Representational & Figurative Art

Mystery and Fantasy Veil Black-and-White Illustrations by Artist David Álvarez

November 3, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

“Agony”

Continually fascinated by the potential of the human figure, Mexico-based artist David Álvarez (previously) illustrates richly textured scenes with a dose of fantasy and surrealism: a bird’s perch transfixes a character who’s sprouted a branch nose, a man writhes on the ground as he grows from a gnarled stump, and a Cheshire cat lifts a blanket to unveil a moon hidden beneath. Underlying many of his works is “the expressive force and the gesture of the human body,” Álvarez tells Colossal, themes that are rendered through highlights and dense markings in graphite that add intrigue and mystery to the monochromatic depictions.

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Wild Scavengers and Mythological Wonder Converge in Hera’s Dreamy Mixed-Media Works

October 30, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

“I Had This Guy,’ acrylic paint, spray paint, charcoal on canvas, 27.6 x 27.6 inches

In a poetic new series of works on canvas, German-Pakistani artist Jasmin Siddiqui, aka Hera, nods to her background in street art with sweeping, spray-painted marks, chaotic drips and splatters, and snippets of text. The gestural pieces are rooted in narrative and feature wide-eyed characters who wear headdresses of long-nosed rats, wolves, and strange, hairless creatures. In each imaginative rendering, Hera positions the possibility and wonder of adolescence alongside wild animals often deemed nuisances to human society, with “I’m fine really” displayed next to a child whose finger is snapped in a mousetrap and the title of another work, “Love Her But Leave Her Wild,” accompanying a contorted figure.

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Language Learning

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

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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How Landscape Became Doctrine in American Art

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

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 artistvenu

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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African artists are banking on a record-breaking contemporary and modern art market

September 1, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

or Abidjan-based artist Saint-Étienne Yéanzi, the continent’s social and political reality has sparked a creative evolution for contemporary African artists, he says, giving them confidence to work and stay in Africa.

The contemporary art market in Ivory Coast and across sub-Saharan Africa has captured collectors’ imaginations on a global scale, translating into profits for many artists like Saint-Etienne. He says the average value for individual pieces of his work increased from roughly around $8,000 to $60,000 in his seven years as an artist.

Perhaps the biggest example of this exponential growth is Ivorian rising star Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, better known as Aboudia. “He is one of those artists that has evolved well in recent years,” says gallery owner Cécile Fakhoury, who opened her gallery in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 2012 and has witnessed the ways Aboudia’s vibrant style of graffiti-like painting — reminiscent of the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat — has propelled his career.

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What Does It Mean to Create Afrofuturistic Art?

August 19, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Installation view, Sedrick Chisom, Twenty Thousand Years of Fire and Snow, Pilar Corrias Eastcastle Street (all images courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London, all photos by Mark Blower)

LONDON — What is curious about the works featured in New York-based artist Sedrick Chisom’s first UK solo show Twenty Thousand Years of Fire and Snow, at Pilar Corrias, is that while they are described as “sitting within the Afrofuturistic tradition,” there are no Black people present in them. This is not a criticism. It is an observation that provides an opportunity to consider what it means to create Afrofuturistic art — i.e., work that envisages futures from Black perspectives, and most commonly, imagines the lives of Black people in those futures — that does not require the presence of Black people.

In this particular apocalyptic future that Chisom so vividly builds, all people of color have left Earth. The remaining inhabitants are succumbing to a disease that affects skin pigmentation, and a contingent fortunate enough to be getting sick more slowly are attempting to assert dominance over a so-called “monstrous” race whom the pestilence has already ravaged and transformed entirely.

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An Ancient Fast Food Restaurant in Pompeii That Served Honey-Roasted Rodents Is Now Open to the Public

August 16, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

The thermopolium, or fast food restaurant, of Regio V in Pompeii. Photo courtesy of Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

Archaeologists studying the Roman city of Pompeii recently discovered a thermopolium—a kind of ancient fast food restaurant—and it is now open to the public.

Visitors won’t be able to try the Roman delicacies that would have been served at the original restaurant—since this is a society that thought honey-roasted rodents raised in jars were a delicacy—but they will be able to see the establishment’s colorful fresco paintings.

One artwork seemingly features ingredients that would have been prepared at the thermopolium, such as a rooster, while another shows a scene from mythology, with a Nereid riding a sea-horse. A third depicts a collared dog and Roman-era graffiti that roughly translates to “Nicias Shameless Shitter,” presumably an insult to the owner, Nicias.

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Watercolor Illustrations by Steeven Salvat Cloak Natural Specimens with Elaborate Metallic Motifs

August 8, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

History, science, and nature converge in the watercolor and ink drawings of French artist Steeven Salvat (previously). Whether encasing beetles in ornate armor, rotational gears, and antique dials or rendering vast entanglements of flora and fauna, Salvat’s works exquisitely apply a fanciful veil to wildlife and insects. Each piece, which is the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking linework, stems from biological studies and 18th-century engravings, two themes the artist returns to as a way to allude to the precious qualities of the natural world.

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How South African artist Penny Siopis is exploring ‘Shame’

August 7, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Siopis says the Truth and Reconciliation Commission raised questions about individual complicity in apartheid, which she wanted to explore in the series. Mario Todeschini

Growing up in South Africa in the 1950s and ’60s, it was inevitable that Penny Siopis’ work would be political.

The multimedia artist was born during apartheid, South Africa’s period of legislated segregation, and began her career in the 1980s when anti-apartheid activist (and later president) Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. The “momentous changes of the country” fundamentally shaped her art, said Siopis.”

You’re not just painting or making work about the empirical changes that you witness, but actually the psychological changes,” she said.

Siopis expressed some of those psychological changes in her series “Shame.” Comprising 165 paintings created over three years between 2002 and 2005, Siopis said the series was a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a government body established to investigate human rights violations that took place during apartheid — that explored the “questions around culpability, vulnerability, and shame that the Commission raised.”

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Category: Representational & Figurative Art

Mystery and Fantasy Veil Black-and-White Illustrations by Artist David Álvarez

Wild Scavengers and Mythological Wonder Converge in Hera’s Dreamy Mixed-Media Works

Language Learning

How Landscape Became Doctrine in American Art

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

African artists are banking on a record-breaking contemporary and modern art market

What Does It Mean to Create Afrofuturistic Art?

An Ancient Fast Food Restaurant in Pompeii That Served Honey-Roasted Rodents Is Now Open to the Public

Watercolor Illustrations by Steeven Salvat Cloak Natural Specimens with Elaborate Metallic Motifs

How South African artist Penny Siopis is exploring ‘Shame’

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