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Understanding Ugo Rondinone’s Target Paintings
Swiss-born and New York-based artist, Ugo Rondinone emerged in the 1990s becoming one of the leading contemporary artists of our times. Famous for his permanent installation in Nevada, Seven Magic Mountains, Rondinone refuses to settle on a single medium, often recurring to painting, sculpture, photography, sound and video.
The target paintings, considered his most iconic body of work, appeared in 1991 in Rondinone’s oeuvre. The works are titled with their execution date in German, drawing the attention to the conception of time and duration, which is at the core of Rondinone’s existentialist analysis.
The works are spray-painted with blurry rings of colour that, despite their apparent simplicity, pulsate, creating an illusion of depth. The illusory visual energy generates a psychedelic effect that destabilises the viewer’s eye.
In his art Rondinone often uses patterns which derive from art history. He says:
“If you do art today with relevance, then [artistic] movements … are naturally part of the information in this new work. Every artwork has its history and carries the whole information of art history.” -U.R
In Target Paintings, there is a clear recall to the work of Kenneth Noland whose target paintings were realised in the 1950s. Noland evolved his most remembered sequence of work in the late 1950s, at the outset of Post-painterly abstraction and the close of the modern period. He worked them by hand and stained the color into the canvas. Ugo Rondinone, by contrast, birthed his pictures in 1991.
Of course, comparing artists that are decades apart is generally just as wrongheaded as comparing images that are superficially similar: context is all. But before we place Ugo Rondinone more precisely in his own time, it is important to recognize that artists of his generation—and particularly those working in paint—have had a peculiarly strong relationship to modernism, its themes and concerns forming a pole against which they react and navigate. That makes the comparison of Kenneth Noland and Ugo Rondinone instructive.
Although Rondinone and Noland’s target paintings are aesthetically similar, their execution and conceptions are extremely different. As Noland was primarily concerned with form, it was important to erase any trace of the artist by employing rollers, sponges and brushes; in addition, the usage of geometric forms crated a space where the viewer’s eye could primarily focus on the presentation of color.
For his paintings, Rondinone also takes inspiration from Op Art’s psychedelic patterns and extends Noland’s precepts of repetition and random permutation of colour and line. Contrarily to Noland, Rondinone’s circles are perfectly symmetric, contributing to create a stronger optical illusion.
The Target Paintings generate a powerful visual involvement so that its viewers are engaged through the experience rather than its conceptual understanding. This is Rondinone’s unique and special way to create a dialogue between audience and artwork and a moment to reflect on this complicated relationship.
What the top 5 most expensive NFT artworks tell us about the ecosystem
A day spent in the NFT world can often feel overwhelming. Things are constantly changing, and the technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate. But if you are interested in exploring the space and you’ve got to start somewhere, why not start at the top?
There are some crucial lessons we can learn from looking at the most expensive NFT artworks sold to date. Although filled with the ‘usual suspects’ (think Beeple, Cryptopunks, PAK, Christie’s and Sotheby’s…) these records can actually give us a pretty broad perspective on some of the key trends in the NFT space today.
#5 Larva Labs, Cryptopunk #5822.
Sold for USD 23,700,000 (8,000 ETH) on 12 February 2022.
Trend: PFPs and status signalling
Okay if you have never heard of Cryptopunks, I completely understand why you may be staring at your screen with a look of horror on your face. But let me explain why that pixelated image was sold for 23.7m dollars. Cryptopunks are a collection of 10,000 pixelated avatars, considered to many as the first NFT project ever created. Created in June 2017, it was one of the first use cases of the newly launched Ethereum blockchain. What is crazy is that they were originally given away for free to whoever was interested in the innovation that NFTs presented. Given this first-comer status, the project has become one of the most valuable NFT collections that exist today.
Cryptopunks are an example of ‘Profile Pic NFTs’ also known as PFPs. PFPs are collections of avatars (ranging from punks, to apes, to kittens) that collectors use as their digital counterparts, thus using them as their profile pictures on social media. Following the success of Cryptopunks, countless of PFP collections have been launched and continue to be launched daily. It is very questionable whether these collections can be considered Art, but it does demonstrate an interesting trend in the NFT space.
What this historic price and the growth of PFPs shows us is the importance of status signalling in the NFT world. Having a Cryptopunk as your profile picture on social media demonstrates one of two things. Either you were involved in the space early (as early as 2017) and therefore presumably a seasoned expert in the crypto space more generally, or you are extremely wealthy and therefore able to afford a Cryptopunk at the prices that they are being sold for today. This alone has justified the incredible prices that collectors have spent for Cryptopunks.
#4 Beeple, HUMAN ONE.
Sold for USD 28,980,000 on 9 November 2021.
Trend: Christie’s, Sotheby’s and the importance of showcasing NFTs physically
It is safe to say Beeple is a phenomenon on his own, one of the highest-earning artists in the NFT space and also one of the few that are slowly forging a career in the ‘traditional’ contemporary art world. Back in November 2021, a hybrid physical/digital NFT artwork by Beeple sold at auction for an outstanding 28.9m dollars. HUMAN ONE, is a generative sculptural artwork of a digital astronaut that is wandering across shifting environments.
So, what lessons can we learn from this exorbitant artwork sale? To begin, this artwork reflects a desire to showcase digital NFT art physically, a problem without a real and convincing solution. By creating a digital artwork with a physical showcase, Beeple presented a solution for his own art.
Another lesson is the influence traditional art world auction houses, particularly Christie’s and Sotheby’s have had in record NFT sales. Selling through these established auction houses seems to give the NFT world a sort of ‘art world validity’. What is ironic is that the NFTs sold at Christie’s or Sotheby’s tend to be sold to crypto-native collectors. Strangely, marketplaces already exist for these types of NFT transactions, and both buyers and sellers could save a lot from avoiding the big auction houses’ fees. It seems as though auction houses are currently filling the position of NFT tastemakers through first-mover advantage, but I wonder how long that will last…
#3 PAK & Julian Assange, Clock.
Sold for USD 52,700,000 on 7 February 2022
Trend: DAOs and crowdfunding
The auction of the unique NFT artwork titled Clock by PAK and Julian Assange sheds light on one of the most interesting phenomena of the crypto space: DAOs. In simple terms, A Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, or DAO, is essentially a group of people that come together to pool funds for a common cause. All decision-making is decentralised among all members and the ‘rules’ established for the DAO are published on the blockchain.
What has made DAOs an unavoidable force in the space is the ease with which people are now able to fundraise together for a common cause. When PAK & Assange announced the auction of the NFT Clock, a DAO called AssangeDAO raised 52.7m dollars in a matter of days to purchase the artwork. Their mission is to free Julian Assange and the proceeds from the sale were donated in full to Assange’s legal defence.
Needless to say, the ease with which money can be pooled for a common cause through blockchain technology could have a revolutionary effect on the art world and the future of art collecting.
#2 Beeple, Everydays: The First 5000 Days.
Sold for USD 69,300,000 on 21 February 2021.
Trend: The artwork that got us here in the first place
It is pretty likely anyone reading this has heard of this sale, as it took the art world by storm. The sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days came quick and hard, like an unexpected slap in the face. How was it possible that an artist, whose name had never been heard before, was suddenly the third most expensive living artist at auction? This sale is probably the reason why I am even writing this column. It brought NFTs to the spotlight, globally and in all news channels, both within the art world and beyond.
But what does this sale teach us about key trends in the industry? Mainly that anyone who is paying exorbitant prices for NFTs today is bound to have a vested interest in the success of NFTs. What better PR stunt than announcing the sale of an NFT at 69.3m dollars? The NFT was purchased by the owners of a crypto and NFT fund called Metapurse, who had been investing in NFTs for a while and could only benefit from a record-breaking price that would bring NFTs to global fame.
#1 PAK, The Merge.
Sold for USD 91,800,000 on 2 December 2021.
Trend: Fractional Ownership
In first place is PAK’s The Merge, an artwork that sold for USD 91.8m during Art Basel Miami Beach week. But here’s the catch: PAK fractionalised the ownership of the artwork and 28,983 collectors participated in the purchase of 312,686 units of the artwork as individual NFTs. It is debatable whether this artwork can be considered one artwork or 312,686 unique ones, particularly if you compare it to the auction record for a living artist, namely Jeff Koons’ 1986 Rabbit which sold for USD 91.1m in 2019. Theoretically, a single buyer could purchase all individual NFTs into the single piece The Merge, causing the work to be widely considered the most expensive NFT artwork sold to date. But are we ready to accept an NFT is the most expensive artwork by a living artist, ever?!
Leaving that debate aside, this sale sheds light on one of the most exciting trends in the NFT space. The concept of fractional ownership of an asset, and the subsequent astronomical sums of money that can be pooled together, is an innovation that is bound to revolutionise the art world. Of course, you may argue that crowdfunding or partial ownership existed well before the NFT hype, but it is the ease with which this can be done that could really make it mainstream soon. It is a fascinating prospect and one that I believe we are bound to see growing in appeal amongst today’s contemporary artists and commercial art galleries.
Blockchain, what? is a monthly column on the LVH ART JOURNAL by Carlota Dochao Naveira exploring how crypto, NFTs and Web3 may revolutionise the art world.
The value of the Ephemeral: Farewell to Christo
Statelessness: according to International Law, a stateless person is someone who is “not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law”.
After escaping from the Communist dictatorship of Bulgaria, his country of origin, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff moved to Prague, Vienna, Geneva, and finally to Paris, where he was regarded as a refugee and, therefore, a stateless person. Charmingly enough, although Christo was not recognised as being a citizen of any country, the nomadic artist borrowed spaces and created “gentle disturbances for a few days” all around the world.
For the course of his life, Christo was a spiritual genie. Far from following traditional artistic approaches, Christo recognised that artworks can only be seen to be truthful and authentic when they reflect the ephemerality of life itself. Accordingly, Christo produced artworks that only existed for a number of weeks, such as wrapped-up buildings, bridges, landmarks, seacoasts, city parks or geologic formations, each becoming a temporary yet mesmerising eighth wonder of the world:
‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying,
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.’ -(Robert Herrick)
Since everything in the spatio-temporal world is contingent, we must follow Horace’s dictum of “carpe diem” and grasp our opportunities while we can, a sentiment that was expressed by the artist himself in a recent interview when referring to some of his installations:
“There will never be another Running Fence or Floating Piers. If you didn’t see it, you missed it.” “We have these two weeks with our precious babies,” Jeanne-Claude -Christo’s life partner similarly said. She continued: “As for me, I always feel physically, viscerally joined to the work.”
Working closely with his wife, Jean Claude, the artists’ couple signature works couldn’t be commodified because of their ephemeral nature. Moreover, during a talk at the Harvard School of Design in 2016, Christo claimed that he would never let someone pay to experience his works, and that no one could ever buy his projects’ “freedom”:
“Freedom is the enemy of possession, and possession is permanence.”
Christo has taught us, therefore, that art should be, like him, nomadic. His artworks inspired spontaneous responses and fully engaged us. Following this line of thought, it would be incorrect to talk about an ‘audience’ when it comes to the visitors of Christo’s art. People directly engaged with Christo’s installations and were thus able to achieve experiences that would have been unthinkable before the realisation of the said work.
In this regard, Christo’s 2016’s installation over the Italian Lake Iseo is unforgettable; countless visitors were able to step onto the artwork – sometimes even in bare-feet – in order to completely immerse themselves in the natural surroundings. By allowing the visitor to ‘walk on water’ in this way, Christo enabled them to perform something that only the Gods had previously ‘experienced’.
“When we install three kilometres of a floating pier, what you experience is three kilometres of a floating pier —meaning, you have to walk the three kilometres on the water. You are exposed to real elements: sun, wind, rain, fear.”
As underlined by Christo’s words, nature was a fundamental component of his work: the artist used lands as his personal canvas, harmoniously displacing on them temporary triumphs of vision. For instance, Umbrellas (1991) was an installation made of more than 3,100 blue and yellow umbrellas spread across inland valleys in Japan and California. Such a simultaneous displacement of art unifies mankind: with his Umbrellas Christo aimed at showing how each person, be they Japanese or American, is moved by the same necessities, such as the protection from heat or rain. On the other hand, by adopting different colours, he aimed to represent the unique colour palette in the landscape of the two countries: Japan with its blue watery rice fields and California with his yellowish sand deserts.
May we throughout our lives be fuelled by the same indefatigable attitude that Christo and Jeanne Claude always displayed in their artistic practice: outstanding works require, naturally, tireless preparations. It took several years to finally obtain the permission to wrap monuments such as the Reichstag in Berlin, following years of navigating through the correct channels of bureaucracy.
For Christo, his life as an artist began by learning how to comply to the propaganda requirements insisted upon by the Bulgarian Communist regime. In spite of this, he managed to develop an very individualistic form of artistic production which aimed at liberating people, rather than indoctrinating them. The project to wrap the Reichstag took 24 years, three official refusals, and the fall of Communism before it was completed in 1995, but, in the end, it became true and stood as the affirmation of his own freedom.
More recently, in the Summer of 2018, he surprised us all again with his London Mastaba, located in the middle of the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. The sculpture, made of 7,506 oil barrels, had been conceived by the artist-couple, but, unfortunately, only Christo had the chance to actually see it, as Jeanne-Claude died in 2009. Art always came first for the artist-couple: in fact, even though the two were reportedly inseparable, Christo and Jeanne-Claude always flew on different planes during their uncountable trips; at least one of them had to finish their artwork, in the case of a plane crash.
Similarly, an instillation in which the Arc of Triumph in Paris will be wrapped-up, which is expected to be completed in October 2021, is set to continue even without the artist. For Christo, the transient quality of his art was a reflection on the ephemeral nature of human existence; although he will not be able to experience for himself his forthcoming work, his visitors will bear witness to his final ‘temporary’ triumph.
The Young and Black Vanguard
The beauty of art is that it’s constantly evolving and being pushed to new heights with each new generation of artists. A crop of young black artists, in particular, deserve to be on your radar, adding immeasurably to the artistic dialogue with their unique visions and techniques. Here is our latest list of young artists to watch:
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones
Born in London in 1992. Lives and works in New York.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s paintings emerge from a perspective of what the artist describes as ‘cultural addition, combination and collaboration’. Born and educated in the UK and now living and working in the USA, his practice is inspired by the ancient history of West Africa and its attendant mythology, and by his Yoruba heritage.
Often beginning with studies in ink pen or watercolour on paper as a means to explore his imagery, Adeniyi-Jones employs a varied palette and works with different seasons or times of day. His characters and forms are repeated and re-worked in multi-panel paintings which depict figures in small groups or pairs, invoking the ritualised repetition integral to ceremonial processes.
His boldly coloured paintings are set within a flat, shallow space located in modernist abstraction – in particular the overlapping planes of Cubism and the colourful papier découpé of Matisse – as well as the narratives and symbolism of West Africa. In these, abstract backgrounds of lush, stylized foliage proliferate across the canvas surface, the sinewy bodies emerging and dispersing into the tessellating shapes and interlocking swathes of colour.
Jerrell Gibbs
Born in 1988. Lives and works in Baltimore.
Jerrell Gibb’s paintings are distinctive for their loose playful lines, an illustrative style emulating the beauty in daily mundane life experiences. The subjects are static, however, his unmistakable expression affirms the multilayered experience of African-Americans by accentuating Black identity through an empathetic and authentic lens.
Gibbs pays homage to Matisse who similarly believed expression and decoration are one in the same. The arrangement focuses equally on placement, size and proportion, as on painterly gesture. His claim of legacy and the way it performs and displaces an audience unaccustomed to more extensive and wide-ranging portrayals of Black life is powerful.
Alex Gardner
Born in 1987 in California. Lives and works in California.
Alex Gardner’s cool, surreal canvases portray androgynous, mostly featureless Black subjects situated amid spare colour fields. Gardner uses dark, inky hues to render these figures’ skin and adorns them with pastel-tinged clothing. This contrast creates both tactile warmth and a sense of distance, which is amplified thanks to the sitters’ lack of recognisable features. These anonymised forms variously raise questions about racial identity, gender roles, and the chilly nature of digital interactions. The artist has referenced Old Masters including El Greco and Michelangelo, giving art historical traditions a contemporary update.
Cinga Samson
Born in 1986 in Cape Town, South Africa. Lives and works in South Africa.
Educated in a shared art studio of South African painters in his early twenties, soon after deciding to dedicate his life to art, Cinga Samson has recently established himself as an important new voice in contemporary painting. His oil works on canvas manifest echoes of what he describes as the superstitions and spirituality integral to his upbringing in the town of Ethembeni and its surrounding countryside. Desire, aspiration, and celebration of identity drive much of his work, for which he draws inspiration from fashion, heritage, and the works of Paul Gauguin and Andrew Wyeth, among others. Samson’s process incorporates the use of sketches and photo shoots; he carefully selects elements within a composition to be replaced with others in order to achieve a sensual equilibrium between the real, the imagined, and the accentuated.
Joshua Oheneba Takyi
Born in 1997 in Kumasi. Lives and works in Ghana.
Joshua Oheneba-Takyi’s versatile practice, based on drawing and painting, has increasingly drawn attention. In his work, he intimately documents and examines the themes of placement and displacement, often employing the chair as a metaphor for notions of stability and belonging. Oheneba-Takyi learned the practice of mixing paints and painting on canvas on his own and through his contemporaries. In 2018, he founded Painstpree, a not for profit organization which turns any space into an art-friendly environment where participants can relax and paint for fun as a way to invest in their creative selves.
Truth in Francis Bacon’s Works
Francis Bacon is without a doubt one of the most important painters of 20th century. In a period where abstract painting was becoming predominant, here were figurative images that felt very current yet remained rooted in Old Master painting and ancient art. With his unique visual language, Bacon’s works are the combination and contradiction of formal spatial structure, informal, and almost like abstract mark making. Bacon’s unparalleled talent is unquestionable, however his personal history, has heavily influenced the way Bacon views the world and how he chooses to portray it in his works.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Bacon lived most of his early adolescent years moving between Paris, Berlin and London, finally making London his permanent home. After going through a series of tumultuous relationships that often left Bacon questioning his belief towards love and relationships, the artist met his longtime partner George Dyer, during the height of his career. Unfortunately, Dyer soon after passed away suddenly due to alcohol abuse , at the time Bacon was working on multiple projects such as a solo exhibition at Centre George Pompidou and an upcoming exhibition with the Royal Academy of Arts, he deeply blamed himself for not being present during the period leading to his partner’s passing. The following years, he profusely focused the feelings he had towards his works by constantly trying to recreate Dyer. Although dark his works during this period also had a certain tenderness to them. Bacon’s creative process was heavily involved around recreating the world he sees on the canvas, and try to capture the fragility of humanity in them.
Later in his creative process, Bacon’s works showed intrinsic features into the artist’s psyche. Each canvas is designed with precision, with his figures framed by cages, apertures or other geometric devices. Together with his sharp lines and color contrasts, these frames act against sentimentality. The brilliance of Bacon is how his human and animal figures are always breaking out of these devices, going beyond these frames, creating a sense of visual panic. Bacon has mastered exploiting the innate process of the viewer to break it down to reality to find explicit truth.
Bacon’s iconic body of works have inspired artist like Jenny Saville, “ It was a spirit of freedom to do whatever you wanted – as long as there was truth in it, however brutal. Bacon gave me that permission. If you liked looking at violence, if you liked looking at blood and death, Bacon showed that you could do that as an artist.” says Saville. In the spirit of Bacon, Saville painted a carcass in 2004. The canvas, Torso II (2004-05), shows the ox meat as a classic carcass hung up vertically, Saville draws inspiration from Bacon’s aesthetic of mirroring humanity through total catharsis.
Another prominent artist that has drawn inspiration from Francis Bacon is Damien Hirst. Now iconic, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) alongside many works of Hirst, are revealed by him to be closely inspired by the themes and influences that are seen in Bacon’s works. As he said, “There has only ever been one idea, and it’s the fear of death”. Bacon like painters before him such as Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh who often explored darker subject areas with their works, aims to portray the full force of the human psyche. His work always veers to the imagination, with a continuous presence of raw, dark power, this visceral energy that is compelling. “I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He’s not afraid to: get dirty and wrestle with the dark stuff. He is complicated. It’s not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It is about belief. I believe!” says Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon.
Bacon talked about the brutality of fact. His incredible bravery to take this on, to face up the catastrophes of human life makes him beautifully unique. Being his own worst and best critic, he pushed himself to the edge everytime. By looking into the void that usually is avoided by many artists, Bacon’s profound way of taking on brutality and fragility under one umbrella, and continuously questioning it through decades of creative process proves his continuous relevance and importance transcending through the times.
Understanding Andy Warhol’s Shadow Paintings
In 1978, at age 50, the irreverent Pop Art icon, and chronicler of an era, Andy Warhol embarked upon the production of a monumental body of work titled Shadows with the assistance of his entourage at the Factory.
That same year, he also created a smaller version of this body of work, using the same name and following the exact same process and aesthetics.
Nine of these paintings are on view at our exhibition What’s Up / Twenty Twenty. An ambitious reunion of Warhol’s small Shadows, this viewing experience is unique, as most of Warhol’s series have been split up and sold to lots of individual buyers, making it nearly impossible to reunite them. The monumental Shadows were purchased as a single group by Dia Art Foundation in 1979.
Like the artist’s famed Marilyn or Mao silkscreens, Shadows is an exercise in obsessive repetition: Two photographs of shadowy forms are printed over and over again in vibrant shades of aqua, violet, coral, and yellow.
Conceived as one painting in multiple parts, with the final number of canvases being determined by the dimensions of an exhibition space, these 102 silkscreened canvas panels formalized the artist’s earlier explorations of abstraction seen the previous year in the Oxidation, Rorschach, and Camouflage paintings. In contrast to the Oxidation or Piss paintings, achieved through a process of staining in which a canvas coated in copper reacted to the acidity of urine spilled or dripped on it, the Shadows panels are silkscreened canvases.
To understand the radical implications of Warhol’s Shadows, one must begin with the work’s form: the Shadows series was conceived as one painting in multiple parts, the final number of canvases determined by the dimensions of an exhibition space. In its first public presentation, only 83 canvases were shown. They were installed edge to edge, a foot from the floor, in the order that Warhol’s assistants, Ronnie Cutrone and Stephen Mueller, hung them.
The canvases, which were primed and coated with acrylic paint prior to the printing of the image, show Warhol’s signature palette of bright hues with cheerful excess. While the color palette used for the grounds of the Shadows includes more than a dozen different hues, certain colors that are characteristic of his larger body of work—the translucent violet of Lavender Disaster, 1963, or the aqua green of Turquoise Marilyn, 1964—are present. Unlike the surfaces of earlier paintings, in which thin layers of rolled acrylic paint constituted the backgrounds onto which black pixelated images were silkscreened, the backgrounds of the Shadows canvases were painted with a sponge mop, whose streaks and trails add “gesture” to the picture plane. Seven or eight different screens were used to create Shadows, as evidenced in the slight shifts in scales of dark areas as well as the arbitrary presence of spots of light.
The “shadows” alternate between positive and negative as they march along the walls of the gallery. Despite the apparent embrace of repetition, Warhol’s “machine method” is nothing but handmade. A significant and intriguing fact about Shadows is the irreproducibility of its assumed reproduction, a point that problematizes his aesthetic of “plagiarism” and positions Warhol’s project as one that is primordially pictorial. This revelation, previously inferred by curator Donna De Salvo in the catalogue for Tate’s 2001 retrospective of Warhol’s work, is crucial to our absorbing this series 39 years after it was created. As De Salvo observed,
“Each of the visual strategies operative in these paintings is the same as those used some 17 years before. As with the earlier silkscreen paintings, although we at first believe each canvas to be the same—a belief emphasized here by the repeated patterns of the shadow—they are not.” Far from replicas, each Shadow corresponds to a form that reveals its space with precision and self-awareness, directing the spectator’s gaze to light, the central subject of the series. By focusing on the shadow to devise light as sparks of color, Warhol returns to the quintessential problem of art: perception. As he asserted, “when I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.”
Donna De Salvo, Dia Art Foundation’s senior adjunct curator of special projects.
Understanding Antony Gormley’s Cube Works
The British artist Sir Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body with space. His sculpture Subject, 2012, featured in our exhibition What’s Up / Twenty Twenty, is a perfect example of Gormley’s celebrated Cube Works series (2012 – 2018), in which the artist’s critical investigations with the human body and how it inhabits the architectural scape become most powerful and evident.
In a career spanning forty years, Gormley has reached a level of recognition for which many artists strive. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019). In 1994, he was awarded the Turner Prize. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014.
The critical engagement of Gormley’s sculptural project with both the artist’s own body and those of others confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and architecture as a mental condition. Harnessing the language of modernity -most notably De Stijl and American minimalism-,Gormley’s geometric constructions of bodily figures eschew illustration and mimesis while allowing an open ground for projection and reflection:
“The body is the place where emotions are most directly registered. When you feel frightened, when you feel excited, happy, depressed – somehow the body registers it.” -A.G
Translating the volumes of the body into strict cubic frames built of solid iron blocks, the uncompromising orthogonals that compose Subject, 2012 belie their emotional punch, its sculptural structure so schematic that the body form is rendered purely abstract, but without any loss of human empathy.
Expressing serenity and composure, the body posture of Subject, 2012 evokes a feeling of reverence and submission, with fists softly rested on the hips; and back, shoulders and neck standing firmly straight. The sculpture’s knees and feet touch the ground, making the body’s contact with the floor part of the sculpture’s structure, kneeing down for support and interrogating our dependency on habitat.
Implying a dialogue between human nature and planetary matter this work is cast in iron, an earth material identical to the core of the planet and which when exposed at its surface reacts to time and the elements, fusing the both into the meaning and material of the sculpture.
This piece is an excellent example of Antony Gormley’s Cube Works series (2012 –2018). Intrigued by the ways in which iron pyrite naturally aggregates, the artist began to experiment by using off‐set cubes to create body masses. The aim was to translate the volumes of the body into strict cubic frames or solids, propping up the architecture, and testing the bounding condition of the space.
Following these interrogations of how the human body occupies space, Antony Gormley asks:
“if a mind occupies the body and the body occupies a building, how does it feel if we substitute building for body? To what degree are we sheltered and contained by our structures and to what extent are we controlled by them?” -A.G.
Whereas Subject, 2012 resembles a three-dimensional architectural model, or ground plan of a modernist housing ensemble, it alludes, both literally and figuratively, to the notion of the ‘house’, which is here articulated as a man-made construction and shelter, without which we would ultimately perish, but also as the bodily ‘shell’ that protects something infinitely more remote and enigmatic: the cerebral inner ‘space’ where thought and emotion reside. In his exploration of the points of contact between these two spheres, the work bears witness to Gormley’s on-going investigation of geometry, abstraction and our metaphysical relationship to the built environment. Through materials, gesture and spatial relationships, the artist strives to give form to that which is least visible and most profound: the sensation of occupying a body that, in turn, inhabits the world.
THE PICTURES GENERATION: 5 ICONIC ARTISTS WE LOVE
The Pictures Generation was a loose affiliation of artists, influenced by Conceptual and Pop art, who utilised appropriation and montage to reveal the constructed nature of images. Experimenting with a variety of media, including photography and film, their works exposed cultural tropes and stereotypes in popular imagery.
By reworking well-known images, their art challenged notions of individuality and authorship, making the movement an important part of postmodernism. The artists created a more savvy and critical viewing culture, while also expanding notions of art to include social criticism for a new generation of viewers saturated by mass media.
Though many artists in the group were trained formally in traditional disciplines such as painting and sculpture, they elected to utilise their skills in unorthodox ways – re-examining composition, particularly within popular image production. The ready availability of cameras allowed artists to reconsider photography’s stance as an artistic medium, composing images with conceptual frameworks.
The artists who would be involved in the Pictures Generation grew up in the 1960s when consumerism and mass media began to have a large impact on society. They were the first generation of artists raised with television. In the 1970s and 1980s conceptual art ideas were being circulated through art professors who began to incorporate then-unorthodox and nontraditional media into their curricula. Programs like the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City, which was established in 1968, the visual arts program at New York’s Buffalo State College, and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles were cutting edge curricular innovations. A majority of the artists of the Pictures Generation studied in Buffalo, New York or Los Angeles.
In the following list, we explore the work of some of the most prominent artists from the Pictures Generation through their most iconic pictures -or photographs-, which not only challenged the conventions of art history but also those of popular imagery and the collective psyche:
Richard Prince
Untitled (Cowboy), 1989
At first glance, one sees a seemingly romantic all-American image of a Stetson-topped cowboy against a brilliant blue expanse of mountain and sky in Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy). However, the photograph is grainy, somewhat unclear, an incomplete, imperfect image. Prince appropriated it from an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes, instead re-photographing and distorting a page torn from a glossy magazine to track the construction of an American symbol: the Marlboro Man. In the beginning of his career, Prince worked in a New York publishing company collecting and sending physical pages from magazines to advertisers to prove that they were run in magazines. He began to photograph a series using the Marlboro Man advertisements, eliminating the text, cropping and blurring the existing image, and producing alternative meaning. Although the Western archetype of a cowboy has been long associated with an American masculine ideal, Prince disrupts the highly polished and constructed image by removing its context, reminding the viewer that mythic ideals inform consumer habits and that the viewer is complicit in the creation of that myth.
Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #21, 1978
For Untitled Film Stills series, Cindy Sherman began photographing herself staged in various scenes that appeared to be from classical Hollywood films: a girl arriving in the big city, a girl cooking over the stove, a girl in lingerie dressing herself. The stills seem recognisable, but are taken from no particular movie, mimicking typical cinematic angles, lighting, and dramatisation to convey a sense of the familiar. Critics have commented on Sherman’s representation of females as “making strange” – forcing the viewer to be a more critical observer of the constructed re-representation, categorising Sherman’s work as a feminist intervention. Sherman draws attention to the fact that a woman’s appearance is often associated with her identity: a woman is valued in society to be looked at. The film theorist Laura Mulvey established the term “male gaze” to illustrate the typical perspective of a filmgoer, who assumes the role of male subject. Taking the term from psychoanalysis, Mulvey surmised that vision works as a function of sexual and developmental drives, and male-directed films of the mid-20th century often served to place women in subjugated roles, relegating women to fetishised victims or villainous femmes fatales who were unable to be agents of their own destiny. Sherman’s reworking of these archetypes, as creator and character, interrupts the male gaze and re-establishes the women in the photographs as agents, while simultaneously complicating the relationship as she freezes herself in these multiple roles.
Robert Longo
Men in the Cities, 1979
One of Longo’s most well known series is Men in the Cities, a group of charcoal drawings that depicts various individuals frozen in exaggerated movements. The people are dressed in business garb, suits, jackets, ties, prim dresses, and heels, thrusting and careening wildly. The critic Craig Owens points out the “aestheticisation of violence” within Longo’s practice, as he freezes these ecstatic figures in moments of frenzy. There is a disparity, however, between the conservative attire and the jerky motions that renders these images somewhat mysterious and awkward. The men and women are still but convey kinetic movement in their positions, suggesting movement beyond the white background, beyond the frame. In the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan-era politics became synonymous with big business concerns and corporate branding, artists investigated how identities were being divorced from individuals, enforcing a type of alienation. Longo studied sculpture and he slyly insinuates three-dimensionality through suspension, hitting pause to question how citizens are complicit in the society in which they participate despite an adherence to so-called proper appearances.
Barbara Kruger
Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), 1987
Kruger began her career in advertising – specifically, working in graphic design and layout at Conde Nast – and the juxtaposition of image and text in her work often speaks to her former training. In Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) two fingers hold a palm-sized card outward. The card itself is wiped off its original face, as Kruger has clearly set “I shop therefore I am” across the flat red surface. The viewer can probably deduce that the original image displayed a credit card, tying the new text to its appropriation. The statement “I shop therefore I am” links the excitement of sponsored consumerism and constructed female identity. As popular formats like films, ladies’ magazines, and department store advertisements dictate what is appropriately feminine and desirable, Kruger ironically turns the upbeat slogan against itself by displacing image from attractive arrangement. The interruption of bold text and bright crimson stop the viewer, forcing them to ask what representation and identity mean for women in a consumer society, and how advertising tries to shape this identity.
John Baldessari
Blasted Allegories(Colorful Sentence), 1978
John Baldessari began his artistic education in San Diego and began introducing text and photographs into his paintings during the late 1950s. By the 1970s he had expanded his practice to include sculpture, film, installation, and printmaking. Like others of the Pictures Generation, Baldessari read newly available critical texts extensively, incorporating the theories of structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss into his artwork, particularly in the photomontage series Blasted Allegories. For Blasted Allegories, Baldessari arranged a series of photographs on a board to organise images as one would words in a sentence, playing with syntax and rhyme, destabilising models of construction visually and linguistically. The stills depict various objects, stills from films and television, and bits of pop cultural ephemera. His work is humorous, juxtaposing visual jokes with seemingly straightforward text to obfuscate direct meaning. The words are relevant to the image shown, but when strung together with other sentences, they are not fully coherent. Through the prescribed images and text, the viewer acts as an active reader, scanning the visual and verbal sentence through the physical line, deriving his or her own sense of the work through various readings of the arrangement. The viewer is thus situated as an active producer of the work’s me
The profound sensibility of Etel Adnan’s work
Edel Adnan has quietly seduced the mind and hearts of art lovers and connoisseurs. It took several decades for the art world to understand the power and truthfulness of Adnan’s artistic oeuvre, but she is now achieving her deserved spotlight. Finally being recognized for the fundamental role that she has embodied in aiding theArab-American community, the emancipation of women artists, and the anti-war and peaceful movements.
Edel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, and received a Catholic education from a French school run by nuns. In a city that was a beautiful mix of cultures, Adnan absorbed all the backgrounds and languages that she was confronted by, and grew with an open mind, curiosity and mental agility. At the age of 24 she flew to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and in 1955 – a very important year for Adnan education and personal life – she moved to the United States. Here she pursued postgraduate studies and two milestone universities: Berkeley and Harvard. She decided to settle down in the States where she spent her time teaching and writing, mainly exploring themes such as sense of identity and displacement, history and politics, which would become recurrent in her practise.
Adnan never really left Lebanon as she always felt a strong connection with her native country. By 1972 she decided to move back, as she was feeling very homesick. Once in Lebanon, she found a country very different from the one that she left many years before: as she said “revolutions do not happen overnight” (Leonard Schwartz interviews Etel on Cross-Cultural Poetics. November 9, 2006), Lebanon was already nursing for the civil war, which started in 1975. During this time, Adnan worked as a cultural editor, until 1976 when she decided to move to the United States.
A polyhedral artist, poet and novelist, Edel Adnan is among the prominent voices in contemporary Arab American literature and art. Her practice, both visual and verbal, is characterised by an intense connection with the world. Her art and literature represents a cross-cultural dialogue between the Arabic and American culture: while embracing new medium and artistic expression, new languages and a modern twist, her oeuvre is a reference of traditional culture, education and feelings.
A powerful feminist and anti-war supporter, her art and writings contain many attributions to politics and the violence of wars. In her award-winning novel Sitt Marie-Rose (1978) she explores what are recurrent themes in her poetry: the political and individual perceptions of violence, in response to the Vietnam and Lebanese Civil War, and her experience of separation from familiar cultures, landscapes and languages.
The special thing about Adnan is that through different forms of artistic expression she is able to express different sides of her personality: trained as a philosopher and passionate about peace and liberal movements, her essays and articles are straight forward, rational and resolved. Her artworks, on the other hand, encompass a more lyrical quality, their warmth and depth released from the rigors of formal expression and thought, to position themselves in a sensory experience. Adan says about her work that “is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape” (Artsy, Etel Adnan Biography; https://www.artsy.net/artist/etel-adnan).
Her paintings do not have a political voice, but they reveal Adnan’s strong willingness to engage with the world. The artworks have a profound resonance for her, recalling familiar landscapes and geographies, her homes: Lebanon and California. The reference to the familiar landscapes of her childhood, found in what appears to be the Mediterranean Sea, and of her mature life, with the warmth of the yellows and reds, mountains and horizons, which resemble California, her artworks are windows into Adnan’s memories and feelings. In the artworks, the artist’s response to violence and men’s indifference is nothing but calm landscapes, empathy with the world: they are a moment of reconnection and spaces to remember and think.
Adnan work spans many dimensions: drawings, oil paintings, films, poems, tapestry, political journalism, notebooks, and novels. Her early artworks, made in the 1950s, are intimate in scale and abstract compositions, where the pivotal element is usually a red square, created with a knife and by directly applying colours from the tube. She used this gestural abstract technique to make colours stand out as she was fascinated by their immediate beauty and power.
While she was curious in diving into different materials and techniques, her art always resembles something familiar, she recalls her native country and Arab origins, which are also what makes her works so special and intimate. This appears frequently in her tapestries series, inspired by the emotion and colour of Persian rugs, and the same gesture of sewing recalls the ancient tradition of Arab women.
In 1964 she discovered another medium: the Leporellos. Famous in the Japanese culture, these fold-out illustrated books gave her a way to combine drawing with poetry in a way where she could meld both of her practices. For this series, she integrated Arabic calligraphy together with drawings: she used to copy words for hours, transcribing poems which meant to unfold nature and urban spaces. These artworks exemplify the nomadic nature of Adnan’s life and oeuvre.
Throughout her artistic career, she never abandoned the practice of abstract painting, which particularly unveils her sensitivity to shapes and colours. Painted from remembrance, her landscapes include mountains, skies and horizons represented as squares, triangles, pyramids and circles, all characterised by the employment of bright colours. The intense energy and mysticism of her paintings presents a clear reference to Nicolas de Staël and Paul Klee. Adnan believes that images are never still, but always in movement: “They come, they go, they disappear, they approach, they recede, and they are not even visual – ultimately they are pure feeling” (White Cube, Etel Adnan, 2014).
Etel Adnan gave an immense contribution to the Arabic American culture and literature, to the emancipation of women and anti-war movements. She is a true example that different cultures and mind openness create beauty and progress. With her writing she gave voice to many communities that didn’t have one, while always using calm, polite and secure tones. Her art is still pure energy, full of optimism and passion for the world. Adnan’s message is that “the world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation” (Etel Adnan for Hans Ulrich Obrist’s handwriting project on Instagram (@hansulrichobrist).
Beyond Reality: The Lasting Impact of Surrealism
As museums across the globe commemorate the centenary of Surrealism, this movement has transcended its original bounds and has become more familiar than ever.
Notably, the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, was aptly titled The Milk of Dreams, immersing visitors in Surrealist themes. In tandem, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum showcased Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, further highlighting the movement’s relevance. The intersection of art and the occult has also captured significant attention, exemplified by the success of the Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life exhibition at Tate Modern in 2023. Additionally, galleries are increasingly showcasing Surrealist artists; Karma Gallery has brought attention to mid-century American Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, whilst Ben Hunter Gallery recently exhibited the works of British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun.
The Angel of the home (the Triumph of Surrealism), 1937 by Max Ernst
This year marks the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s groundbreaking Manifesto of Surrealism, written in his Paris apartment on Rue Fontaine. To celebrate this milestone, museums around the world are showcasing innovative exhibitions dedicated to the movement. From the show Surrealism and Us at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas to Surrealism and the East at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, China, institutions all around the world have showcased their recognition of Surrealism this year. While these two exhibitions have wrapped up, several shows on Surrealism are still on, and more are certainly on the horizon. In London, Levy Gorvy Dayan gallery is currently presenting Enchanted Alchemies: Magic, Mysticism, and the Occult in Art, which juxtaposes contemporary artists with Surrealist works to illuminate their connections. Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes at Hepworth Wakefield in the UK will run from November 23, 2024, to April 27, 2025, and explores Surrealist art through the lens of flora and fauna.
Women Surrounded by the Flight of a Bird by Joan Miró
The most remarkable Surrealism exhibition currently on view is the Centre Pompidou’s Surrealism, open from September 4, 2024, to January 13, 2025. The exhibition honours Surrealism’s origins, with André Breton famously writing the manifesto in Paris. France was home to some of the movement’s most renowned figures, including Marcel Duchamp, Dora Maar, and André Masson. Beyond these icons, artists from around the world flocked to Paris during this vibrant period. To illustrate the city’s influential role in the Surrealist movement, consider the following anecdote: In 1936, the German-born artist and photographer Méret Oppenheim encountered Picasso and his lover, Dora Maar, at Café Flore. At just 23, Oppenheim was wearing a brass cuff covered in ocelot fur that she had designed for the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Upon noticing it, Picasso teasingly suggested that all kinds of objects could surely be wrapped in fur. Oppenheim playfully agreed, gesturing to the plate and cup on her table. This exchange inspired her to cover a cup, saucer, and spoon in the skin of a Chinese gazelle, creating the now-iconic work Fur Breakfast (1936). If you want to delve deeper into Paris’s importance to Surrealism, consider reading Sue Roe’s book In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dalí.
Green Tea, 2011 by Leonora Carrington
At the literal centre of the Pompidou exhibition is a tribute to Paris’s pivotal role in the Surrealist movement, featuring the original Surrealist Manifesto manuscript prominently displayed within the exhibition’s central “drum.” This rare artefact is accompanied by a multimedia presentation that enhances visitors’ understanding of its importance. Breaking from more traditional curatorial approaches, the exhibition is designed in a spiral layout inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s renowned Surrealist exhibitions, inviting guests to meander through dreamlike experiences. With over 500 objects on display, the exhibition provides a comprehensive exploration of the movement’s global impact and rich diversity. Highlights include iconic works such as Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone, alongside rarely seen pieces that showcase the movement’s fascination with the subconscious, animality, and anthropomorphism. The exhibition highlights how the Surrealism movement has transitioned from the artistic fringes to the fashionable mainstream, a position it is likely to maintain, in various forms, for the remainder of the century and beyond.
“Of all the modernist art movements, it was the surrealists who were best at enjoying their revolution. In the Pompidou’s perfectly judged exhibition, that pleasure shines through as you meet these artists, all dead now, not so much as giants of art history as extremely amusing companions.”
Jonathan Jones from The Guardian
Poppy Hotel, Room 202, 1970-73 by Dorothea Tanning
