Tuesday 23 February 2010

DENISE GRÜNSTEIN



DENISE GRÜNSTEIN is one of the best known and most highly respected profiles in Swedish photography. Her images are easily recognized for their characteristic, intensely present, highly personal and quite romantic artistic expression. Considered one of Sweden´s foremost portrayers of people, be they models, actors, dancers, directors or authors, she has a unique ability to imprint her own feelings and temperament on film. Besides people, nature has been another main source of inspiration for Denise throughout her career, with much of her most powerful work distiguished by often subtle natural romantic elements. Denise Grunstein works in her very own lifestyle tradition, always with strong fashion sense, regardless of project and commission. She has staged a large number of high profile solo exhibitions and contributed to numerous celebrated books. For her personal art work, Denise is represented by Galleri Charlotte Lund. (camera link)

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DENISE GRÜNSTEIN @ GALLERY CHARLOTTE LUND
DENISE GRÜNSTEIN @ CAMERA LINK
DENISE GRÜNSTEIN @ WE FIND WILDNESS

CYRIL HATT


CYRIL HATT takes pictures of the same object from different points of view and assembles these pictures to create a 3D object.

CYRIL HATT
Born in Rodez, 1975
Lives and works in Rodez.

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CYRIL HATT
CYRIL HATT @ BERTRAND GRIMONT
CYRIL HATT @ FITA COLA

Monday 22 February 2010

JOHN GRANT



JOHN GRANT

"In my photographic work I seek to distill and dramatize natural elements, transforming them into symbolic metaphor. I embrace the often clichéd or sentimental botanical portrayal, presenting objects in ways that infuse them with an enigmatic quality that expands expectations and tweaks the imagination.

For years I have experimented with digital capture and computer printing techniques, manipulating the media to push the limits of traditional photography. Organic specimens, such as flowers, fruit, vegetables, or seedpods, are presented close-up and in isolation, calling for a deeper observation that is paradoxically both expansive and reductive. Smoky, nuanced surfaces and rich colorations are decidedly romantic, yet the content is designed to suggest multiple symbolic analogies—tulip petal as the flank of a
horse, a wing as the surface of a leaf, a blossom as a cloud. Imperfections appear, and suddenly something that at first felt direct and familiar becomes ineffably psychological, even surreal.

Most recently, my work has expanded in complexity, where layers of landscape content—sourced from my own past photographs or found tintypes—have been introduced as vintage atmospheric backdrops. This interplay between foreground and background introduces a context to the still life images, offering new opportunities for narrative engagement. " (JOHN GRANT)


JOHN GRANT

Wednesday 17 February 2010

DESIREE DOLRON





DESIREE DOLRON /// XTERIORS


The outstanding Dutch artist DESIREE DOLRON has produced a series of images which has been three years in the making. Entitled Xteriors, this group of nine seamlessly constructed works have the quality of Old Master paintings, although they are in fact digital photographic composites of several different faces. (...)

Dolron's aesthetic is intricately linked to the Flemish school of primitive portrait painters such as Petrus Christus, Rogier van der Weyden and the interior Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi. Dolron does not try to emulate their work but rather adapts the aesthetic to her 21st century vision, which is as complex in construction as the paintings themselves. Each piece of work is built using state-of-the-art digital technology, with the final results belying their true complexity. Like a painter, Dolron moves and mixes the objects and people who act within the tableaux by adding and changing elements within the frame: changing elements of their appearance with those of other people she has found to be more in keeping with her private dream of the final image. As with the Flemish painters she most admires, the work is covered again and again with the final images printed at nearly 6 feet high.

DESIREE DOLRON's previous projects have demonstrated her unique versatility as an artist, produced with an often astonishingly technical application. Images of religious rituals made whilst travelling in the Far East called 'Exhaltation'; her much admired series of Cuba 'I Give You All My Dreams' continues to create waves within the contemporary art and photography markets; and ‘Gaze’, her series of portraits taken under water, have all cemented her reputation as a powerful artist to be noted in an all too crowded arena. (micheal hoppen contemporary)

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DESIREE DOLRON
Born in Haarlem, 1963, The Netherlands

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DESIREE DOLRON
DESIREE DOLRON @ MICHEAL HOPPEN

Tuesday 16 February 2010

LAURA LETINSKY




LAURA LETINSKY (born Canada, 1962) is a contemporary photographer, best known for her still lifes.

Much of Letinsky's work alludes to human presence, without including any actual figures. For example, in the Morning and Melancholia (c. 1997-2001), and the I Did Not Remember I Had Forgotten (c. 2002-2004) series, Letinsky seems to document the aftermath of a sumptuous gathering or dinner party. Faded flower petals intermingle with empty glasses and crumbs of food on partially cleared tables, often covered with a white linen that bears the mark of spilled wine. As alluded in the title Morning and Melancholia these scenes are often filled with a fresh, clear light, as though one is viewing from the perspective of the morning after, what the host failed to clean up the evening before. However, the title of the series itself is a reference to an essay by Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," which discusses the human response to loss. The title I Did Not Remember I Had Forgotten also has a literary source; it refers to a line by St. Augustine, commenting on memory, 'One would never say I did not remember I had forgotten.' Letinsky responded:

"I was thinking, "No, that's not right!" Actually, I felt I had just come to this moment where I did not remember that I had forgotten, and it had to do with music. I'd gone for three years without listening to music. I would drive in the car and I would want silence, or I would listen to talk shows. Then for some reason I began listening to the radio, and some of the CDs I had around, and it was almost like drinking water after being really thirsty. I took such pleasure in it. Somehow, I did not remember that I'd forgotten to turn on the music."

The recent Somewhere, Somewhere series (c. 2005) explores similar themes of seemingly vacated domestic settings. Empty rooms and corridors bear only traces of their inhabitants: a scrap of paper on the floor, a lamp left hanging on the bare wall - these photographs might show apartments in the liminal time between tenants, full of old memories on the one hand, and expectation on the other. (wikipedia)

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LAURA LETINSKY @ MONIQUE MELOCHE
LAURA LETINSKY @ YANCEY RICHARDSON
LAURA LETINSKY @ JAMES HYMAN GALLERY
LAURA LETINSKY @ BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI

YVES KLEIN



Why am I presenting YVES KLEIN today? For very selfish reasons. I realized we were one digit apart. He was born on April 28 1928 and I was born on April 28 1978. And we obviously both have an issue with blue...

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YVES KLEIN (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art.

Klein was born in Nice, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France. His parents, Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, were both painters. His father painted in a loose Post-impressionist style, whilst his mother was a leading figure in Art informel, and held regular soirées with other leading practitioners of this Parisian abstract movement.
From 1942 to 1946, Klein studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales and began practicing judo. At this time, he became friends with Arman Fernandez and Claude Pascal and started to paint. At the age of nineteen, Klein and his friends lay on a beach in the south of France, and divided the world between themselves; Arman chose the earth, Claude, words, whilst Yves chose the ethereal space surrounding the planet, which he then preceded to sign:

With this famous symbolic gesture of signing the sky, Klein had foreseen, as in a reverie, the thrust of his art from that time onwards—a quest to reach the far side of the infinite.

Between 1947–1948, Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony (1949, formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence – a precedent to both La Monte Young's drone music and John Cage's silent 4′33″. During the years 1948 to 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan. In Japan, at the early age of 25, he became a master at judo receiving the rank of yodan (4th dan/degree black-belt) from the Kodokan, which at that time was a remarkable achievement for a westerner. He also wrote a book on Judo called Les fondements du judo. In 1954, Klein settled permanently in Paris and began in earnest to establish himself in the art world.

The critic Pierre Restany, who he'd met during his first public exhibition at the Club Solitaire, founded the Nouveau Realisme group in Klein's apartment, on 27 October 1960. Founding members were Arman, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques Villeglé, with Niki de Saint-Phalle, Christo and Deschamps joining later. Normally seen as a French version of Pop Art, the aim of the group was stated as 'New Realism=New Perceptual Approaches To The Real'.

A large retrospective was held at Krefeld, Germany, January 1961, followed by an unsuccessful opening at Leo Castelli's Gallery, New York, in which Klein failed to sell a single painting. He stayed with Rotraut at the Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the exhibition, and whilst there wrote the "Chelsea Hotel Manifesto", a defence against the 'mutual incomprehension' provoked by the exhibition. He moved on to exhibit at the Dwan Gallery, LA, and also travelled extensively around the Mid-West of America, visiting Death Valley and the Mojave Desert. On 21 January 1962, in an elaborate ceremony in which Klein dressed as a Knight of the Order of St Sebastian, he married Rotraut Uecker at Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs, Paris. His last works included painting geophysical reliefs of France and casting his friends' torsos, painting them blue, and attaching them to gold-leafed supports.
He suffered a first heart attack whilst watching the film Mondo Cane (which he is featured in) at the Cannes Film Festival on 11 May 1962. Two more heart attacks followed, the second of which killed him on 6 June 1962. His son, Yves, was born a few months later in Nice. (See Le maître du bleu, Yves Klein by Annette Kahn, éditions Stock, Paris, 2000)
Yves Amu Klein (son) grew up to study architecture, design, cybernetics theory of systems, and Fine Arts sculpture. He went on to create robotized sculptures.

Monochrome works: The Blue Epoch
Although Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the Artist's book Yves: Peintures in November 1954. Parodying a traditional catalogue, the book featured a series of intense monochromes linked to various cities he had lived in during the previous years. Yves: Peintures anticipated his first two shows of oil paintings, at the Club des Solitaires, Paris, October 1955 and Yves: Proposition monochromes at Gallery Colette Allendy, February 1956. These shows, displaying orange, yellow, red, pink and blue monochromes, deeply disappointed Klein, as people went from painting to painting, linking them together as a sort of mosaic.
From the reactions of the audience, [Klein] realized that...viewers thought his various, uniformly colored canvases amounted to a new kind of bright, abstract interior decoration. Shocked at this misunderstanding, Klein knew a further and decisive step in the direction of monochrome art would have to be taken...From that time onwards he would concentrate on one single, primary color alone: blue.[6]
The next exhibition, 'Proposte Monochrome, Epoca Blu' (Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch) at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, (January 1957), featured 11 identical blue canvases, using ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin 'Rhodopas'. Discovered with the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, the effect was to retain the brilliance of the pigment which tended to become dull when suspended in linseed oil. Klein later patented this recipe to maintain the "authenticity of the pure idea."[7] This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become famous as 'International Klein Blue' (IKB). The paintings were attached to poles placed 20 cm away from the walls to increase their spatial ambiguities.
The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London. The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery, May 1957, became a seminal happening[8]; As well as 1001 blue balloons being released to mark the opening, blue postcards were sent out using IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate. An exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held concurrently at Gallery Collette Allendy.

The Void
For his next exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery (April 1958), Klein chose to show nothing whatsoever, called La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void): he removed everything in the gallery space except a large cabinet, painted every surface white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the opening night; The gallery's window was painted blue, and a blue curtain was hung in the entrance lobby, accompanied by republican guards and blue cocktails. Thanks to an enormous publicity drive, 3000 people were forced to queue up, waiting to be let in to an empty room.
"Recently my work with color has led me, in spite of myself, to search little by little, with some assistance (from the observer, from the translator), for the realization of matter, and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner, in my next Parisian exhibition at Iris Clert's."
Later in the year, he was invited to decorate the Gelsenkirchen Opera House, Germany, with a series of vast blue murals, the largest of which were 20 metres by 7 metres. The Opera House was inaugurated in December 1959. Klein celebrated the commission by travelling to Cascia, Italy, to place an ex-voto offering at the Saint Rita Monastery. The offering took the form of a small see-through plastic box containing three compartments; one filled with IKB pigment, one with pink pigment, and one with gold leaf in. The container was only rediscovered in 1980.
Klein's last two exhibitions at Iris Clert's were Vitesse Pure et Stabilité Monochrome (Sheer Speed and Monochrome Stability), November 1958, a collaboration with Jean Tinguely, of kinetic sculptures, and Bas-Reliefs dans une Forêt d’Éponges (Bas-Reliefs in a Sponge Forest), June 1959, a collection of sponges that Klein had used to paint IKB canvases, mounted on steel rods and set in rocks that he'd found in his parents' garden.

Anthropométries
Despite the IKB paintings being uniformly coloured, Klein experimented with various methods of applying the paint; firstly different rollers and then later sponges, created a series of varied surfaces. This experimentalism would lead to a number of works Klein made using naked female models covered in blue paint and dragged across or laid upon canvases to make the image, using the models as "living brushes". This type of work he called Anthropometry. Other paintings in this method of production include "recordings" of rain that Klein made by driving around in the rain at 70 miles per hour with a canvas tied to the roof of his car, and canvases with patterns of soot created by scorching the canvas with gas burners.
Klein and Arman were continually involved with each other creatively, both as Nouveaux Réalistes and as friends. Both from Nice, the two worked together for many years and Arman even named his son, Yves Arman after Yves Klein who was his god-father.
Sometimes the creation of these paintings was turned into a kind of performance art—an event in 1960, for example, had an audience dressed in formal evening wear watching the models go about their task while an instrumental ensemble played Klein's 1949 The Monotone Symphony (a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence).
In the performance piece, Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959-62, he offered empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In exchange, he gave a certificate of ownership to the buyer. As the second part of the piece, performed on the Seine with an Art critic in attendance, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the river, in order to restore the "natural order" that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not "empty" anymore). He used the other half of the gold to create a series of gold-leafed works, which, along with a series of pink monochromes, began to augment his blue monochromes toward the end of his life.

Aero works
Klein is also well known for a photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) [4] , originally published in the artist's book Dimanche, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel. In fact, "Saut dans le vide", published as part of a broadside on the part of Klein (the "artist of space") denouncing NASA's own lunar expeditions as hubris and folly, was a photomontage in which the large tarpaulin Klein leaped onto was removed from the final image.
Klein's work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as "le Vide" (the Void). Klein's Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to ones own sensibilities, and to "reality" as opposed to "representation". Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art—paintings, a book, a musical composition—but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his "Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility". Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein's work strongly refers to a theoretical/arthistorical context as well as to philosophy/metaphysics and with his work he aimed to combine these. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be "felt" as well as "understood".

Multiples
As well as painting flat canvases, Klein produced a series of works throughout his career that blurred the edges between painting and sculpture. He appropriated plaster casts of famous sculptures, such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo, by painting them International Klein Blue; he painted a globe, 3D reliefs of areas of France and dowls which he hung from the ceiling as rain; He also stuck sponges to canvases and painted dinner plates. Many of these works were later manufactured as editioned multiples after his death.
In Blue Obelisk, a project that he had failed to realise in 1958, but that finally happened in 1983, he appropriated the Place de la Concorde by shining blue spotlights onto the central obelisk.
(Wikipedia)



YVES KLEIN
YVES KLEIN @ WIKIPEDIA
YVES KLEIN @ FRENCH WIKIPEDIA
YVES KLEIN @ CENTRE POMPIDOU

Thursday 11 February 2010

MONICA COOK



MONICA COOK paints beautiful and disturbing portraits of women. Her figures are brilliantly painted, with breathtaking skill; Cook excels in rendering the subtleties of the flesh and details of light, tone and surface. Painted with an eerie intensity, Cook's figures compel the viewer to study them, often surreptitiously, as there is a strong sense of invading an extremely private moment. We look, albeit sideways, with fascination at the beauty, humanity and complexity of these portraits.

In Seeded and Soiled, Cook’s nude women continue to be engaged with gorgeously rendered erotic food in scenes that elicit a range of emotion in the viewer from mesmerized hilarity to horror. The atmosphere in the current paintings however, has been altered from that of the prior works. The sense of pensive isolation of the previous solitary nude figures has been fractured and energized, as multiple figures, both clothed and nude are now interacting with each other, as well as with the food that they are consuming and playing with in sensual abandon. What is more, it is not solely the fact that some of the figures are clothed while others are nude that expand the implications of these utterly curious images, but the oddity of the garment itself - a captivatingly incongruous uniform vaguely reminiscent of an earlier era – and the fact that every clothed figure is wearing exactly the same uniform. To add to the surreality of the situation, all the women appear to be the same person, nude or clothed, tortured or enraptured, emaciated or corpulent. The artist has dubbed these nude and clothed women the “Nakeds” and the “Officials”. Whether locked in battle as in the exquisitely precise drawings, or enjoying a sort of truce while sporting side by side in slippery, shining food as in the paintings, the Officials and the Nakeds play out the eternal paradox of existence as they, in the artists’ words “wrestle with debauchery and virtue, control and liberation, logic and absurdity – the beauty and repulsion inherent in each of these extremes and the magnificent struggle in our search for balance”.

The Georgia-born artist graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1996 and now lives and works in New York, where she recently concluded a residency at the School of Visual Arts. Since 1992, Cook has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the US and Canada, as well as in the Netherlands, Israel, France and Switzerland. Publications include Art in America, Le Figaro, Elle Magazine, and New American Paintings. She has also exhibited at art fairs with Marcia Wood Gallery in London, Miami and New York. (marcia wood gallery)

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MONICA COOK
MONICA COOK @ MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
MONICA COOK @ ACIDOLATTE

FABIO ZONTA




FABIO ZONTA's photograph really touch me this morning. I have been thinking about different subjects for a new series of paintings that I want to make and flowers, especially Tea Roses, keep coming in my mind. A couple of months ago, I saw a picture in Vanity Fair or Vogue (can't remember which) of a Tea Rose on a white background and I thought it looked absolutely beautiful, but there wasn't any photo credit so I never could find out who was the author of such beauty. Anyhow, that picture gave me the will to make a series of huge square paintings of Tea Roses on a colored background. In that urge, I bought myself the TASCHEN book of Pierre-Joseph Redouté's roses engraveries. But I'm still heasitating to make that series because with my style, which has a lot of texture and a very glossy finish, I don't know if it would be visually that interesting.

All to say that this morning I stumbled upon Fabio Zonta's work and I was in awe and contemplation because it resumes what I have had in my head for months. I don't know if he is the author of that photo I saw in Vogue, but I am very happy to see his work and I find it very very, very beautiful.

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FABIO ZONTA was born in Bassano del Grappa in 1958. In 1977 he moved to Milan where he worked at Alfredo Pratelli’s Publifoto; within the renowned agency he assisted Alfa Castaldi and Chistopher Broadbent. From 1979 to 1982 Fabio Zonta was assistant to Davide Mosconi with whom he established a strong collaboration, which ended in 2002 when his mentor and friend died. Simultaneously, since 1980 he has collaborated with several design and architecture magazines and his photographs have been regularly published by Abitare, Domus, Gran-Bazaar, Ottagono, Modo and Interni.

Fabio Zonta has been staff photographer for important architecture firms, such as Cini Boeri, Matteo Thun, Sottsass-Associati, Antonio Zanuso, and Venini glassware in Venezia until 1986. He has photographd the work of Renata Bonfanti, Laura Diaz de Santillana, Philip Tsiaras, Lee Babel, Stefania Lucchetta, Candido Fior, Alessandro Diaz de Santillana for catalogues and exhibitions.Since his first solo exhibition in 2003 he has been focusing mainly on the Natura Morta theme; he has had exhibitions at Paris Photo, Art Miami, Ginevra, Roma, Firenze, Milano, Torino and Genova.

He has released several publications and his work is part of significant collections both in Italy and abroad. He is represented by Brancolini Grimaldi gallery, Roma/Firenze. He works and lives between Bassano del Grappa and Milan.

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