Representational & Figurative Art

Guimi You Finds the Poetic Possibilities of Paint

November 20, 2023 (updated November 20, 2023) Published by artistvenu

LOS ANGELES — Guimi You is quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary figurative painters. Trained in both traditional Korean and Western techniques, her work is a unique synthesis that combines elements and influences from Symbolist and Surrealist art, Korean landscape painting, and even children’s book illustrations. Her solo show at Make Room, entitled Winter Blossom, features eight new works that sprinkle moments of transformation and poetic possibility into everyday scenes.

One of the most fascinating aspects of You’s art is her color sensibility. The Western influence is evident in her use of highly mixed colors and passages of slight temperature and value shifts, as in “Magic Island” (2023). A Korean approach to color that is more symbolic manifests visually as highly saturated and contrasting hues placed next to each other (in the traditional Korean palette, each color represents a different element or cardinal direction). For example, the spines of the books in “Still Books” (2023) and the bottom half of “Orange Studio” (2023) recall the vibrant color combinations of traditional Korean hanbok and bojagi.

Featured image: Guimi You, “Sketch in the Cafe” (2023), oil on linen, 76 x 57 1/8 inches

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

Stunning Hyperrealistic Paintings Capture People’s Surreal Connection to Nature

November 11, 2023 (updated November 12, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Human figures appear to merge with their surroundings in the paintings of Austin Howlett. The New Mexico-based artist explores people’s connection to their environment in surrealist depictions of men and women converging with natural settings.

In some of these pieces, portraits are overlayed with the branches of a large tree, and in others, figures appear to become one with the mountains they are perched on. “I believe that nature allows us to be vulnerable and encourages us to grow. This is why I feel the need to illustrate the human form blended with nature,” Howlett tells My Modern Met. “The complexity of the human spirit at times needs the support of its natural surroundings in order to find balance and peace. The goal of all of my artwork from the beginning has been to ask viewers to do the terrifying work of addressing our deepest emotions so that we can better understand ourselves and shift our outlook on the world to a more empathetic viewpoint.”

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

Michelangelo’s Secret Drawing Room In Florence Opens To The Public For The First Time

November 4, 2023 (updated November 4, 2023) Published by artistvenu

After nearly five decades since its initial discovery, the room believed to have served as Michelangelo’s refuge from political enemies in 1530 is now open to the public. The compact space, measuring 10 m in length, 3 m in width, and reaching a height of 2,50 m, became a canvas for the artist who sketched dozens of drawings on the walls. For the first time ever, this unique space will be accessible to the public from November 15, 2023, through March 30, 2024, and can be reached through the New Sacristy within the Medici Chapels Museum in Florence, Italy.

In November 1975, Paolo Dal Poggetto, the then-director of the Museum of the Medici Chapels (find more here), enlisted the restorer Sabino Giovannoni to conduct cleaning experiments in a narrow passageway below the apse of the New Sacristy. This was part of a preliminary inspection to find a suitable area for creating a new museum exit. Instead of fidning a new passageway, the room was discovered.

Featured image: the compact space is 10 m in length, 3 m in width, and 2,50 m in height | all images courtesy of the Bargello Museums

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below.

Remedios Varo in a Sphere of Her Own

October 26, 2023 (updated October 26, 2023) Published by artistvenu

CHICAGO — What would it be like to wake up, have coffee, and get to work cultivating the implausible, embracing not just the visible world but one of molecules, energies, metaphysics, and fourth dimensions. While all artists are conjurors, Remedios Varo (1908–1963) is a sorceress extraordinaire. Her work is so odd that it feels as if it occupies a category of its own, aligning with the Surrealist sensibilities of Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, or Leonora Carrington, but more otherworldly, more like pages of a medieval spell book or an ancient codex for girls. Varo uniquely fuses technique with content, applying Surrealist methods of chance to delineate spaces and atmospheres infused with magic. Her working methods seem as much potion as process.

Science Fictions, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the first major presentation of Varo’s work in the United States since 2020, when the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC organized a survey. (Needless to say that Varo is just one of many women artists who were historically excluded from the history of Surrealism and art history in general.) Upon entering the show, the consistent orange and golden hues of her paintings set the room aglow. A few of her subjects’ faces, inlayed with mother-of-pearl, catch the light like flecks of the moon. The paintings beckon us to plunge into their vaporous worlds while challenging us to decode intricate scenarios.

Featured Image: Entry to Remedios Varo: Science Fictions at the Art Institute of Chicago (photo Debra Brehmer/Hyperallergic)

Read the original article here… and return to share your thoughts on artistvenu below

Artist Reimagines Modern-Day Landscapes With Van Gogh-Inspired Swirly Skies

October 26, 2023 (updated October 26, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Over the last few years, Mexico City has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Among its main attractions is its unique architecture, blending centuries-old colonial buildings with modern styles. Inspired by its vibrant cityscape, artist Cizza Bernal has set out to capture the landmarks of the Mexican capital with his camera. Then, he elevates those pictures by digitally giving them a swirly sky that evokes Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

For Bernal, this has allowed him to marry his two passions—photography and painting. “I used to paint oil replicas of Impressionist works. Then, I initiated myself in photography and realized that I knew all the rules of composition thanks to my painting experience,” he tells My Modern Met. “It was as if magically I already knew how to take photos thanks to painting, but photography wasn’t enough to express myself.” And so he came up with a unique technique, which he describes as “digital photographic intervention.”

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

With a New Show in London, Painter Daniel Richter Talks Political History, German Identity, and Ugandan Dance Music

October 25, 2023 (updated October 24, 2023) Published by artistvenu

The Metropol theater, a muscular relic of Art Nouveau decadence in Berlin’s Schoneberg district, looms beyond the window of Daniel Richter’s studio, taking up most of the visible skyline. The studio is modest in size for an artist of Richter’s stature: it is not buzzing with artist assistants and interns, and it is no lofty warehouse. Wide stacks of catalogs stand behind his desk which looks out onto a wall where three large paintings hang. Before them is one paint-splotched yoga mat.

“The bigger the space gets the more people you need working for you,” Richter notes, sitting framed by a pot of herbal tea and a small bowl of nuts. “If I moved to a hangar, my paintings would look like stamps. I do not want to make seven meters painting. I want to stay solitary in this mix of music and literature, in a situation I can control.”

Featured Image: Jahresdaten meiner Langeweile (2023). Courtesy Thaddeus Ropac gallery, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

What Did Home Mean to Leonora Carrington?

October 10, 2023 (updated October 10, 2023) Published by artistvenu

“Houses are really bodies,” Leonora Carrington writes in her 1974 novella The Hearing Trumpet. “We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang onto our livers, skeletons, flesh, and blood streams.” Like bodies, homes are intimate places, and Carrington was staunchly private with hers. The British expat lived much of her long life in Mexico, but she also resided in mansions, pensions, apartments, and cottages in London, Paris, Florence, Madrid, Lisbon, New York, Chicago, and other locales. We know from Carrington’s writing that home was an essential, even corporeal concept. How did the many places in which she lived shape who she was and how she made art?

In Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington (Princeton University Press, 2023), the British journalist and writer Joanna Moorhead explores how each of the artist’s homes marked her life and work. Moorhead revisits all of Carrington’s former residences, seeking traces of the artist in their surrounding landscapes, climates, and communities. Crucially, many of these locations have changed little since the artist left them, allowing Moorhead plenty of room to excavate fascinating details about Carrington’s life.

Featured Image: Leonora Carrington, “The Bird Men of Burnley” (1970), oil on canvas; Private Collection (courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco)

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

Remedios Varo’s Strange and Mysterious Universes

October 5, 2023 (updated October 5, 2023) Published by artistvenu

CHICAGO — Though relatively unknown in the United States, the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo is beloved in her adopted Mexico, where she moved as a refugee of World War II. The artist’s enigmatic oeuvre is deceptively compact, but spend any time in front of these self-contained scenes — often housed in incredible architectural spaces, like the celestial tower in “Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle” — and you’ll find they contain universes.

Though she is often called a Surrealist, and while her figures’ heart-shaped faces and spindly forms do evoke those of her friend and fellow European expatriate Leonora Carrington, the internal logic of Varo’s paintings — as is so brilliantly manifest in the one-wheeled, wind-propelled vehicle in “Vagabond” — make that label an uncomfortable fit. Classically trained as a painter at the prestigious Academia de San Fernando in Madrid and the daughter of an engineer, Varo is more meticulous in her process than the other artists of the movement with whom she is often compared.

Read the original article here… and return to share your thoughts on artistvenu below

Nicholas Rougeux Painstakingly Restores Hundreds of 19th-Century Hummingbird Illustrations

October 4, 2023 (updated October 4, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Chicago-based designer Nicholas Rougeux is fascinated by early encyclopedic publications, from a 17th-century Dutch manuscript dedicated to mixing watercolors to Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture. Most recently, he took an interest in ornithologist John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds.

Published between 1849 and 1861, the beautifully illustrated five-volume series contains 360 hand-colored lithographic plates made in collaboration with his assistant, Henry Constantine Richter. “The monograph is considered one of the finest examples of ornithological illustration ever produced, as well as a scientific masterpiece,” Rougeux says on the project’s website, which provides context about the original publication.

Phaethornis superciliosus

Read the original article here… and return to share your thoughts on artistvenu below

Enormous Animals and Human Hybrids Interact in Enigmatic Landscapes by Bill Mayer

September 17, 2023 (updated September 17, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Bill Mayer is an artist-illustrator based in Decatur, Georgia whose work spans various mediums and styles. He is best known for his intricate and detailed illustrations that have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and TIME Magazine, to name a few.

Mayer’s artwork is a masterpiece of imagination and creativity. His illustrations blend traditional and modern techniques that evoke a sense of wonder and amazement in the viewer. His work is characterized by its attention to detail and vivid colors, and he displays a keen sense of humor that is charming and captivating. Bill’s illustrations are often complex and layered, inviting the viewer to look closer and discover the hidden details.

View artwork by Bill Mayer in a recent article published in Colossal here… and return to share your thoughts on artistvenu below

Category: Representational & Figurative Art

Guimi You Finds the Poetic Possibilities of Paint

Stunning Hyperrealistic Paintings Capture People’s Surreal Connection to Nature

Michelangelo’s Secret Drawing Room In Florence Opens To The Public For The First Time

Remedios Varo in a Sphere of Her Own

Artist Reimagines Modern-Day Landscapes With Van Gogh-Inspired Swirly Skies

With a New Show in London, Painter Daniel Richter Talks Political History, German Identity, and Ugandan Dance Music

What Did Home Mean to Leonora Carrington?

Remedios Varo’s Strange and Mysterious Universes

Nicholas Rougeux Painstakingly Restores Hundreds of 19th-Century Hummingbird Illustrations

Enormous Animals and Human Hybrids Interact in Enigmatic Landscapes by Bill Mayer

Recent Posts