Author: artistvenu

Stunning Shots from the 2021 Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition Unveil Nature’s Minuscule Details

October 27, 2021 (updated October 27, 2021) Published by

Andy Sand’s “Lachnum niveum”

Salamander silhouettes, an ant clutching a snack, and the diverse findings of an unintentional insect trap are a few of the winners of the 2021 Close-Up Photographer of the Year contest (previously). Now in its third year, the global competition garnered more than 9,000 entries across 55 countries, an incredible selection that unveils the stunning and minuscule details of the natural world. See some of our favorite shots below, and view all winners on the contest’s site.  (via Kottke)

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Shattered Porcelain Fragments Are Elegantly Bonded in Kintsugi Sculptures by Yeesookyung

October 27, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

“Translated vase” (2020), ceramic shards, epoxy, and 24K gold leaf, 22 × 22 × 20 centimeters

Seoul-based artist Yeesookyung (previously) fuses Korean and Japanese craft traditions in her elegant, gilded sculptures. Blending ornately patterned vessels with deities and animals, the delicate assemblages meld shards of discarded ceramic into new forms with bulbous sides, halved figures, and drips of metallic epoxy. Utilizing fragments from previous works references the Korean tradition of discarding porcelain with small irregularities, while the visibly repaired crevices draw on Kintsugi techniques, the Japanese art of highlighting the beauty of broken vessels with thick, gold mending’s.

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At the Shed, Instagram-Ready Art Collective Drift Serves Up a Spectacle Made of Floating Pillars and Lightweight Ideas

October 27, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

One of the configurations of the blocks in Drifters. Photo by Ben Davis

I’m a bit split about “Fragile Future,” the slick collection of installations by Amsterdam-based experience-art duo Drift (a.k.a. Lonneke Gordijn, Ralph Nauta, and their “multidisciplinary team” of helpers), currently at the Shed.

In terms of what you see and experience, the show is fun. If you like Christmas light shows or Las Vegas magic acts—and I do personally like both these things—this will hit the spot. It’s art in that register.

But it also aims to be more than just fun. Drift wants its work to be taken seriously, to both inspire and to “ask fundamental questions.” And I just don’t know if I can take it that seriously.

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What Quilts Mean Now

October 27, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

Virginia Jacobs, Krakow Kabuki Waltz, 1987, cotton plain weave, pieced and quilted, 7 feet in diameter.COURTESY THE ARTIST. PHOTO © MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.

The goal of the new exhibition “Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories” (on view through January 17, 2022) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, seems—at first glance—straightforward enough. The show reflects the history of the United States over the course of some three hundred years through fifty-eight objects drawn primarily from the MFA’s own collection. Previous exhibitions have primed us to accept that quilts hold history in their very threads. Yet quilts are multivalent things; they speak different words to different ears. Do quilts function as autobiography, a manifestation of the maker’s vision, or a fundamentally communal expression of purpose and meaning? Do they visualize broader aesthetic trends and evolving techniques? Are they embodiments of economic forces that bring commercially produced cloth into homes? Do they represent gendered training and its possible subversion? The answer to each of these questions is “yes and . . .”; quilts illuminate multiple facets of life.

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Language Learning

October 27, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

View of Sonia Almeida’s Pockets and Lies, 2020, in the exhibition “Standard Error (SE),” Tørreloft, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2020.PHOTO BRIAN KURE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TØRRELOFT, COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

In her paintings, Sonia Almeida often draws imagery from typographic sources such as Roman letters or a medieval anthropomorphic alphabet. The Portuguese-born, Boston-based artist is fascinated by linguistic rules and systems, which she explores in a rather associative manner. A bilingual professor of printmaking and book arts at Brandeis and the mother of a dyslexic child, Almeida spends much of her time thinking about language, and produces works that feature bright colors and unconventional formats loosely inspired by books. Athulya Aravind, an assistant professor of linguistics at MIT and codirector of its Language Acquisition Lab, visited Almeida in her studio outside Boston. As an expert in verbal learning, Aravind is fascinated by the human capacity to form language communities. The two women discussed the links between writing and visual art as communication tools as well as the relationship between grammatical understanding and cultural belonging.

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The Democracy of Abstraction

October 25, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

Thomas Nozkowski, “Untitled (9-69)” (2019), oil on linen on panel 22 × 28 inches (all images © Thomas Nozkowski, courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019) never hedged his bets. One bet was that abstract painting did not have to be elitist; it could be as open to subject matter as Andy Warhol supposedly was. The difference is that Nozkowski was not interested in the second-hand experiences we all supposedly share. He believed that each person’s experience of the everyday was fundamentally unique and set out to honor that in his work.

By 1974, when making large-scale paintings had become commonplace, and subject matter had largely been banished from abstraction in favor of paint-as-paint, he had formulated an alternative approach based on two conclusions. First, he decided to work on a 16-by-20-inch format using prepared canvas boards, which are available in any art supply store, implicitly rejecting the masterpiece tradition and the belief in the artist as a heroic figure.

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How Landscape Became Doctrine in American Art

October 18, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

Thomas Cole, “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow” (1836), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Outside of his popular Modern Art Notes podcast, Tyler Green is working to reinvigorate the tradition of Americana in art history. His first book, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (2018), traced the influence of one photographer on the formation of national parks. Yosemite became the nation’s first act of “landscape preservation,” which was central to a burgeoning United States cultural identity. As frontiersmen settled the park’s surroundings, Watkins captured “cathedral spires” on the Sierra Mountains, gesturing at nature’s spiritual essence and the protestant foundations of Manifest Destiny.

Throughout the 19th century, nature served as inspiration for American artists, thanks partially to transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1836 essay “Nature” encourages religious and aesthetic separatism from Europe’s old muses.

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Surrealism Beyond Europe: 5 Essential Artists Getting Recognition at New Met Show

October 18, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

Eugenio Granell, El vuelo nocturno del pájaro Pí (The Pi Bird’s Night Flight), 1952.PHOTO MARGEN FOTOGRAFÍA/©2021 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VEGAP, MADRID/COLECCIÓN FUNDACIÓN EUGENIO GRANELL, SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

For years, the common misconception about Surrealism was that it was mainly a European movement, with René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and others as its leaders. Gradually, that notion is changing. Feminists have added to the Surrealist canon female artists like Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Méret Oppenheim, and acclaimed surveys outside the U.S. have brought increased attention to figures like Wifredo Lam, Hervé Télémaque, and Remedios Varo. As a new kind of surrealism takes root among today’s younger female painters, a new understanding of the movement is also blooming.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders” reflects this momentum. Curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale with Lauren Rosati, Sean O’Hanlan, and Carine Harmand, the show, which heads to Tate Modern in London after its run in New York, aims to prove that Surrealism was hardly confined to Europe. If anything, this survey suggests that, once Surrealism got its start in Paris in the ’20s, the movement’s influence could not be contained.

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Tracking The Shadow: Jill Johnston On Jasper Johns

October 7, 2021 (updated October 7, 2021) Published by

Jasper Johns: Racing Thoughts, 1983, encaustic and collage on canvas, 48⅛ by 75⅜ inches. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK. ©2021 JASPER JOHNS/LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

In the recent show at Castelli of Jasper Johns’s latest work—four largish paintings titled “The Seasons,” with a number of drawings and prints related to them—one detail eventually caught my attention, occluding all others. The most obvious feature in these four paintings is Johns himself, represented by his shadow, cast life-size onto the canvases, worked from a tracing drawn by a friend. The same silhouette, painted in rich grays, appears in each Season—Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter—tilting left to the same degree.

This four-part work is as literal as anything Johns has done. Spring, for instance, is marked by diagonal streaks of white paint crossing the whole canvas and indicating rain; Winter is dotted all over with white snowflakes and even has a stick-figure snowman in it. In Spring, birth is clearly signified by the centered shadow-form of a child (inside a rectangle) directly underneath the looming, tilting shadow figure of Johns. The child’s head, cut off just above the ears, slashes across Johns’s body right below the crotch, sepa· rated only by its variant gray color and the top horizontal of the rectangle containing and cropping the child’s head.

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The Drawing Cure

October 7, 2021 (updated October 7, 2021) Published by

A participant wearing a mobile EEG cap equipped with electrodes that track brain wave activity while painting at the Your Brain on Art conference, Valencia, Spain.PHOTO LUKAS GEHRKE/COURTESY STEPHANIE SCOTT AND LUKAS GEHRKE

Like essential frontline workers, art therapists have been toiling nonstop during the pandemic. Having usually treated patients in psychiatric hospitals and mental health clinics, they shifted to practicing online, making art virtually with clients marooned at home. In August 2020, the American Art Therapy Association released a coronavirus impact report documenting how Covid-19 had disrupted mental health care at a time when it was desperately needed: 92 percent of the art therapists surveyed said their clients experienced anxiety due to isolation and the pandemic threat. Financial pressure and increased family responsibilities, like home schooling and safeguarding the health of loved ones, ranked highest among their patients’ causes of stress. Meanwhile, a new dynamic sprang up overnight, with clinicians and clients suddenly “in” each other’s homes—privy to personal space, accidentally meeting pets or family members—a situation that would normally constitute a flagrant breach of ethical boundaries. For art therapists, conducting sessions online presents additional roadblocks.

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