Studio Drift

Yves Tanguy Painting Thought to Be Lost During Fascist Raid Is Found and Repaired

January 24, 2022 (updated January 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Yves Tanguy, Fraud in the Garden, 1930.

For decades, scholars thought that a painting by Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy was destroyed during a raid on a Paris cinema led by two right-wing groups. Now, in a find that has shocked even those with a deep knowledge of Tanguy’s oeuvre, that painting has been found and brought back to its original state.

It turns out that that painting, Fraud in the Garden (1930), had been hiding in plain sight, in a way. The Guardian reports that the painting had been bought at auction in 1985 by a French owner who had suspected that the work may be the one that some believed was lost back in 1930, shortly after its creation. Jennifer Mass, a restorer, analyzed the work, and discovered that the painting bought at auction was indeed the original.

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Tiny Holes Drilled into Bricks Provide Miniature Homes for Solitary Bees

January 24, 2022 (updated January 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Image © Green&Blue

An innovative creation of Cornwall-based Green&Blue, Bee Bricks are designed to establish homes within homes. The architectural building blocks can be layered with more typical materials and feature holes of various sizes that allow the fuzzy, winged insects a space for nesting. These multi-purpose bricks are especially crucial as bee populations dwindle due to habitat loss and a changing climate.

Burrowing inches into the blocks made of reclaimed concrete, the narrow openings are targeted at red masons, leafcutters, and other cavity-nesters that live outside of colonies. It’s estimated that the U.K. alone boasts 250 solitary species, which tend to be better pollinators than their social counterparts because they gather the sticky substance from multiple sources, which improves biodiversity.

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Byfusion is turning non-recyclable ocean plastic into a concrete block alternative

January 22, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Image courtesy of byfusion

the first step is to find the plastic, which isn’t so hard. byfusion collaborates with ocean clean-up operations to collect discarded waste that’s ended up in our marine environments. in the summer of 2020, the company acted as the take-off partner for ocean voyages institute/project kaisei, who pulled over 100 tons of waste from the great pacific garbage patch.

the second step is to shred the plastic into smaller pieces. it’s then superheated using byfusion’s patented steam-based process and fused into blocks measuring 40cm x 20cm x 20cm and weighing 10kg each. what’s great about this method is that it requires no chemicals, additives, nor fillers and it generates 41% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than concrete blocks. the byblocks also don’t crack or crumble like standard blocks. check out the video below to see how durable they are.

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Aiming to Make Art More Accessible and Diverse, Apostrophe Puzzles Releases Artist-Designed Jigsaws

January 20, 2022 (updated January 20, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Vinita Karim

Apostrophe Puzzles is at the nexus of art and accessibility. Founder Mandi Masden launched the Brooklyn-based company in 2019 with the goal of making the works usually confined to galleries, museums, and the collections of wealthy patrons more affordable to average consumers. “I am really aiming to utilize puzzles to bridge the gap of accessibility to fine art and to make art collecting something everyone can participate in,” she explains.

The company, which borrows its name from the punctuation indicating either possession or omission, collaborates exclusively with contemporary artists of color to design 1,000-piece jigsaws featuring their works. In the last two years, it’s released two collections, with the most recent including Liz Flores’s colorful, abstract bodies, the powerfully posed women at the center of Tim Okamura’s portraits (previously), and Ronald Jackson’s masked figures.

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Art Institutions Aren’t Doing Enough to Lead on Climate Change. Here’s How the Industry Should Rethink Our Responsibility

January 17, 2022 (updated January 17, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Installation view, “COAL + ICE” at the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture in San Francisco.

It’s 2022 and the warning lights are flashing more urgently than ever. Climate change-induced heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and forest fires are crippling our planetary operating system. In 2021, the U.S. set more heat records than it had in the previous three decades. Even so, as one strolls through the world’s galleries, art fairs, and museums, this shared emergency hardly stands out as a core concern. It’s not just that we could use more art and exhibitions about climate change. The art world and its institutions need to lead the way in helping society respond, partly by making lasting changes in their own behavior.

It was with these considerations in mind that we, on behalf of the Asia Society and together with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, initiated a call to an emerging generation of artists—those who will face the incipient environmental collapse head-on—to put forward works that directly address the scale, urgency, and complexity of the climate-change threat.

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A Return to The Matrix Explores Binary Thinking

January 3, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

From The Matrix Resurrections (2021), dir. Lana Wachowski (all images courtesy WarnerMedia)

Lana and Lilly Wachowski are among the most transgressive filmmakers working in Hollywood. Despite their ambition and high concepts, the works the writer/director siblings have made since the seminal The Matrix have often been dismissed because of their unabashed stylization, sentimentality, and sincerity. That they’ve evolved as storytellers seems to affront those who crave if not fetishize consistency. The sisters have gone their separate creative ways in recent years, with only Lana returning to the series that made them famous with The Matrix Resurrections (directing solo and writing the script with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon). The themes of the Wachowskis’ films have historically come across as more important than their pioneering aesthetics (often unsubtly and sometimes with questionable implementation), but here Lana seems to have found the perfect balance. Whether regarding the value of the past or present, prioritizing action or storytelling, or highlighting characters over visuals, Resurrections is about existing within binaries and embracing multiple facets of life.

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From Immersive Everything to the Rise of Museum Unions, These 7 Trends Defined the Art World in 2021—and Will Shape the Year to Come

January 3, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

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

Immersive Van Gogh ruled the year, with multiple versions of the phenomenon competing across the map for the Big Fun Art dollar. Following Van Gogh’s lead, scads of companies started experiences inspired by pretty much any artist with any name recognition whatsoever, from three separate immersive Monets, to immersive Frida and Diego (“Mexican Geniuses“), to immersive Francisco Goya (“InGoya“).

Meow Wolf, the experience-art collective turned experience-art company, opened large new environments including its “Omega Mart” in Vegas, which was part of Area15, a dedicated immersive-experience zone in Sin City. Meanwhile, Superblue, the Pace-affiliated Big Fun Art emporium, opened a dedicated space in Miami, before Superblue’s curators realized a show of the design-art group DRIFT at the Shed, filling the space with the spectacle of gravity-defying stone blocks.

In the hazy post-vax, pre-Omicron days of mid-2021, people were looking to get back out into the world and be around people, and the popularity of these para-art attractions became one of the manifestations of that urge.

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