Author: artistvenu

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

March 4, 2024 (updated March 4, 2024) Published by

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 While it includes some of his greatest hits, it also brings to light lesser-known and previously unpublished pieces from his oeuvre.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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A Painter Suspended Between Beauty and Waste

March 4, 2024 (updated March 4, 2024) Published by

Featured image: Phillip Allen, “Low Memory (Strange Roads to Walk Version)” (2023), oil on panel, 56 1/2 x 49 x 3 inches

Phillip Allen’s paintings are paradoxes that have stayed with me ever since I first saw his work in 2013 at Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. As I stated in my review at the time, it was evident to me that “Allen doesn’t define his commitment through style but through an exploration of materiality.” This was the beginning of what I saw in his art.

Seven years later, during the first months of the pandemic, when New York was shut down, I saw his debut exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery. By then, I had come to think of him as “one of the most wonderfully challenging painters around.” After visiting his current self-titled exhibition at Miles McEnery, I feel even more determined to pinpoint exactly what Allen does in his work. Something about his visual preoccupations speaks to the viewer’s mind and eye, the connections and ruptures between physical and visual sensations, in tandem with our capacity to daydream and to reflect upon the bond between the ephemeral and the permanent. The paintings embody the joy of looking and the space of self-reflection such elation might bring us.

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Wander into This Miraculous Miniature Library with Thousands of Books Made Entirely by Hand

March 1, 2024 (updated March 1, 2024) Published by

Featured image © Tomas Mayer

When you log onto any social media platform, it’s hard to deny AI’s pervasiveness. This occurs in both subtle forms like advertisements, or more blatant ways, like the explosion of images on your Instagram Explore page that don’t look quite right. Whatever the case, it’s clear that artificial intelligence is here to stay, and with tech giants running amok, an air of skepticism ceaselessly clouds social networks.

That being said, it’s understandable that coming across striking photos like Tomas Mayer’s “Handmade Miniature Library” can send you into a spiral of questioning how—and who— brought it into existence. Luckily, we have insight.

Working out of his Stockholm studio, Mayer expertly constructs miniatures and dioramas. The “Handmade Miniature Library” is an incredibly detailed scene filled with hundreds of books, scrolls, and shelves, all created with the artist’s dextrous skill and dedication to a tedious craft.

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Why the Impressionists Went Gaga for Purple

February 28, 2024 (updated February 28, 2024) Published by

Featured image: Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard (1899–1903). Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd.

by Verity Babbs February 28, 2024


“I have finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere. It is violet. The open air is violet. I found it! […] In three years from now, everyone will be wearing purple!” said Claude Monet. But not everyone was as passionate about purple as Monet and the Impressionists. In fact, the group’s extensive use of the colour upset many critics, who accused the Impressionists of suffering from “Violettomania”.

The first true pigment—cobalt violet—was synthesized in 1859, and nine years later came the brighter and less toxic manganese violet. The Impressionists, who had their first exhibition in Paris in 1874, loved to use the shade in their mission to portray the true nature of light in their paintings. Some critics even put the group’s heavy use of violet down to optical and neurological conditions. The German ophthalmologist Richard Liebreich saw works by J.M.W. Turner—another fan—at London’s National Gallery, and asked whether the artist’s new work was “caused by an ocular or cerebral disturbance”.

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Dramatic Dualities and Emotional Entanglements Unfold in the Metaphysical Realm of Moonassi’s ‘Murmures’

February 24, 2024 (updated February 24, 2024) Published by

Featured image: “Tie the knot” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 102 x 142 centimeters Image © Moonassi

Pensive faces, ambiguous light sources, and mysterious spaces characterize the atmospheric drawings of Moonassi, whose solo exhibition Murmures at Vazieux Gallery delves into the surreal world of memory and emotions.

In black-and-white ink and acrylic, the Seoul-based artist cross-hatches figurative scenes onto Korean hanji paper, portraying deep contrasts, dualities, and tensions. Rich, black shadows reveal glowing hands and faces, exploring relationships between light and dark, awareness and the unconscious, presence and absence, and the known and unknown.

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Lachlan Turczan Transforms Water Patterns Into Liquid Sculptures With Cymatic Watergrams

February 22, 2024 (updated February 22, 2024) Published by

Featured image: Images courtesy of Lachlan Turczan

LACHLAN TURCZAN EXPLORES VISUAL AND SONIC DIMENSIONS OF WATER

Water, light, and sound artist Lachlan Turczan crafts Cymatic Watergrams as otherworldly landscapes born within the confines of a darkroom. Through the exposure of vibrating water patterns onto photosensitive paper, Turczan unveils a hypnotic exploration of both the visual and sonic dimensions of this element. His camera-less prints document his Resonance Series, giving rise to cymatic sculptures that animate water as liquid art, revealing sculpture-like forms that pulsate and undulate in a rhythmic dance. As light passes through the intricate wave patterns and is captured on photosensitive paper, it becomes harnessed by the water which serves as a lens that focuses and disperses light according to the varying frequencies present within the liquid.

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Will Hutnick’s ‘Glitchy’ Paintings Investigate Gaps in Perception

February 18, 2024 (updated February 18, 2024) Published by

Featured image: Will Hutnick, Weather Patterns (2024). Courtesy of Geary, Millerton, New York.

Every month, hundreds of galleries add newly available works by thousands of artists to the Artnet Gallery Network—and every week, we shine a spotlight on one artist or exhibition you should know. Check out what we have in store, and inquire for more with one simple click.

What You Need to Know: Opening February 24, 2024, artist Will Hutnick will be the subject of the solo exhibition “SATELLITE” at Geary in Millerton, New York. Featuring a range of new and recent paintings, the exhibition highlights Hutnick’s experimental practice, with each work containing various techniques such as using plants, stencils, and rollers to create complex layers that, together, blur the boundary between the abstract and representational. On view through April 7, the show mirrors the malleability of our present reality, particularly regarding the tensions between the digital and corporeal worlds. Speaking of these gaps in perception and understanding, Hutnick said, “There is something inherently queer about these glitch-type spaces that seem to be filled with potential; they’re shape-shifting, constantly reinventing themselves, not tied to the present but rather circumnavigating both the past and present.”

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Exploring the Unpredictably of the Human Body, Cristina Camacho Flays Symmetric Paintings

February 16, 2024 (updated February 16, 2024) Published by

Featured image: Detail of “Cuerpo hambriento” (2022), acrylic on canvas, 66 x 52 inches Images © Cristina Camacho

Cristina Camacho likens canvas stretched across a skeletal frame to skin. Both a protectant and a site for expression, the flesh is one of many layers within the body that the artist peels back to reveal what lies beneath and within. “When I first started cutting the canvas, I was very interested in stopping seeing the canvas as the surface where the paint goes,” she tells Colossal.

In Carne, a series of symmetrical paintings sliced and sculpted into three-dimensional forms, Camacho expands on her earlier bodies of work that explore universal themes around female anatomy, shame, and healing. After being diagnosed with a rare disease and realizing her chances of becoming a mother were limited, though, she began to turn toward the personal, creating as part of reckoning with life-altering news. “My relationship with the work really changed because it became a tool for healing and for understanding how I was feeling both emotionally and physically with my symptoms and my fears,” she says. “The idea was to have a catharsis of my symptoms.”

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Stunning Oil Paintings That Look Like Aerial Views of Western Landscapes

February 16, 2024 (updated February 16, 2024) Published by

Featured image: “Orb,” 2022

At first glance, Philip Govedare‘s art looks like your typical aerial landscape photograph. But upon close inspection, it’s revealed that these are actually carefully crafted oil paintings. Visually compelling, each piece highlights natural geographic features, as well as the manmade interventions that impact our planet.

Inspired by remote western landscapes, Govedare’s work isn’t about one specific place. Rather, he uses his memories, observations, and imagination to formulate an evocative landscape. In depicting different weather and lighting conditions, as well as geological formations, he’s able to evoke different emotions.

“While my paintings may elicit questions about our role in nature and the transformation (or desecration) of the earth’s surface and biosphere, they are, above all, a celebration of the beauty and mystery of the natural world,” Govedare tells My Modern Met. “I hope that my work inspires people to contemplate our place as an integral part of nature and appreciate all that is mysterious and transcendent in the world we inhabit.”

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Tony Bechara Creates Chaos With Grids

February 14, 2024 (updated February 14, 2024) Published by

Featured image: Tony Bechara, “
Random 28 (Green version),” detail (2023), 
acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61 inches (all images © Tony Bechara, courtesy Lisson Gallery)

Tony Bechara is the least-known member of a loosely affiliated group of abstract artists who developed a meticulous approach to the phenomenology of color. Centered in New York around Hunter College, where Sanford Wurmfeld, Gabriele Evertz, Vincent Longo, and Robert Swain taught for many years, this group (active since at least the mid-1970s) has long been interested in color theory and issues of perception, going back to Josef Albers and Georges Seurat. One reason they have flown under the radar can be extrapolated from the art historian William Agee’s observation of Wurmfeld’s Cyclorama projects, an immersive experience in which the viewer is surrounded by color:

“A generation of art, permeated by conceptualism and theory, has devalued the power of the visual; like color itself, as well as art, painting that provides visual pleasure has been seen as too easy, too simple, lacking in “intellectual” depth. This is wrong, for it fails to understand that the mind and eye, the intellect and the senses, cannot be separated, and in fact are inextricably joined in one thinking, feeling body. Sensory intelligence and visual intelligence are fundamental to our being. The visual is profound, for it is how we see and thus how we comprehend the world.”

Although I knew of Bechara from conversations I had with Wurmfeld, I was not prepared for what I encountered in his self-titled debut exhibition at Lisson Gallery. Working in acrylic on square canvases ranging from 24 by 24 inches to 61 by 61 inches, he divides the entire surface into quarter-inch squares in which he paints one of 28 colors.

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