Author: artistvenu

Industrial Materials and Rugged Topographies Converge in Jacqueline Surdell’s Knotted Tapestries

July 30, 2021 (updated July 30, 2021) Published by

“We Will Win: Our Banner in the Sky (after Frederic Edwin Church)” (2020), cotton cord, nylon, paracord, fabric, and ribbons, 84 x 108 x 12 inches, 120-inch bar. Photo by Ian Vecchiotti. Images courtesy of Jacqueline Surdell and Patricia Sweetow Gallery, shared with permission

Chicago-based artist Jacqueline Surdell sutures lengths of rope, fabric, and silky ribbons into sprawling abstract tapestries that hang from walls and standalone armatures in textured, colorful masses. Swelling clusters of knots and ties, loose weaves, braided tunnels, and dangling strands compose her three-dimensional compositions that are disrupted by sporadically used items like steel chains, volleyballs, and polyester shower curtains. Because of the scale of the pieces and the hefty materials, the artist often uses her body as a shuttle to weave the brightly colored fibers together on massive hand-built looms.

Surdell embeds parts of her Chicago upbringing in her wall sculptures, especially childhood memories of her grandmother’s landscape paintings and her grandfather’s job in South Side steel mills. These two experiences converge in her textured works by evoking vast terrains and the city’s industrial history through her use of commercial materials.

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In Pictures: See Inside the Italian Futurist Painter Giacomo Balla’s Apartment, and Works From His Long-Awaited Retrospective in Rome

July 29, 2021 (updated July 29, 2021) Published by

Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.

Born in Turin in 1871, artist Giacomo Balla went on to become one of the world’s best-known Modernist artists. Associated with the Italian Futurists, he left an indelible mark on the history of painting, uniting elements of fantasy with close studies of light, space, and movement.

Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s dynamic photographs, and along with peers Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, and Mario Sironi, Balla infused his works with the Futurist ethos that pervaded Italy in his day. It was not without controversy: members of the movement, including the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who wrote the Futurist Manifesto, were closely aligned with Italian Fascism. Those ties are what led Balla to break with the group.

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How Piet Mondrian’s Abstractions Became a New Way To See The World

July 24, 2021 (updated July 24, 2021) Published by

Piet Mondrian, Victory Boogie Woogie, (1942–44).KUNSTMUSEUM DEN HAAG/PUBLIC DOMAIN

Inside his final studio, on East 59th street in New York, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian covered each wall with painted papers cut into crisp rectangles. Mondrian had become famous at the beginning of the 20th century for this signature style: the three primary colors framed by thick bands of black. But in this piece, the colors had been released from their frames, creating a mosaic of pulsing beats, evoking his beloved jazz and the city’s electric grid.

“We must destroy the particular form” was Mondrian’s mantra throughout his life, and he applied that throughout his career, even breaking down the forms that had made him famous. His final two pieces—Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) and Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–1944)—attempted to do just that, reducing New York to its essence. And with Victory Boogie Woogie, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1944, Mondrian pushed the destruction of his conventions even further, turning the canvas so it became a diamond instead of a square. He conceived the painting in anticipation of the Allied triumph, which he never lived to celebrate.

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How Alma Thomas’s Radiant Paintings Plotted a New Course for Abstraction

July 24, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise, 1970.SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

In 1963, Alma Thomas set out to turn Henri Matisse on his head. Two years before, in 1961, she attended a show of Henri Matisse’s late-career gouaches at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, she saw The Snail (1952–53), in which cut-and-pasted squares of colorful paper are arranged in a spiral-like shape, abstractly alluding to a gastropod without ever outright showing it.

Thomas got to work, effectively recreating the iconic Matisse gouache with a twist. Her version, titled Watusi (Hard Edge), likewise contains a jumble of rectangles, rhombuses, and squares. Look closely, however, and you realize that Thomas has rotated Matisse’s composition 90 degrees. The medium has changed, from gouache to acrylic on canvas, and arguably, the subject matter has changed, too. Judging by Thomas’s title, no longer does the work refer to an animal. Now, it may call to mind a dance style popular in the ’60s whose name came from the Tutsi people in Africa.

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Futurism Explained: Protest and Modernity in Art

July 23, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by

Speeding Train by Ivo Pannaggi, 1922, via Fondazione Carima-Museo Palazzo Ricci, Macerata

When hearing the word “futurism,” images of science fiction and utopian visions tend to come to mind. However, the term was not initially linked to spaceships, final frontiers, and surreal technologies. Instead, it was a celebration of the modern world and a dream of movement that never stops: a revolution in ideologies and perceptions.

Coined by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, the word “futurism” first appeared in the Italian Newspaper Gazzetta dell’Emilia on February 5th. A few weeks later, it was translated to French and published by the French newspaper Le Figaro. It was then that the idea took the world of culture by storm, reshaping first Italy and then spreading further to conquer new minds. Like various other art movements, Futurism took flight to break away from tradition and celebrate modernity. However, this movement was one of the first and the few that pushed nonconformism to its limits. With its unyielding militant nature, Futurist art and ideology were bound to become dictatorial; it sought to demolish the past and bring change, glorifying violent raptures.

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Sunlight Filters through Misty Spruce Forests in Enchanting Photos by Kilian Schönberger

July 23, 2021 (updated July 23, 2021) Published by

Image © Kilian Schönberger

In 2020 alone, a combination of droughts and a raging bark beetle infestation spurred by the climate crisis diminished Germany’s spruce tree population by record numbers. The European nation lost an estimated 4.3 percent of the evergreen species, which tend to grow in both commercial and naturally established forests in the Bavarian Alps and along the southeastern border. Photographer Kilian Schönberger (previously) visited these regions in the early part of 2021 to shed light on the enchanting beauty of the wooded areas that are undergoing substantial transformations.

Endorsement for Spruce Forests captures the species’ ethereal nature as sunlight filters through fog and morning mist, casting a warm candy-colored glow on the landscape. Pink light illuminates the barren branches that splay outward alongside trees covered in needles, while other shots show the rough, labyrinth-like paths that wind through the hilly terrain.

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Frida Kahlo Is the Latest Artist to Get the Immersive Installation Treatment With a New Projected Light Show in Mexico City

July 23, 2021 (updated July 23, 2021) Published by

Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.

There’s a new way to experience the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Art lovers making a pilgrimage to her hometown of Mexico City, where she lived at La Casa Azul with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, can now add a second stop to their itinerary: “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.”

That’s right, Kahlo, perhaps the world’s most famous woman artist, has gotten the “Immersive Van Gogh” treatment, with a 35-minute projected light show that animates 26 of the artist’s works in larger-than-life fashion. Because Kahlo specialized in self-portraits, the experience is something of an immersive autobiography, telling the story of her struggles with illness and disability, as well as her unconventional and often fraught romance with Rivera.

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How Joseph E. Yoakum, an Enigmatic Former Circus Hand and Untrained Artist, Found Drawing in His 70s—and the Hairy Who as Admirers

July 22, 2021 (updated July 22, 2021) Published by

Joseph E. Yoakum, Waianae Mtn Range Entrance to Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Oahu of Hawaiian Islands (1968). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1962, Joseph E. Yoakum had a dream that told him to make drawings. 

He was 71 then, a retired veteran and one-time circus hand living in Chicago. He had no experience making art. But for the next decade of his life—his last, it would turn out—drawing was what he did, churning out some 2,000 wondrous pieces in the process. 

Most came in the form of dreamy landscapes, tethered equally to the natural world and the artist’s own fantastical one: scalloped mountains and pristine pools of water, forests that look like heads of romanesco, and winding roads that disappear into the horizon line. A sense of yearning pervades it all.

The old adage about the Velvet Underground—that only 10,000 people bought their first album, but that every one of them started a band—also applies to Yoakum. Not many people saw his drawings, but those who did came away as immediate and lifelong fans. 

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Anne Wu On Chinatowns, Immigration, and the Uunfinished

July 22, 2021 (updated July 22, 2021) Published by

Anne Wu: A Patterned Universe, 2021, stainless steel, rigid insulation foam, tinted joint compound, PVC roof panel, tarp, plastic packing rope, cast and found objects, 10 by 20 by 12 feet; at the Shed, New York.RONALD AMSTUTZ

Anne Wu, who received her MFA from Yale University in 2020, is an emerging sculptor and installation artist whose work reflects the material culture and collective experience of Chinese immigrant communities. Wu’s sculptural installation A Patterned Universe (2021) features architectural materials such as polished stainless-steel rods, red string, insulation foam, and PVC roof panels sourced from her immigrant neighborhood of Flushing, Queens. With the help of a fabricator known as Mr. An from New Tengfei Stainless Steel, Wu created an installation that evokes liminal spaces by affixing unfinished staircases, doorways, and windows to the walls and floor of a gallery. Below, Wu discusses how she came to see found materials from her neighborhood as conveyors of Chinese cultural heritage and current socioeconomic conditions. “Open Call: Anne Wu” is on view at the Shed in New York through August 1.

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A Flower Patch of Recycled Denim Grows from the Ceiling in Ian Berry’s ‘Secret Garden’

July 15, 2021 (updated July 16, 2021) Published by

“Secret Garden,” New York Children’s Museum of the Arts. Photo by Will Ellis

Whimsical tendrils of vines, foliage, wisteria, and chrysanthemums sprout from artist Ian Berry’s wild, overgrown garden plots. Densely assembled and often suspended from the ceiling, his recurring “Secret Garden” is comprised of blooms and leafy plants created entirely from recycled denim, producing immersive spaces teeming with indigo botanicals in various washes and fades.

Since its debut at the New York Children’s Museum of the Arts, Berry’s site-specific installation has undergone a few iterations. “The first one was made with children in mind… hence the more magical secret garden angle,” he says, “just wanting to (ensure they think about) where the material comes from, see what they can make, and seek out outdoor places within a city.” It’s since traveled to London, Barcelona, The Netherlands, France, Kentucky, and the San Francisco Flower Mart, where it’s permanently installed as a trellis lining the space’s windows.

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