Elaborate Fragments of Line and Color Transform into Bodies and Landscapes in Lui Ferreyra’s Vibrant Compositions

Featured image: “Axis Mundi,” oil on linen, 84 x 64 inches Image © Lui Ferreyra

The deceptively simple power of line and color comes into full force in Lui Ferreyra’s paintings and colored penciled drawings (previously). “I’ve been drawn to the figure and the human face from the beginning,” the artist tells Colossal. “The real subject matter of the work, however, is the breakdown of visual information itself.”

Puzzle-like compartments, which the artist describes as a “coarse-grain deconstruction of visual information,” fit together to highlight realistic body parts or dramatic scenery. Ferreyra is interested in the idea of gestalt, a term often often associated with the adage, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and used in psychology to describe the way that human behavior and the mind are interconnected.

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Damien H. Ding’s Dreams of a Modernist Past

Featured image: Damien H. Ding, “Drawing an A” (2023), egg tempera on panel, 49.125 x 61.125 inches framed

BOSTON — I did not know of Damien H. Ding’s art until I saw his debut exhibition, Simple Structures, at Steven Zevitas Gallery. The show consists of five egg tempera paintings on aluminum surfaces and two large sculptures made of repurposed wooden beams, both with small paintings on wood inserted into carefully made notches. (The sculptures were built in collaboration with Juan-Manuel Pinzon.) Ding’s understated gesture of inserting his painting into a rigid architectural form is a key to understanding his approach to art-making. Although the critic Harold Bloom might have called him a “belated” modernist, Ding rejects Bloom’s thesis that artists must engage in an Oedipal battle with their forebears. Rather, he finds ways to establish a dialogue with a historical figure — the world-renowned modernist architect I. M. Pei — that reveals something about the subject, himself, and his wide-ranging internal dialogue about art.

In one painting, Ding depicts Pei dreaming; in another, the architect holds an inverted glass pyramid that resembles the one he designed for the Louvre Museum. Pei believed that cubism’s exploration of space was the basis of modern architecture. Working in the International Style, which favored rectilinear forms and planes devoid of ornamentation, as well as spacious interiors and glass and steel construction, Pei’s best-known accomplishments include the triangular design of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (opened in 1978) and the glass pyramid in one of the Louvre’s courtyards (1989), for which he received mixed responses.

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Paintings That Capture the Full Force of Nature

Featured image: Melinda Braathen, “Inwards” (2023), oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

LOS ANGELES — In Melinda Braathen’s oil paintings, the forests are aflame, but at peace. The works in her solo exhibition at Baert Gallery, Atmosphere, depict landscapes in a palette of fiery reds, oranges, and yellows to create the illusion of chaos amid sanctuaries.

Braathen’s compositions of hiking trails, tide pools, and mangroves are ordinary snapshots of the outdoors. Tree branches crisscross above walking paths and spiky leaves sprout from hard soil. Things come to life through her short, vigorous brushstrokes. Deeply layered, they set the environment aglow. In “Body of water” (2022), small patches of yellow leap from red leaves, like embers jumping across kindling.

Braathen’s works are studies in the force of nature, its ability to thrive and consume any environment. Her strongest paintings are the ones in which the ecosystem has swallowed human activity. “In Time, In Tempo” (2023) shows an old car that has nosedived off a cliff, its doors and trunk popped open, splayed out like limbs after a clumsy fall. The warm tones and energetic marks make it appear like an accident in progress, a plume of fire and smoke reaching out from a burning vehicle. But, looking closer, it’s clear that time has passed. Moss, leaves, and vines crawl in and out of the vehicle. The flames are just willowy bundles of fountain grass; the smoke, impressionistic mounds of rocks and mud.

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How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Made the Familiar Bizarre

Featured image: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “The Gardener” (1587–90), oil on wood, 14 x 9 2/5 inches; Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona, Italy (via Wikimedia Commons)

It was in Prague, that red-tile-roofed city of dreaming gothic spires, where the esoteric-minded monarch Rudolf II, the 16th-century ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, gathered thinkers and artifacts from throughout his domain, which covered Austria, Croatia, Hungary, and Moravia. It was Rudolf who English poet Elizabeth Jane Weston celebrated when she intoned in an undated valedictory ode: “May Caesar’s empire, which establishes rewards for the Muses,/ flourish; and may Caesar’s court long thrive.” For though Rudolf was largely ineffectual in matters of statecraft, he assembled a court of scientists, philosophers, and alchemists who were responsible for Prague’s enduring occult reputation.

Unconcerned with the drudgery of government, the Habsburg king was primarily interested in deciphering the occluded structures of our reality. Starting in 1587, he constructed a northern wing on his castle to exhibit his massive Kunstkammer, or “Wonder Cabinet.” Within its 37 cabinets, the emperor collected gargantuan cut gems and curious fossils, astrolabes of gold and silver, and intricate time-keeping contraptions. Most enigmatic, however, was a portrait of Rudolf by one of his court painters, the Milanese Mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

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The Howard Hodgkin collection of Indian court paintings

According to the records, Howard Hodgkin devoured Agatha Christie’s novels. He couldn’t resist an elephant. And, when it came to buying whatever he longed for his private collection, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The late British artist has explained that much of the motivation behind a collection can be attributed to a single concept: desire. But once that stage is surpassed and the collection’s character is formed in the owner’s mind, the pieces must be acquired “out of necessity, as well as passion.” During a talk that Mr. Hodgkin gave in 1992, he announced flatly: “A great collection often seems to be the result of one very rich man going shopping. It isn’t. It is really partly illness, an incurable obsession.”

Howard Hodgkin’s compilation of Indian court paintings was acquired in 2022 by the Met Museum in New York. The exhibition that followed, “Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting“, offers a comprehensive look at a group of artworks that spans Mughal, Deccan, Rajput and Pahari pictures dating from the 16th to the 19th century. There are epic and court scenes; portraits of maharajas and dervishes; botanical and zoological studies; hunting, bathing, weddings; and a room devoted entirely to elephants, many depicted with the same introspective approach human beings’ representations typically take. Also, it seems that the artist loved to identify with elephants.

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Immersive Bamboo Installations by Asim Waqif Whirl and Heave in Monumental Motion

Featured image: “লয় [Loy]” (2019), Arjunpur Amra Sabai Club, Kolkata. Photo by Vivian Sarky

In his monumental, swirling structures, Delhi-based artist Asim Waqif merges tenets of architecture and sculpture into sweeping site-specific compositions. Using natural materials like bamboo and pandanus leaves, he often incorporates found objects, scaffolding, sound elements, cloth, and rope.

Waqif draws on his studies in architecture and experience in film and TV art direction, considering location, material, and the experience of moving around or through the work. Building each installation involves complex “manual processes that are deliberately painstaking and laborious, while the products themselves are often temporary and sometimes even designed to decay,” he says.

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In Leonardo Ulian’s Techno Assemblages, Electrical Wire and Found Objects Form Precise Geometric Systems

Featured image: “Techno Atlas 013 – Rebirthing State” (2021), electronic components, microchip, speakers, copper wires, lead, 3D printed elements, varnish, paper, and wood, 84 x 84 x 4.5 centimeters

During the past several decades, digital technology has impacted—and in many cases completely transformed—just about everything. From medicine to sports to the supply chain, myriad facets of our lives are organized and determined by computers. For London-based artist Leonardo Ulian (previously), the networks and connections of today’s technologies provide an unending well of inspiration.

In a number of ongoing series like Technological Mandalas, Techno Atlas, or Contrived Objects, Ulian draws on varying themes like the body, global maps, and analog objects to create a dialogue between electronic systems, philosophy, and the human condition.

The Technological Mandala series, for example, came into being a little more than a decade ago when Ulian was going through a personal crisis and sought a sense of purpose in his life and artistic practice. His research and experiments at the time opened a trove of ideas that he continues to tap into. “After 10 years,” he says, “I am still captivated by the discoveries this body of work is helping me make, both in terms of novel concepts and, I would say, philosophical thoughts.”

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Sarah Grilo’s Prescient Abstraction

Featured image: Sarah Grilo, “Pines, Ochres and Green” (1963), oil on canvas, 44 x 50 inches (© The Estate of Sarah Grilo; image courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.)

Among the 17 paintings by artist Sarah Grilo in Galerie Lelong’s The New York Years, 1962–1970, one work most dramatically prophesizes the dread-inducing news alerts of our time. The brushwork in beiges, browns, greens, and grays in “America’s going…” (1967) is overlain by red lettering that the artist transferred from newspapers, eerily resembling those red chyrons that flash on our phones and stream across cable news today.

Born in Argentina in 1917, Grilo was creating introspective art amid social and political unrest well before she moved to New York. Through the group Artistas Modernos de la Argentina, she became an important painter amid the male-dominated Buenos Aires art scene of the 1950s, singled out for her monochromatic, geometric, and expressionistic approaches to lyrical abstraction.

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Envisioning Kashmir’s Future Through Paint and Verse

Featured image: Masood Hussain, “Hazratbal Bazaar” (2018), Canson paper 330 g/sm, 20 x 30 inches (image courtesy Private collection)

In 2019, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth, Irish writer and poet Gabriel Rosenstock and Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain collaborated on a book titled Walk with Gandhi: Bóthar na Saoirse. It featured Rosenstock’s bilingual Irish and English haikus and English prose on Gandhi’s life, illustrated by Hussain’s watercolor paintings. The two artists bridged their geographical gap again to virtually collaborate on a second book, Boatman! Take these songs from me in 2023. This time the subject was grief, which found its way into Masood’s painted reliefs embodying human suffering and the visceral struggle against colonial oppression in his homeland of Kashmir. Rosenstock responded to Hussain’s artwork with his ekphrastic tanka poems on sacrifice, longing, and freedom.

Their third and latest collaboration, Love Letter to Kashmir (2024), acts like a balm for the wounds of a strife-torn and occupied Kashmir. In it, Hussain turns to the soothing potential of his watercolor paintings, which offer a glimpse into what was once eulogized as “paradise on earth” by, many scholars believe, the Persian poet Amir Khusrau.

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New Book Explores M.C. Escher’s Lesser-Known Works

Featured image: M.C. Escher, “Relativity” (1953), lithograph, 10 9/10 x 11 1/2 inches

Alongside Monet’s water lilies and van Gogh’s swirling night sky, the telescoping staircases and precise forced perspectives of M.C. Escher are some of the most identifiable motifs in the Western art canon. Escher, a new book edited by Mark Veldhuysen and Federico Giudiceandrea and published by Skira, is a densely illustrated compendium of the artist’s life work. While it includes some of his greatest hits, it also brings to light lesser-known and previously unpublished pieces from his oeuvre.

The book traces the Netherlands-born Escher from his origins through his education and the actualization of his unique vision, culminating in the “Eschermania” that has preserved and proliferated that vision. Work made during his years post-schooling is given particular focus, rooting his obsessions with precise geometries, puzzle art, tessellation, and paradox in his early life in the 1920s, which was also a deeply influential time in Italy.

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