Sebastiaan Bremer : Who’s Afriad of Red, Yellow and Blue

La Quatrième Poupée Radiante

The exhibition title references Barnett Newman’s painting of the same name, a high point of Modernist art, which in 1986 was slashed with a box-cutter and irreparably destroyed while it hung in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Bremer’s new works, literally scratching into the surfaces of Modernist masters, engages with this legacy of destruction, yet the artist uses his cutting technique as a means of entering into and engaging with the original paintings and photographs. Rather than functioning as critique, the works inhabit the lines and brushstrokes of past artists in order to make something new, bridging the boundaries of style and time.

In this new body of work, Bremer uses his signature technique of painting on his own photographs of his own, but he also experiments with new approaches, both in the images in which he interferes and in the methods he employs. Collages in the broadest sense, the new works feature a broader variety of tools, media and artistic references.

Bremer has digitally layered and blended images of nudes and studio interiors by Brandt and Brassaï, bits of paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and his own personal photographs. On these collages, Bremer has employed pen, paint, ink and knife, slicing through the emulsion while the drawn and painted marks squeeze themselves into the works.

A Brandt nude, for instance, merges with the faces of two women painted by Picasso; overlaid with ink and knife cuts, the composite woman exudes power, reminiscent of the goddess Isis and the Venus of Willendorf. Bremer’s mark-making collapses the borders between his various source images, suturing together multiple layers, styles, and modes of expression.

Resource : http://sebastiaanbremer.com/exhibitions/whos-afraid-of-red-yellow-and-blue/exhibition-images/

Jeff Koons : Junkyard

Junkyard © Jeff Koons

 

Junkyard, 2002

Oil on canvas

Like most of the Easyfun-Ethereal painting, Junkyard melds diverse sources into a labyrinthine composition of dizzying layers. Expanding on the legacy of Pop artist James Rosenquist’s cropping and silhouetting of images, Koons uses computer software to create even more complicated spatial arrangements. The layers that are immediately identifiable in the center of the painting (flowing blonde hair, chain-link fencing, and peapods) overlap and are flanked by snippets of visual information that prove much harder to decipher. Images of fishnet stockings, a lacey negligee, and a junkyard intersect and interlock in a kaleidoscopic fashion. The combination and confusino of these sexual and mundane references call into question the relationship of sensuality to consumer culture, while evoking the layered and changing graphics common to the internet and computer screens.

 

Resource :
  The Whitney Museum of American Art
  http://www.jeffkoons.com

Derrick Adams’ Artist Statement

Open House, 2014. Photo Credits : derrickadams.com

Derrick Adams is a multidisciplinary New York–based artist with practices rooted in Deconstructivist philosophies and the formation and perception of ideals attached to objects, colors, textures, symbols and ideologies.
 
Focus is on fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface – exploring shape-shifting forces of popular culture and its counter balances in our lives.
 
Creative process is invested in ideas charging formal constructs working in 2D, 3D and performative realms. Medium works its own favor as a formal language, communicating and exploring ideas of self image and forward projection.
 
Learning functions as both subject and object, deriving from impressionable experiences associated with iconography from American culture, television programming and interest in the institutional critique of cultural perspectives in contemporary art.
 
Shedding light on persuasive, performative and often duplicitous identities, as well as on architectural objects and history, the work explores the relationship between man and monument as they coexist in the landscape as representations of one another.
 
The collage works on paper create minimal geometric constructions of angular human figures that seemingly live both in a state of deconstruction at the same time as if in the process of being built.
 
Architectural processes and their different presentation strategies are important in the work: footprints, floor plans, elevation sections, visual renderings and the constructed object, act as various developmental states and approaches and serve as a comparative investigation into the physical construction of the figure.
 
Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alumnus. He is a recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and is an honored finalist for the 2011 William H. Johnson Prize.
 
Exhibition and performance highlights include: MoMA PS1 Greater New York 2005, PERFORMA 05, Brooklyn Museum Open House, The Kitchen NYC 2010, The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2011/12, a four-night solo performance in BAM’s new Fisher Theater in September 2012, and a solo exhibition at Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, 2013.
 
Upcoming exhibitions and performances include Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, as well as The Shadows Took Shape, both at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013; a performance project at Salon 94, New York, in collaboration with the Calder Foundation for Performa ’13; and a solo exhibition at Hales Gallery, London, 2013.

 

Resource : http://www.derrickadams.com

Natalie Frank’s Artist Statement

 

WEAVING ABSTRACTION and figuration with elements of decoration, Frank makes her West Coast debut with nearly two dozen new paintings and works on paper that push her allegorical art into deeper psychological realms. Utilizing tales of the magic realists as her point of departure, Frank collages elements of her previous works together with gestural marks and realistic renditions of bits of life to express a new, haunting view of humanity.

 

The largest painting, Portrait in Interior with Window, 2013, shows a rotund nude woman reclining on a daybed in a room cluttered with furniture, including a rug depicting colorful birds in flight. The grotesque odalisque is observed by an equally freaky figure in the shadows. The bizarre picture brings to mind the jarring juxtapositions of reality and fiction found in the installations of Ed Kienholz, a West Coast icon.

 

Frank accentuates her smaller paintings on board with a witty array of handmade frames. The oddly shaped Portrait in the Landscape, 2013, depicts a half-man, half-beast in profile; with an opening in the lower right corner, its surrounding wood frame makes the piece reminiscent of a pinball machine. A hinged gate on the frame of Screen Door, 2013, reveals an animalistic couple.

 

Interspersed throughout the show, a series of recent drawings created as stand-alone works reveal the artist’s diverse sources of inspiration – from Edouard Vuillard and Francis Bacon to the radical members of the COBRA movement and the quirky Llyn Foulkes – with painterly panache.

 

– Paul Laster

 

Resource : http://www.natalie-frank.com/press/modernpainters_jan14.html

Nina Katchadourian : World Map

I made this map in college in response to an assignment, and it marks the beginning of my work with maps. Using a blade, I took apart a paper map, moving pieces over to a large piece of paper which I watercolored the same blue as the ocean in the original map. Gradually, the world was reconfigured. I often reconstructed words using presstype in places where the names of countries had gotten truncated. There were switches based on historical or geopological factors (Western Europe inserted into West Africa); others were based on formal correspondences or quirks of the map itself. Australia and Alaska had the same green border color, for example, and fit perfectly together due to the distortion of scale that occurs towards the poles.

Resource : http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/maps/worldmap.php