation, and the complexities of human emotions.
Nara’s studio space plays a vital role in his creative process. Located in Tokyo, Japan, his studio is a sanctuary where he can fully immerse himself in his art. The studio is filled with his characteristic artworks, sketches, and reference materials that inspire and inform his creative vision. Nara’s studio is known for its organized chaos, reflecting his dynamic and spontaneous approach to art-making. It is a space where he can experiment with different techniques and materials, constantly pushing the boundaries of his practice. Nara’s studio environment allows him to delve into his imagination and create the evocative and thought-provoking artworks that have solidified his reputation as a master of contemporary art.
Joe Bradley
Joe Bradley is an esteemed American artist with an extensive and influential career in the contemporary art world. Born in 1975 in Maine, Bradley has made a significant impact with his diverse and thought-provoking body of work. Over the years, he has experimented with various artistic styles and mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage, showcasing his versatility and creative range. His art often challenges traditional notions of representation and explores the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.
Bradley’s career has been marked by numerous solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums globally, solidifying his status as a prominent figure in contemporary art. His works have been met with critical acclaim for their innovative approach, combining elements of minimalism, abstraction, and raw expression. Bradley’s ability to create compelling compositions using a limited color palette and simplified forms has garnered widespread recognition. His distinct style and exploration of unconventional materials and techniques have contributed to his distinct voice in the art world. With his extensive career, Joe Bradley has established himself as an influential and highly regarded artist, leaving a lasting impact on the contemporary art landscape.
Mark Grotjahn
Born in 1968 in Pasadena, California, Grotjahn has gained recognition for his abstract and geometric paintings that explore the relationship between color, form, and space. His works often feature intricate, multi-perspective compositions that create an illusion of depth and movement. Grotjahn’s use of vibrant colors and dynamic brushwork adds a sense of energy and vitality to his paintings. Through his career, he has continuously pushed the boundaries of his practice, experimenting with different techniques and materials, resulting in a diverse and evolving body of work that captivates viewers and art collectors worldwide.
Grotjahn’s extensive career has seen him exhibit his artworks in prestigious galleries and museums around the globe. His paintings have received critical acclaim for their visual impact, complexity, and technical mastery. Grotjahn’s ability to create a sense of tension and balance within his compositions, often employing diagonal lines and shifting perspectives, has made his art highly recognizable and sought after. His works have been collected by major institutions and private collectors, solidifying his position as a significant figure in contemporary art. Throughout his career, Mark Grotjahn’s dedication to his craft and his continuous exploration of new artistic possibilities have cemented his status as a prominent and influential artist in the art world.
Abandoning the rectangular canvas: Kenneth Noland, Sol LeWitt and Ron Gorchov
The 20th century saw a proliferation of radical and revolutionary ideas, stretching the boundaries of what was considered as art and recasting previous conceptions and values.
Traditionally, the medium of painting has most commonly been reserved for the rectangular canvas because this was the easiest shape to stretch over a wooden frame. Furthermore, the shape supported the illusion of glancing into another world or through a window, fitting with the favourable subject matter of truth to reality in the history of western art.
‘No single issue has been as continuously fundamental to the development of modernist painting as the need to acknowledge the literal character of picture-support.’
Michael Fried (b. 1939) from ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century developments in painting took place in the form of new subject matter, new ways of using colour and new styles of brushwork. This was most notable through the Realist and Impressionist movements in France where artists challenged the confines of what had previously been regarded as high and low art through who and what they chose to depict. Nearing the mid-twentieth century, America witnessed what was arguably the most drastic broadening of painting and sculptures’ horizons in recent art history. Coinciding with the politics of the Cold War (1950-1959) and the anxieties this triggered in American politics was the emergence of Abstract Expression.
Striving away from imagery, this reduced drawing to its simplest action: the artist’s gesture on the surface and the placement of colour independently from line and figuration. Leading on from this were the developments of Minimalism and Conceptualism which focused further on exposing the bare bones of artistic matter. The movement was propelled by leading modernist art critic, Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) whose writing defined the importance of the purity of painting which could only be elaborated upon by experimenting with its limitations. This was the rectangular shape supporting it, the properties of the pigment and the flat surface. Art at this time was no longer concerned with the status of the subject matter and instead looked at revealing the philosophical meaning behind the practise itself in its deepest form. This form did not try and shroud itself in the disguise of mimicking other objects and instead was focused purely on the gesture it was itself.
Kenneth Noland
Two of the most central figures in the early exploration of the shaped canvases possibilities were Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Art critic Michael Fried said that the new shaped canvases used in the 1960s by both Noland and Stella neutralized the flatness of the picture support through the optical illusion created by the foreign pigments placed upon the pictorial structure. This brought to light each element of the picture from the placement of colour on the canvas to the flatness of the support. Fried said it was Noland’s “deep and impassioned commitment to making colour yield painting that has compelled him to discover structures in which the shape of the support is acknowledged lucidly and explicitly enough to compel conviction.” His concentric circles were pivotal to the development of geometric abstraction and colour theory. This interest in colour and abstraction began during his studies at Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933, the liberal arts college promoted an experimental and interdisciplinary approach taught by Josef Albers who had moved to America following the closure of the Bauhaus school in Germany concurrent with Hitler’s rise to power. The Bauhaus’s philosophy stemmed from the need to bring art back into contact with everyday experience with an emphasis on technique and technical process, breaking down what constituted as high art and producing functional and aesthetically pleasing objects. The influence of the Bauhaus’s philosophy in America was immense. This can largely be seen in the development towards the shaped canvas with artists such as László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1949) whose placement of geometric shapes and bands of colour anticipated the rejection of the flat rectangular canvas in the 1920s.
Sol LeWitt
Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) believed that materials should be secondary to ideas and thus further extended the surfaces meaning in painting. In ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ he stated there was a danger of making the physicality of the material the concept or expression of the work. “Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions.” Therefore, any physicality of a work which triggers the viewers emotion is redundant in establishing art as a concept. In 1968 he began formulating detailed instructions for the execution of his wall paintings. The perfunctory idea challenged the importance of the artists physical gesture in a new movement that turned towards the idea that machinery could create art. His visually enchanting geometric drawings were the result of rigorous instruction and meticulously detailed diagrams for assistants to follow. The impermeability of the wall drawings undermine the notion of art as an object which can be acquired, owned and conserved. LeWitt’s wall murals defied the art logic of a singular object as the location of artistic invention in his developed patterns was situated in the written instruction opposed to on the picture support.
Ron Gorchov
Another artist to challenge the preoccupations of the canvas was Ron Gorchov (1930 – 2020). His oil-on-linen paintings feature biomorphic shapes on vividly coloured backgrounds. The stretcher is concave, forming a saddle-like shape and bridging the gap between sculpture and abstract painting. The critic Robert Morgan said this curved shape shares more similarities to the human perspective than a hardened rectangle. Gorchov believed this to be “a more intentional form that would create a new kind of visual space.” His primal style of painting upon canvases which curved away from the wall played on human perception to challenge the flat rectangular plane usually reserved for the wall which as Donald Judd said, “determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.”
What Noland, LeWitt and Gorchov had in common was that they all turned to alternative picture planes in an attempt to focus on the inherent qualities within the medium they were working. This liberated art from the constraints imposed upon the medium of painting by societal values and hierarchies.
African American Artists Redefining Black Culture
In 2015 African American movie star Amanda Stenberg in a 4 minute video on cultural appropriation posted on her Tumblr page said, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as black culture?” This question poignantly compiles the deeply troubling state of institution racism in America, and it’s totally illogical disparity at the political and social levels.
America is a nation with deeply tangled roots in institutional racism against African Americans, with a simultaneously thriving art and entertainment culture built on the backs of the very people the nation puts down. There are brutal police shootings of black teenagers, and yet there has been a black president. In the nation with the world’s most prisons, black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than white people. Yet, the cultural appropriation of black culture in music, high fashion, art, and literature is undeniable. From the abolition of slavery in 1865, through the civil rights movement of the 60s, the Black Panthers of the 70s, and the Rodney King riots of 92, the conflict is not new. Yet, it has reached an unprecedented peak.
Institutions and InIndividuals alike can no longer deny the wholly unfair exclusion and lack of recognition of black culture’s impact on society. Art has always been the pathway for truth telling outside the institution, and now more than ever are black artists refusing to be ignored. So how do contemporary artists address this tug of war, to move forward in a struggle that seems to take one step forward for every three steps back? The answer it is to step out of the dance, self-reflect, and redefine what it means to be black. This requires intuitions to become self-reflective in acknowledging the gaping holes in exhibiting black artists, and in hiring black people to authoritative curatorial positions. It requires individuals to consciously acknowledge deeply embedded exclusionary beliefs and do the work to truly change them. It requires a lot of wrongs to be admitted to finally create the spaces for black artists to speak for themselves and be respected for doing so.
In art institutions the exclusion of African Americans has been a topic in the shadows for a longtime. Forget about galleries, who are always very late to the party of social justice and very early to the party of profits. Institutions, however, are designed to reflect historical, political, and social changes championing the great accomplishments of humanity. Institutions have great power in surfacing and normalizing social issues and in a way, this is their civic duty. This nearly total exclusion of African American artists begs the question asked by Maurice Berger in his 1990 Art News essay, “Are Art Museums Racist?”. Thirty years later, his essay could not be more relevant. It is evident that for the most part art museums have acted like other corporations in America, prioritizing the narrow interests and white bias of upper-class investors and clientele, and often acting with little regard to cultural preservation. The art institutions that are willing to confront the issue respond with dedicated exhibitions to African American artists, rarely integrating African American artists into their existing shows. Further perpetuating this segregation is the trend of specifically African American art institutions. Though in theory this is an efficient and quick way to level the playing field, does this method unintentionally absolve the already established institutions of their social responsibility to integration?
Many institution’s defense is the difficulty to place African American artists in the established canon of art history, a canon completely built on Eurocentric shaping of taste and importance that doesn’t properly consider the social and economic boundaries that shaped those tastes. Historically, African Americans did not have access to art departments in schools, and many museums were segregated for a long time. It seems that institutions would rather not rustle their brand or the scripted experience of visitors with works that might force viewers to learn something new, rather than validate their existing art knowledge confidence. All of this is desperately silly when we think of how the entire movement of Cubism was inspired by ceremonial masks from Africa.
This is a glaringly selective interpretation of art history, and one that needs to open its eyes. The role of the museum is to provide resources for public education, and this is the role it must take seriously in the context of institutional racism. Institutions must provide the platform and space for individuals to confront and reevaluate their own problematic attitudes towards people of color. Institutions must also walk the walk and do better in hiring people of color, so these expressions and educational endeavors remain authentic. More established museums could consider satellite operations in more diverse neighborhoods to stimulate inclusion. Berger concluded his 1990 essay with this:
“When it comes to the question of why we ignore the art of African Americans and other people of color, simply learning how to listen to others is not enough. We must first learn how to listen to ourselves, no matter how painful that process might be.”
This attitude was echoed by the late Marcia Tucker, founder of The New Museum in New York City, who stated: “Museum administrators have to reeducate themselves completely. We must read the new art histories; we must read theory in order to put ourselves in touch with all culture. We must learn to listen, keep our eyes and ears open and stop speaking for others.”
The high-profile success of a small handful of African American artists may allow the public to believe the status quo is shifting. In 2017, a painting by the late Jean Michel Basquiat sold for $110 million, becoming the most expensive work by an American artist ever sold at auction. Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s created the sensational hit of Barack and Michelle Obamas presidential portraits that now hang in the National Gallery. Martin Puryear’s sculptures were showcased at the 2019 Venice Biennale, making him the second consecutive African American artist to represent the US. He follows Mark Bradford who is a global star represented by Hauser& Wirth. Kerry James Marshall has recently toured a blockbuster retrospective around the United States. However, these stars are the anomaly still, and their work does not quite directly confront he social tensions of African Americans today.
Let’s briefly discuss the social tensions of racism in America, most prominently seen in the surge of police brutality cases that have sparked riots, marches, and urged political reform in the past decade. In 2012 Barack Obama was elected for his second term as US president, marking his position as highly deserved and far from an anomaly. This very same year a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot to death by a police officer while walking down the street of an affluent neighborhood. Riots emerged almost immediately and later in the year after his shooter was acquitted of murder, massive protests swept the nation. Two years later while being choked by police officers, Eric Garner died gasping for air, begging to the officers that he was asthmatic. The viral video of his death was eerily reminiscent of the footage of Rodney King being beaten by police in 1992. Just months later, 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr, was fatally shot in Ferguson Missouri, allegedly with his hands up in surrender. Massive protests erupt, and Ferguson is declared in a state of emergency, as protesters are gassed by SWAT teams in the street, a scene immortalized in Robert Longo’s hyperrealist charcoal drawing of the heavily armed Ferguson police, Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014). Nationwide protests ensue, yet eventually his shooter Officer Wilson is also acquitted. Three months later Tamir Rice, a 12-year old African American boy, was carrying a replica toy Airsoft gun in a backyard, and was shot to death by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old police officer. The list goes on painfully and unending. MappingPoliceViolence.org is a resource of complied statistics and graphics expressing the gross disparity between white and black people shot and killed by police in America.
It is in this context that contemporary African American artists are working. Two contemporary artists whose work specifically acknowledges these tensions are Arthur Jafa and Adam Pendleton. These artists are working to redefine modern day blackness with open interpretation and encouraging the reconstruction of the individual’s relationship to black culture. Both of their works exude a full acknowledgment that the history of black culture cannot be denied, and cannot be replaced, but is what makes the culture the vibrant life force it is today. While Jafa works in a near real time present-ness of popular culture and Pendleton sources influence from a fragmented history of black culture, both artists are uprooting definitions, breaking molds, and giving audiences the space to reexamine their own deeply embedded conditioning around perspectives of black culture, encouraging individuals to develop new ways of thinking.
Arthur Jafa is an enigmatic figure, who oozes coolness and style. His articulate, calm, and welcoming demeanor invites listeners into his thought process, a process shaped by a lifelong affinity for in depth research on black culture. His work assembles fragments of culture found in newspapers, magazines, videos he has filmed himself and many he has found online. He seeks to let the material speak for itself, and let the viewer determine their own thoughts and feelings and hopefully come to new resolutions. Though it is not Jaffa’s intention to preach or directly educate, he is a facilitator. He provides the visual platform for viewers to rethink the personal bias and prejudices that come up when they are faced with the work. In that, is the lasting transformation of cultural opinion.
Jafa was born in 1960 in Mississippi, his childhood classrooms being among the first integrated. He has an immediate awareness of the invasion of other people’s projections and implied perceptions on him and his blackness. He shares that, very early on, he was determined to break free of the “monolithic blackness” imposed on African Americans. That, though the black population of Mississippi were integrated, they were a collective “other”, and treated as such. Jafa’s professional career blossomed through working with cinematography in films, such as “Eyes Wide Shut” by Stanley Kubrick. He is also famous for directing music videos and art centric documentaries for Jay-Z, Solange Knowles, Beyoncé, and Spike Lee. However, to focus solely on this aspect of his career, is to feed into the concept of monolithic blackness he tries to confront.
He is passionate about black representation in visual art and his work can be seen as a missing link in how black culture is represented and how it is received. Jafa’s work underlines just how crucial it has been to civil rights to turn the camera back upon the white gaze in order to make the world see, reflect, and believe, not just mindlessly consume. In addressing the disparity between the consumption of black culture in America, Jafa states:
“On one level, I’m happy for it because I think black people should feel entitled, too, but that’s just not realistic. It’s not keeping it real. It’s not really seeing this for what it is, and I think that’s super critical. This whole idea of seeing is believing.”
If seeing is believing, Jafa champions video works as the ultimate visual delivery. In a strange parallel, when the 1965 voting-rights marchers in Selma, Alabama were run down by policemen, those were streamed on the evening news when Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We no longer will let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners… We are going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” Jafa uses video, often taken from the internet readily posted by real people to harness pop culture and to reflect us back to ourselves, resulting in an improvisational, “visceral, truth-telling art”.
Milestones in Jafa’s highly esteemed oeuvre include his documentary Dreams are Colder than Death (2012), and art world earthquake Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Love is the Message is a 7-minute-long masterpiece of a vast spectrum of found footage tracing the African American identity through contemporary imagery. The video displays spliced videos of historic events, black superstars, and anonymous individuals in both ecstasy and despair. The video acts a poignant remainder of the multitude of individuals with manifold identities and unaccountable differences that collectively define modern Blackness.
Pushing this concept to the edge, Jafa delivers his masterpiece The White Album 2018-2019, which won the Golden Lion Award at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the highest honor of the event. The White Album 2018-2019 is a 40-minute montage of found footage from the internet. Video segments include the white supremacist Dylan Roof leaving a church in Charleston, South Carolina after murdering nine people at a Bible study in 2015; Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971); a white man on a curb in handcuffs repeatedly screaming “nigger” at his black female arresting officer; Alana Thompson aka Honey Boo Boo; Erykah Badu; O.J. Simpson; German “cybergoths,” dancing to hiphop; a man bleeding to death on the road while being attacked during the Rodney King riots (1992); a white bearded man demonstrating how quickly he can reload the multitude of guns he is carrying. The video investigates the tensions between the violence and the extremism of white supremacy, but also displays tender videos of the white people in Jafa’s life that he loves and respects. By doing this, he confirms that the video is not intended to present a resolution or to divulge his personal stance on the matter, but is meant to antagonize the reality of contemporary racism while breaking it up with safe landing zones in the avalanche of white madness that is on display. Emphasizing the lack of resolution, the black person is no longer the subject to be analyzed, and the work is rather about opening the dialogue to every possibility of interpretation for each individual viewer. What is more, is by using footage found online, Jafa confirms the power of the internet as the communal brain of contemporary culture. Jafa has cited as a central influence Nam Jun Paik’s prediction that:
“The culture that is going to survive in the future is the culture you can carry around in your head.”
Jafa maintains a techno-capitalist iteration of Paik’s thinking; that the culture that is going to survive lives on the internet, as the internet today is deeply entangled with the modern human beliefs and emotions.
Adam Pendleton’s work echoes the concept that the best resolution is no resolution, because where there is no resolution there are endless possibilities of outcome. Pendleton’s work uses fragments of language, phrases, and speech to deconstruct history and reconfigure it in the present, while handing over all reigns of interpretation to the viewer. His work often references 20th century artistic and political movements including Dada, Minimalism, the Civil Rights movement, and the visual culture of decolonization. Pendleton has pioneered the form of Black Dada, a theoretical conceptualism of blackness geared towards abstracting ideas around black culture, a culture so often boxed, limited, and defined by those outside of it. Pendleton’s work liberates black culture, by designing an experience of present-ness around his work, by resurfacing the past and letting it evolve in the ever expanding now. Backing away from a neat chronology, Pendleton’s work uses images and narratives that echo the past but bringing the reverberated sound right to the edges of the present, and curiously follow it to the endless possibilities of the future. This theory is also prominent in the works of the late great James Baldwin who said:
“We used to think of history as the realm of the settled as an inalterable past, as a nightmare. That was the legacy that bequeathed us by the past century’s catastrophes. But while we can never redeem what has been lost, versions of the past are forever being reconstructed in our fabrication of the present”.
Pendleton is only 36 years old, and yet has already filled his oeuvre with rich, vibrant, meaningful works in his sever signature style. He is set for a large-scale multimedia installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City this summer. He often works with installations, creating cohesive environments for which the artwork is merely “a point of departure”. He is more interested in creating a site of engagement and from there, “finding a mid-space location, which is maybe how revolutions start.” Many of his exhibitions carry this atmosphere, of the artwork spilling over its frame and continuing on the walls they are hung from. In 2015 Pendleton participated in the Belgian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, with a group of artists whose work examined or deconstructed, in one way or another, colonialism and decolonization. He devoured his delegated white cube, covering the walls in black and white silkscreen murals, with one prominent wall displaying Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter), 2015, a work made in direct response to the eponymous movement following the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The work depicts a not quite legible black and white spray painted script of “Black Lives Matter”. Prior to this exhibition he had one solo show, and since he has had fifteen worldwide. Pendleton’s 2018 exhibition “Our Ideas” at Pace Gallery in London was an incredibly cohesive show of his various mediums including murals, paintings, drawings, a video work, and two wall sized grids of works on Mylar each composed of around 30 parts. Pendleton also curated the Pace booth at the 2018 Frieze Masters.
Pendleton’s signature style, grounded deeply in thoughtful and provoking social theory, renders him a cultural stature not soon to fade. His work remains educational, informative, aesthetic, and evolving. The artworks alone hold all the trappings of modernist art glory, easily envisioned on the walls of institutions and collectors alike. Having a show at the MoMA proves his ability to break decade old molds of what is shown in established art institutions, and he is no token black artist. He himself has stated his acknowledgement of how much work there is to be done about institutions incorporating more black artists, and sees himself as just the beginning. His work is beautiful and enticing, but his ability to capture the social atmosphere of the present day is what makes his work unforgettable. This is an artist not here to sell paintings, but to encapsulate the present in a way that can be deeply engaged with and perspective changing. Interestingly, as Jafa seems impossibly current and realtime savvy of popular culture, Pendleton has an old soul, and as a young person acts a sage, a guide for contemporary viewers in understanding the larger picture of the greater timelines of black culture, and point us to a very distant future, one still very much worth fighting for.
Jafa and Pendleton’s work both demonstrate that history is not a distant unchangeable nightmare, but the foundation of who we are and talisman of what we can be. We see where we have been to know who we are, and only when we know who we are we can reconfigure, reimagine, and elevate the possibilities. We are greater than ourselves alone, we are the compilation of many great people, people who fought for humanity and succeeded. As these greats did for us, we owe it to the future to reject limits and fight for the impossible beauty of the unknown future. Our contemporary world is so well connected, we are alive on the internet, avatars who can be whomever we want. When we harness the past, learn from it, and reshape in the endless possibility of the present, the future will be inclusive, colorful, and meaningful for everyone.
8 Artists to Know from this year’s Venice Biennale
As the Venice Biennale fast approaches, we take a look at 9 artists that caught our attention in this year’s programme. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art, this edition, titled Foreigners Everywhere, will spotlight artists participating for the first time and is anticipated to explore themes of migration and globalisation.
Etel Adnan (b. 1925-2021)
Highly recognized as a leading figure of abstraction, the Lebanese-American writer and artist Etel Adnan saw colors as metaphysical beings that she used to create simple yet captivating landscapes and compositions. Spending most of her artistic practice alternating between text and painting, her artworks are a reflection of her nomadic life and carry a profound humanist and universal message. Her works have made great results in recent auctions and confirm the growing interest and rediscovery of women abstract artists.
Louis Fratino (b. 1993)
Intimacy and everyday beauty are at the center of Louis Fratino’s practice. The American painter uses his family and friends as models for his lighthearted scenes depicting bodies as places of safe sensual expression and spaces as seen through a window on the life of the figures inhabiting them. With aesthetic references to modernist masters in his depiction, the artist explores the complexity of his queer identity and the depth of human emotional relationships.
Maria Taniguchi (b. 1981)
Maria Taniguchi, a Filipino artist based in Manila, uses a varied range of media to frame, construct, and compose artworks referring to her cultural heritage. Her multifaceted practice, ranging from paintings and sculptures to video and writing, emphasizes the human charge embedded in the works she produces and questions Western notions of modernism. Through dedication and discipline her highly detailed ongoing series of painted brick walls explores the capacity of mechanisation of the body and blur the line between painting and sculpture.
Carmen Herrera (b. 1915-2022)
Carmen Herrera’s paintings, defined by her distinctive style of sharp edges and precise lines, are the bearers of the avant-gardism of this lately recognised master of minimalism. Born in Cuba, she spent most of her life in New York developing her practice. Throughout her extraordinarily extensive career, she remained committed to abstraction and continued to push the boundaries of her artistic expression, transforming her two-dimensional paintings into canvas defying three-dimensional sculptures.
Salman Toor (b. 1983)
The intimate paintings of the Pakistani artist Salman Toor exude a simple passivity but hide a crude reality in their details. Constantly exploring the complexity of the queer experience while being part of a minority, his paintings depict familiar spaces crowded with a multiplicity of allegorical self portraits, unraveling their desires, beliefs and fears through scenes of urban pleasures. In these moments of intimacy, the characters are nonetheless threatened by repression, exclusion and racial discrimination. Simultaneously eerie and intimate his works never cease to question the viewers on the dichotomy of the scene they are experiencing.
WangShui (b. 1986)
Liminality as resistance is at the epicentre of WangShui’s practice. Exploring our perception of the world, they blend media, architecture and technology to delve into thematics of desire and identity while including the spaces into the works. They use symbols of urban theory, the digital realm and mythology to create a universe in which existence is not constricted by predetermined and reductive identities.
Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978)
Born in Seoul and based in Los Angeles, Kang Seung Lee explores the forgotten past of queer communities and its intersection with art history. Bringing back to light marginalised narratives he creates new sites of knowledge linking lived experience, archives and intimate knowledge. Mainly working with graphite drawings and installations, his realistic personal and emotionally charged works serve as pictures of an immaterial and historically left out reality.
Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936)
Rooted in folk art and geometry, the works of Eduardo Terrazas are landmarks in the history of contemporary Mexican art. Artist and Architect, his bright compositions explore a style which has come to be a defining aesthetic movement and led him to international recognition. His works explore the tensions that exist between traditions and modernism, blending past and present to create a new visual language.
9 Contemporary Female Painters Breathing Fresh Life into Surrealism
In the first half of the 20th century, the post-war Western world was a chaotic blend of progress and loss, with advances in medicine and psychology fostering society to reevaluate the relationship between the mind and the body.
In this context of devastation and development, André Breton established a new philosophy through his Surrealist manifesto, in which dreams and reality would resolve into “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality” of melting clocks and uncanny scenarios, of sexual explorations and conjured imagery; and so the Surrealist movement began to gain popularity, quickly spreading to the avant-garde spheres of both the visual arts and literature.
Despite the movement being male-dominated, women across the world began to employ its artistic contours to release the creative potential of their subconscious mind and plumb the depths of their dreams. Indeed, throughout history, female artists have extensively contributed to the development of this magical genre, from the mystical self portraits of Mexican icon Frida Kahlo, the seductive feminine creatures of Dorothea Tanning’s paintings, or the mysterious women of Gertrude Abercrombie’s conjured imagery, to the present day as seen in the work of her new contemporaries.
As art historian Whitney Chadwick notes in LACMA’s catalogue of the exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States:
“Surrealism’s legacy included a model for creative practices that encouraged many women to adapt its principles in their search to link artistic self-identity to the realities of gender and female sexuality.”
In 2020, these assertions stand stronger than ever, with the spread of the Feminist movement drawing female artists from all over the world to employ Surrealism as a means to subvert patriarchal myths and explore their own identity. Through the magical lens of a movement that saw the height of its popularity among male artists working during the mid 20th-century, these are their female contemporaries breathing fresh life into Surrealism:
Loie Hollowell
b. 1983, California. Lives and works in New York
Loie Hollowell is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes and sacred iconography, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Originating in autobiography, her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. Mixing brazen sexuality with abstraction, surrealism and sacred iconography in works saturated with color, sacred geometry, and sensual energy, Loie Hollowell shows the expansive possibilities for exploration through concentrated colors and forms, incorporating high-density foam board and sawdust to intensify quality and depth.
Katherina Olschbaur
b. 1983, Austria. Lives and works in Los Angeles
Katherina Olschbaur’s compositions melt human bodies, objects, formal elements and animals in a cluster of different parts, conjuring seemingly seductive forms through an artistic lens reminiscent of Surrealism. Through smooth washes of carefully placed color, her paintings captivate the viewer whilst providing a female perspective to a history of canonised male painters, whose work simultaneously inspires her. Although traces of matriarchal order in Western thought appear as a mythological apparition, Olschbaur paints a narrative that subverts our expectations under the normative language of patriarchy.
Julie Curtiss
b. 1982, Paris. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Julie Curtiss focuses on the relationship between nature and culture in her figurative painting, sculpture and gouache on paper, exposing and reworking female archetypes through a surrealist sense of the uncanny. Her subject matter centres on the female body, through deconstructed and fragmented details like heads or legs, or through the symbols of stereotyped ‘femininity’ such as long nails, flowing hair or high heels. Through the use of unexpected juxtapositions, of subject with object, of the seen and the implied, and an exaggerated portrayal of cartoon-like forms, her paintings are infused with a direct and deadpan humour, revealing the uncanny within the banal and the grotesque and surreal undertones of human characteristics and behaviour.
Issy Wood
b. 1993 USA. Lives and works in London.
Painting with oils, and occasionally on velvet rather than canvas, there is a seductive artificiality and a nightmarish quality to the work of Issy Wood. The artist jokes that she is a “medieval Millennial”, reveling in the timelessness afforded by the classical associations of painting while embedding small clues and allusions to her identity and more contemporary interests. She often paints strange, sphinx-like women with heavily lidded eyes; long, sharp fingernails; or intricate, curling hair. Then there are her renderings of dogs, interiors, objects, and ornaments—from leather coats, lustrous tureens, and glass teapots to flip phones, plush red car seats, or jewelry—usually cropped and isolated in darkness, as if slowly fading into obscurity.
Dominique Fung
b. 1987, Canada. Lives and works in New York.
In Dominique Fung’s paintings, baby blue hues dance with pastel pinks to create, at first glance, exotic fantasies of Oriental bliss. Like the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Fung’s scenes entice with nude women reclining among porcelain vessels. However, closer inspection reveals stray knives, impaled fruit, and dismembered limbs; the mirage dematerializes. Her early artistic passions were informed by Vermeer, Manet, Rembrandt, and Goya, but her sense of Chinese heritage was largely informed by vessels and objects she saw at home and on display in the Asian art section during visits to the Met in New York.
Sara Anstis
b. 1991, Sweden. Lives and works in London
Anstis uses sensuous soft pastels and paint to build fantasy worlds at a remove from heteronormative patriarchy, yet strikingly transformative of it. The predominant concepts that Anstis’s works explore are “subjectivity, Eros, Thanatos, humour, personal mythologies, misunderstandings and (mis)anthropomorphisms.” These themes are woven together in her paintings alongside a plethora of otherworldly elements – strange creatures, surreal landscapes and plants – by which her feminine figures lay claim to desire, for better or for worse.
Jessie Makinson
b. 1985, Glasgow. Lives and works in London.
Drawing inspiration from speculative fiction and the occult, Jessie Makinson builds her mischievous, uncanny paintings through an intuitive accretion of gesture, form, and color. As her marks coalesce into figures, a narrative emerges. The artist mines art history and science fiction alike to present scenes of sexuality and lurking menace. The underpainting can look bruised, miasmic—an undefined presence which seeps into the tightly differentiated surface of pastels and deep shadows. It is this dance of environmental chaos and the stillness of the figures which gives the paintings a frantic, gripping energy.
9 NEW ART INSTALLATIONS TO SEE THIS SUMMER
2023 has brought a plethora of ground-breaking artists whose practice extends beyond the confines of the typical gallery space. We have selected nine unmissable current and upcoming art installations from around the globe to visit this summer.
Bernar Venet in Grosvenor Square in London, UK
Situated at the compass points of Grosvenor Square, one of Mayfair’s largest garden parks, Londoners will discover a quartet of large-scale Cor-Ten steel sculptures by Bernar Venet. These curled tendrils of rolled steel to sophisticated triangular geometry are currently on display as part of a collaboration between Waddington Custot and Art in Mayfair as New West End Company’s most recent initiative. This exhibition provides a unique occasion to witness the masterpieces of a prominent artist of this calibre in open air.
This year marks the sixth decade of the artist’s seminal career and the 60th anniversary of his iconic work ‘Tas de charbon’ created in 1963. This work in question unequivocally stands as a pioneering masterpiece, being the first ever to not have a fixed form, which spearheaded the start of his investigative practice. These sculptures loaned by the Venet Foundation survey the artist’s innovative approach to sculpting, each representing a concept of artistic concern whether it be “collapse”, “accident” or using mathematical and scientific investigation. The line serves as both the point of origin and the fundamental subject matter that Venet has incorporated throughout the years.
Bernar Venet at Grosvenor Square is on view through August 29, 2023
Lee Bae, Issu de feu (2023) in New York, USA
New York has always been an international cultural hub for artistic exchange. May has brought a celebration of Korean culture and heritage to the Rockefeller Center, New York. To coincide with this event, Johyun Gallery, a leading art gallery in Busan, Korea, presents a group exhibition titled ‘Origin, Emergence, Return’. The exhibition features over 70 works from three leading Korean artists across three generations- Park Seo Bo, Lee Bae and Jin Meyerson- who challenge the notion of abstraction through the use of unconventional materials.
This exhibition also comes with many firsts- it marks the first time that Johyun Gallery has exhibited outside of Korea, also making Lee the first Korean artist to debut his site-specific outdoor sculpture in the Channel Gardens. Consisting of stacked charcoal and standing at colossal 12- feet high, Issu de feu (2023) towers over pedestrians. Having worked with charcoal for over thirty years, Lee continually pushes boundaries with the medium as Charcoal speaks to the very DNA of Korean society. It was through the reintroduction and the rediscovery of charcoal in Paris that the artist found that its uses were easily found in the natural world. “Through charcoal, I can reflect on the cultural background and the environment I grew up in“, says the artist. At the core, much of the artist’s work is an exploration into materiality, the spiritual and the physical world that surrounds us allowing an alternate interaction for audiences.
Lee Bae, Issu de feu (2023) as part of Origin, Emergence, Return. On view now through 26 July, 2023
Kimsooja, 자오선 Jaoseon (2023) in Meridiano, Oaxaca, Mexico
A young gallery sits on the sandy plumes of the western coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. For Meridiano’s initial exhibition opening, the work of Kimsooja, a conceptual artist from South Korea occupies the two gallery spaces. The artist has continued her practice across New York, Seoul, and Berlin for over four decades, addressing contemporary cultural, and political phenomena in our rapidly globalising world.
Deductive Object – Bottari (2023) is a new work from the Deductive Object series that began in the early 1990s. The first space that visitors enter features a rock placed in the centre of Meridiano’s square room, while the second space houses the ceremonial fire performance. Having discovered a rock during her stay in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, Kimsooja painted the rock matte black to create the visual depiction of a wrapped bundle, like the traditional Korean fabric (bottari) used in the artist’s previous works. The concept of inactivity holds immense significance in artistic processes and formalistic practices.
Kimsooja, 자오선 Jaoseon (2023) is on view at Meridiano, Oaxaca, Mexico
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Point of Infinity: Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature (2023), San Francisco, USA
San Francisco’s skyline now boasts an impressive addition in the form of a new sculpture titled Point of Infinity: Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature (2023). The stainless steel monument designed by Hiroshi Sugimoto stands at an impressive height of 69 feet with a base of 23 feet, creating the illusion of infinity. It sits above a former water tank on Yerba Buena Island, San Francisco; the sculpture is the first of many public artworks commissioned by the Treasure Island Arts Program in partnership with the San Francisco Arts Commission, celebrating the city’s commitment to public art and cultural development.
Sugimoto used his exceptional skill in mathematics to incorporate a hyperbolic curve that suggests both infinity and eternity in the sculpture, a mindset that can launch a rocket into space. The sculpture, which costs $2 million, was installed last month as part of the new Infinity Point Park on the island, set to open to the public later this year. It is Sugimoto’s first major work in the United States, and he was selected from over 495 other candidates who responded to an open call in 2017.
Sugimoto’s creations have spanned across multiple domains, including design, calligraphy, theatre production, and architecture. His remarkable pieces have earned a place in the collections of prominent museums such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum.
Rachel Whiteread, “…And the Animals Were Sold” (2023) in Bergamo, Italy
For the sixth consecutive year, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo has commissioned an installation by the esteemed British contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread. The installation consists of sixty sculptures constructed from Sarnico stone and Zandobbio marble, extracted from quarries near Bergamo which blend seamlessly with the venue’s architectural history. These sculptures have been purposefully spaced apart to invoke memories of social distancing during the covid-19 pandemic, which was especially challenging for the Bergamo community while celebrating the eventual return to proximity.
Whiteread works with a variety of industrial materials to create sculptures of everyday objects and architectural spaces. Her pieces vary in size and scale, ranging from small and intimate to grandiose and monumental. Whiteread incorporates found objects and materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber, and metal. Her unique approach to sculpture has earned her a place as one of the most innovative artists of our time.
Rachel Whiteread ‘…And the Animals Were Sold’ (2023) is on view until the 29 October 2023
Anselm Kiefer, Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France
The German artist Anselm Kiefer explores universal questions surrounding areas of existence, belief, and meaning. His work encompasses all art forms, including large-scale works, sculptures, and installations that delve into epic territory, creating complex sculptural formations. Kiefer’s new solo exhibition, currently on view at Château La Coste in Aix-en-Provence features five sculptures from the Frauen der Antike (Women of Antiquity) series honouring the unwavering and independent women of ancient history and mythology. The exhibition also showcases four recent landscape paintings, which blend Finnish mythology and German Romanticism. Kiefer uses written text to honour his inspirations and share his heritage with the wider audience.
Anselm Kiefer at Château La Coste. On view until 3 September 2023
GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG (2023) at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK
The French artist Camille Henrot is among 20 artists included in Hauser & Wirth’s new group show GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG which celebrates the Swiss heritage of the traditional Kunsthalle. The exhibition playfully showcases contemporary issues for a broad audience. Henrot’s bronze sculpture Family of Men (2022) depicts the crushing power of a patriarchal society where interconnected, hybrid human forms scramble over one another, providing a thought-provoking image of power dynamics and the quest for growth and elevation.
GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG (2023), Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK until 1 January 2024
Ugo Rondinone, Storm King Arts Centre, New York, USA
Ugo Rondinone, the New York based Swiss artist known for his famous colourful large-scale outdoor sculptures has never been limited to one medium. The New York State Council on the Arts made this outdoor presentation possible with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The Sun (2018) and The Moon (2021) are crafted from cast-bronze tree branches, meticulously shaped into circles. One sculpture is coated with silver leaf, while the other is gilded with gold. Both stand tall at over 16 feet and are positioned parallel to each other to resemble a window or gateway. Visitors will see the spectacular vistas of Schunnemunk and Storm King Mountains through them.
Rondinone’s connection to the natural world is unparalleled. By situating The Sun and The Moon in Storm King’s landscape, the connections between these works and nature further the dichotomy between the two celestial bodies.
Ugo Rondinone, Storm King Arts Centre is on view until 13 November 2023
Antony Gormley, Critical Mass (2023) in Musée Rodin, Paris, France
The human form and space have been the catalyst for the British sculptor Antony Gormley’s practice for over forty years. The upcoming exhibition Critical Mass at the iconic musée Rodin in Paris will feature key works by Gormley, showcasing his shared interest with Rodin in exploring the human form as subject matter. The centrepiece, Critical Mass II (1995) will feature an installation of sixty life-sized sculptures arranged in various configurations, leading to Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. Gormley’s Insider works will also be on display, along with four carefully chosen sculptures placed alongside Rodin’s masterpieces. Over 200 of Gormley’s workbooks will also be available for viewing, providing insight into his creative process.
Antony Gormley, Critical Mass (2023) is on view from 17 October 2023 to 03 March 2024
The German School of Photographers: Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky
During the mid-1970’s, a group of photographers studying at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Bernard and Hilla Becher stepped away from old methods of photography in favour of new typographies that blurred the boundaries between painting and camerawork. This group became known as The German School of Photographers. Their photography is presented in a documentary style, using the medium to systematically document subjects as their conceptual framework. The group were devoted to the 1920’s German modern realist movement, Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. This movement created themes on the universal human condition and post-war mentality of the early 1900’s. The German School of Photographers were drawn to their traditional methods, which focused just on the subject and brought attention to all levels of German society.
The teachers of the German school of photographers were Bernd Becher (1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (1934- 2015). They started collaborating in 1959 while attending the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and married in 1961. They taught contemporary photography there from 1976-1996. Their work focused on black and white images of systematic documentation of Germany’s industrial archetypes such as almost forgotten water towers and coal bunkers. The standardised documentary style underscored the communality inherited in variation and was based on their objective visions. The Becher’s were inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” which focused on the object as the main subject matter and the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. They encouraged their students to create case studies and typologies of disappearing architectural relics that were in use but would soon be marked as irrelevant. Their artwork, Blast Furnaces (1969-95) represents an array of multiple small black and white photographs combined together into a grid focusing on the visual forms of the subject matter of the furnace. Each photo on the grid offers a slightly different vision of each furnace in order to draw the viewers’ attention to the subject matter itself. Their collections can be found today in international institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C and the Tate Gallery in London.
With new developments in digitalisation of technological advances within the realm of photography, the notion of the image became obscured. Photography after modernity became a superficial transformation of media images with meaning being brought into question. In order to mediate the influence of pictures on post-societal views, new documentary strategies were discussed on the treatment of presentation. In the 1980’s in Germany, a new photographic theory began to be discussed with the introduction of digital technology shifting focus from what was being depicted to how it was depicted. The Becher students sought out to create a mediation between the medium and the content. The treatment of their presentation of large-scale digitally fabricated images deems the photograph as a painting. Technology becomes essential to their pictorial ideas and the form becomes content and medium. Becher students, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky constructed a new visual reality with digital manipulation. They are known as “Bild-Erfinder” or “Pictorial Fabricators”, for they do not just follow traditional photographic constructs, but use other technologies to create their pictures.
Thomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff is a German photographer known as the master of edited and reimagined images. He is from Hammersbach, West Germany and studied under Bernard and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf where he became a prominent member of the German School of Photographers. Ruff’s early works focused on conveying the truth of the photograph with subject matter containing no theatrical essence. The Becher’s inspiration is shown through his focus on the simple image in socio-cultural interpretations. His works are known for representing the photograph for what it is, an object that only receives meaning after production. Ruff illuminates the outcome of contemporary vision in photography by showing the distance between an event and its representation on subjects such as newspaper photos, portraits and pornography. He removes pictorial features of perspective, horizon lines and spatial depth from his photographs to show the emotional content.
He became famous for his early work Portraiture Series (1980’s), which featured groupings of large-scale ‘passport sized’ portraits that conveyed reality. In the mid-1990’s, he changed his technique from straight photography to working mainly with found imagery from various sources. His subjects turned towards empty domestic interiors, abstractions of modern architecture, appropriated NASA images, 3-D generated pop imagery and pornography. The series Nudes (late 1990’s) are images of naked people stretched to be blurry through the use of resolution to show the emotional real of the subject matter. His work has been exhibited worldwide since 1981 in venues such as the Guggenheim New York, the Biennale de São Paulo and David Zwirner. Ruff currently works and lives in Düsseldorf, Germany pursuing new methods within his medium such as 3-D software.
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky is an influential German photographer from Leipzig, East Germany. He studied under Bernard and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1980 to 1987 and taught there from 2010 to 2018. He is known for his involvement in the German School of Photographers and for his large-scale digitally manipulated images. His subject matter captures the modern world of both built and natural environments on a large scale. The Becher’s influence can be seen in how the focus is solely on the subject matter. Emerging on the art scene in the 1990’s, he used new techniques for his photographs by splicing together images of the same scene, shooting at an elevated perspective and employing digital manipulation to heighten scale, colour and detail. His work focuses on scenes of expansive views that consum the viewer as one can experience the subject being subsumed by the masses or the environment.
In the early 1990’s his work focused on factories, stock exchanges, airports, highways, buildings and golf courses with aerial viewpoints that showed a pattern of crowds and infrastructure. In 1996, his style changed from perspective to frontal view, arranging the photographic montages according to classical patterns with subject matter focusing on social phenomena, entertainment and urban planning. The Pyongyang photos (2007) show a kaleidoscope view of performers in North Korea. During the 2000’s he also focused on themes of capturing the plant as it is by photographing bodies of water. Gursky’s series Ocean (2010) used high-definition satellite photography to interpret his views on sea and land and his series Bangkok (2011) captured water reflections, highlighting the intensity of present moments.
His Rhine photographs of 1999 is undoubtedly one of his most successful series in which he digitised the pictures and left out distracting elements. Rhein II (1999) sold at Christies New York for a record breaking $4.3 million in November 8, 2011, becoming the most expensive photograph ever sold. Gursky is currently working and living in Düsseldorf. His photographs are in many international permanent collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gursky’s current exhibition, which was supposed to open November 19, 2020 at the Amore Pacific Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
5 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS PORTRAYING QUEER LOVE
For our latest list of exceptional artists to watch, we shine a light on our five favourite contemporary artists exploring queer love in all its different manifestations: from romantic love and desire, to self-love or the love that bonds us together in friendship, family and community. These artists serve a critical role for both the queer community and society at large, providing points of reference, identification and inspiration whilst fighting for a better future, advocating for inclusion and equal rights.
Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s intimate images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her, especially in the LGBTQ community and the drug-addicted subculture. Her most notable work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–1986) is a 40-minute slideshow of 700 photographs set to music that chronicled her life in New York during the 1980s. The Ballad was first exhibited at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was made into a photobook the following year.
“For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress,” she said of the medium. “I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.” -Nan Goldin
Born in 1953 in Washington, the artist began taking photographs as a teenager to cherish her relationships with those she photographed, as well as a political tool to inform the public of issues that were important to her, capturing herself and her friends at their most vulnerable moments, as seen in her seminal photobook Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996).
The artist currently lives and works between New York, NY, and Paris, France. Today, Goldin’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.
Nicole Eisenman
Working from the heart and driven by the body, Nicole Eisenman explores the human condition in her paintings, drawings and mixed-media artworks. Influenced by Expressionism, Impressionism, and Pablo Picasso, Eisenman populates her works with emotionally resonant, cartoonish figures, formed out of exaggerated, painterly lines and intense colours. Full of pathos and dark humour, they are expressionistic portraits of herself and her friends, or imagined characters based on her critical observations of contemporary life and culture. Whether carousing at a beer garden or lounging dreamily, in groups or alone, Eisenman’s figures seem isolated and contemplative—products of our time, reflections of ourselves.
“I reflect a certain desire in my work, I want my work to be authentic and reflective of my body, what it’s interested in. The work is nothing if not feeling-based.” –Nicole Eisenman
Eisenman’s father is a Freudian psychiatrist and she grew up listening to him interpret dreams. This is quite evident in the surreal nature of her work. Eisenman has flirted with a variety of styles but her paintings have remained grounded in her personality and vision. A lesbian herself, Eisenman rose to prominence in the mid 90s by combining the absurd with the banal and imbuing quotidian scenes with socio-political importance. Her work has been described as witty, satirical, and overtly queer.
Catherine Opie
In the course of a thirty-year career, the American photographer Catherine Opie has made a study of the freeways of Los Angeles, lesbian families, surfers, Tea Party gatherings, America’s national parks and the houses of Beverly Hills. Often politically charged, her photographs feature a central figure occupying a flattened space, highlighting her subject’s inner life through the removal of external detail. Throughout her practice, Opie investigates queer culture and personal history, creating work that is often autobiographical and informed by her experiences as a lesbian woman.
But her most famous photographs are probably two that she took of herself, early in her working life. In “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” which Opie made in 1993, when she was thirty-two years old, she stands shirtless with her back to the camera in front of an emerald-green tapestry, which offsets her pale skin and the rivulets of blood emerging from an image carved into her back with a scalpel: a childlike scene of a house, a cloud, and a pair of smiling, skirt-wearing stick figures. In “Self-Portrait/Pervert,” made the following year, Opie is faceless and topless and bleeding again: she sits in front of a black-and-gold brocade with her hands folded in her lap, her head sealed in an ominous black leather hood, the word “pervert” carved in oozing, ornate letters across her chest.
In describing her iconic self-portrait, she explained:
“I made the piece out of a reaction to all of the sudden gays and lesbians’ bringing on the ‘normal’ dialogue to us,” and wanted to “push the boundaries a little bit here about what you guys think normal is.” -Catherine Opie
Louis Fratino
Louis Fratino is celebrated for his deeply personal paintings, which draw upon the artist’s intimate experiences, memories, and fantasies to portray the everyday lives of gay men in New York City. “I paint people I love, and I paint using the vocabulary of paintings I love,” Fratino explains. “So the influence is very straightforward; if I see a painting that sets me on fire, I want to try and make something that feels like that.” Whether capturing erotic scenes of lovers embracing in bed or subway passengers peering at their reflections, Fratino embues his contemporary subject matter with references to art history. His paintings often embody the visual style of early 20th century modernists like Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse.
“I paint people I love, and I paint using the vocabulary of paintings I love” -Louis Fratino
Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans is an influential contemporary German artist. Emerging in the 1990s with his snapshot documentations of youths, clubs, and LGBTQ culture, Tillman’s practice has expanded to include diaristic photography, large-scale abstraction, and commissioned magazine work.
“I want the pictures to be working in both directions, I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.” -Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans made his name documenting gay culture in London and Berlin. Born in Germany in 1968 and dividing his time between there and London, Tillmans provokes a sense of belonging in many gay men of a certain generation. The images of a form of post-Berlin Wall freedom – Love Parade, cheap rent, Easyjet, circuit parties, Europe – were all representations of a life that was an escape from the North. At times when masculinity was still shaped by the Gallagher brothers and Manchester United, Tillmans offered a sensual representation of a forbidden gay toughness. Though still largely white and macho, such representations stood out from most of the images of maleness of those times. And what’s more, they came from a gay scene that actually existed somewhere.
5 Critically Acclaimed Films about Art
Never Look Away
Never Look Away follows thirty years in the life of a great post-war German artist, Kurt Barnert, whose story is based on Gerhard Richter’s. The film goes from a childhood witnessing Nazi Germany, to a post-war East Berlin, where Kurt starts attending fine art classes and falls in love with a young woman. But the repressive Socialist Realism painting style of Soviet Germany prompts Kurt and his girlfriend to escape to the West during the time of the Berlin Wall. Once settled in, Kurt and his fellow artists friends from The Düsseldorf Academy burst forward a new exciting movement in contemporary art, which is up until today still inspiring collectors, dealers and critics alike, for being one of the most remarkable moments in art history.
The Best Offer
In this fictional, psychological thriller, Virgil Oldman, a cultured and sophisticated director and owner of an esteemed auction house, falls in love with a reclusive young heiress, who trusts him to auction the large collection of art and antiques left to her by her parents. Virgil, who lives in seclusion amid his priceless collection of female portraits is drawn to his enigmatic new client who refuses to meet in person. More than once Virgil is tempted to bow out of what appears to be nothing but a bothersome mess, but on each occasion, the mysterious young woman, locked in her own obsessional world, convinces him to continue. And with this, the old antique dealer’s life begins to take an unexpected turn, soon finding himself concealed by a passion that will transform his grey existence forever.
Woman in Gold
This film is based on the incredible true story of Gustave Klimt’s sublime painting of “Woman in Gold, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I”. Sixty years after fleeing Vienna, Maria Altmann, an elderly Jewish woman, attempts to reclaim family possessions that were seized by the Nazis. Among them is a famous portrait of Maria’s beloved Aunt Adele: Gustave Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” With the help of young lawyer Randy Schoeberg, Maria embarks upon a lengthy legal battle to recover this painting and several others, but it will not be easy, for Austria considers them national treasures. “Woman in Gold, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” is now on view at Neue Gallerie in New York.
Mona Lisa Smile
At an all-women’s conservative private school in the 1950s in America, a non-conformist art history teacher, Katherine, encourages students to pursue their dreams and question the roles women are expected to play in society, as well as the role that the Abstract Expressionism movement plays in art history. At her first class, Katherine discovers that her students have already memorised the entire textbook and syllabus, so she uses the classes to introduce them to modern art and encourages discussion about topics such as what makes good art. Katherine comes to know her students and seeks to inspire them to achieve more than marriage to eligible young men.
Frida
This film is based on the true story of the complicated and inspiring life of the surrealist Mexican artist Frida Kahlo who shares an unstable and complex relationship with her husband, the muralist Diego de Rivera. Throughout the marriage, Rivera has affairs with a wide array of women, while the bisexual Kahlo takes on male and female lovers, including the politician Leon Trotsky, who is granted political asylum in Mexico. Throughout the film, a scene starts as a painting which slowly dissolves into a live action, highlighting how Frida channeled the pain of her crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.
5 Interesting Facts You Didn’t Know About these What’s Up Artists
David Hockney’s pool paintings inspired movie director Luca Guadagnino’s film A Bigger Splash
The award wining director of Call Me By Your Name talks about how David Hockney inspired his film A Bigger Splash, a sexually charged, romantic drama happening in the Italian island of Pantelleria. In Guadagnino’s own words: “With his painting, A Bigger Splash, Hockney created this incredible mystery: the mystery of desire, the mystery of sexuality, the metaphor of this broken surface under which you don’t know what’s looming. There’s a phantom in the painting. What happens after the human presence is gone? And gone for how long? With his other pool paintings there are also these mysterious figures in the water. Grounded in that is Hockney’s own desire – his sexuality, the Californian Eden he was living in at the time, this paradise that in a way is impossible to reach. When I was thinking of the basic concepts behind the film – regret, love lost, jealousy – it was the subversive qualities of Hockney in the 60s that came to mind. With the splash itself, there’s this moment of fracture in reality; you don’t know what came before or what’s going to happen next. It’s a lot to do with the kinetic energy that comes from the sexual act. That’s what I wanted in my movie. So I felt it was important that the film title was the title of this major masterpiece from this master artist, Hockney.”
A Velázquez Painting helped Alex Katz’s define his style
When he was a twenty-something, Katz visited an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and viewed a portrait of a Habsburg infant. The experience proved pivotal. He recalls the moment and its effect on his life: “It was nothing—so simple! Something could be so simple and so much. Just a green background, a little girl—everything was perfect. There’s no story line. It’s immediate. He painted directly. He saw it, he painted it.”
An airline commissioned Calder to paint a Jet
Calder’s most colossal commission came in 1973, when Braniff International Airways asked the artist to decorate a full-sized Douglas DC-8 jet airliner in his distinctive style. Given his background in engineering and his interest in motion, Calder accepted the offer. Known as Flying Colors, this plane took flight in 1973 and primarily serviced South America. Two years later, he designed another plane for the airline: Flying Colors of the United States.
In 1982, the airline went out of business. The first aircraft was sold to a leasing firm, while the second rendition was accidentally destroyed during filming for a movie.
Gerhard Richter conceived the south windows of the Cologne Cathedral
A vast colour chart by Richter was installed in 2007 in the south transept window of the Cologne Cathedral, a Gothic bastion of Roman Catholicism in northern Europe. Sixty-five feet tall, Richter’s south-facing giant window consists of eleven thousand five hundred panes of “antique” handblown glass which, when directly sunlit, admits a wash of aureate illumination into the cathedral’s gloomy immensity. According to a recent poll, this cathedral has since become the Germans’ favourite art attraction.
Maurizio Cattelan likes to make his gallerists the subject of his work
One time Cattelan taped the gallerist Massimo De Carlo to a wall. It looked like a “duct tape crucifixion”. Massimo actually had to be taken down after a couple of hours because he was suffering from exhaustion and lack of oxygen.
Furthermore, in 1995, Maurizio Cattelan put on stage his parisian gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, disguised in a pink rabbit costume with a giant phallus shape. This was Surrealist theatre at its best and most intimate, bringing visitors into direct contact with the child/parent relationship of artist and dealer. We get a glimpse of Cattelan as innocent subversive; his artistic purpose a tricky blend of self-searching, a determination to avoid clichés, and a commitment to keep his audience in tow.
