Artifacts: 2016

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Pia Fries

Pia Fries is a swiss painter born in 1955 in Beromunster, Switzerland. In 1980 she studied sculpture in Lucerne and painting in 1986 under Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—the Arts Academy of the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist who makes abstract and photorealistic paintings as well as photographs of glass pieces. She then taught at various academies and is now a professor of painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Fries is interested in “the materialism of things, in the means and in the techniques, in the substance of the paint, in its body, its weight and its physical resistance”. She creates pieces with contrasting spaces of blankness and filled colorful chaos in order to create cohesive and heterogenous art—art with different elements and characters. Her goal is to create a “visual language” through her work by making it impressionable to the viewers. All of her work is abstract—filled with varying shapes and colors and textures—but the pieces feel calm and the elements work together to make one, united image. I find the way in which she makes art so creative and difficult in that she experiments with mediums—their weight and texture and color—to create unique pieces instead of attempting to recreate a recognizable image. There is such a great amount of detail and variety packed into her pieces but every element seems to have an intentional purpose which creates her skillful and individual style and this is why I am drawn to Fries’s art.

Fries's Work

Untitled IV, 1999

19.8 x 25.9 in.

Silkscreen

Movement: Contemporary Art

Musselin 12, 2004

19.7 x 30.7 in.

Oil and silkscreen on wood

Movement: Contemporary Art

dens, 2006

19.7 x 27.6 in.

Oil and screenprint on wood

Movement: Contemporary Art

Pliss, 2007

24.5 x 25.5 in.

Made using photogravure and aquatint

(printmaking processes using copper plates)

Color soap ground and spit bite aquatints

Movement: Contemporary Art

dolding, 2015

26.8 x 86.6 x 1.9 in.

Oil and silkscreen on wood

Movement: Contemporary Art

arcus, 2016

41.4 x 30.4 in.

Oil and silkscreen on wood

Movement: Contemporary Art

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pia_Fries

http://www.peterfreemaninc.com/exhibitions/pia-fries_1/pressrelease/

http://piafries.com/exhibitions/windhand-laufbein/

https://www.google.com/search?q=pia+fries&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS712&espv=2&biw=838&bih=631&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIq7rW8t3PAhVJhlQKHQ9zDh8Q_AUIBigB#imgrc=FFwFfpQxNQ6xHM%3A

https://www.artsy.net/artist/pia-fries

Friday, October 14, 2016

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist. Her central ideas and concerns are often reflected in her work, some of which are sex, birth, regeneration, gender, race, health, humans and nature, and women's rights. A few of her inspirations were her father's death and her sister's death from AIDS. She often produces works of sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textile. She has used materials such as clothes screen printed with body parts and aquatint. A characteristic of her work is body parts.

Personally, I think it's beautiful how she takes personal tragedy and makes it into art. I respect her ability to incorporate her own feelings and thoughts without them also overwhelming the aesthetic appeal of her work.

Mary Magdelegne

Virgin with Dove

Lying with the Wolf

Regalo

Jewel

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Jockum Nordstrom

Nordström was born in 1963 in the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden. He grew up watching his mother sew, and has always been interested in textiles. He has made drawings as long as he can remember. He studied art at Stockholm College of Art and Design, and began showing his work in Sweden in the late eighties. He makes furniture, designs carpets, illustrates children’s books (including the popular Swedish series Sailor and Pekka), designs album covers, constructs architectural models, and makes animated films. When he discovered he was allergic to oil paints, he adopted watercolor, gouache, graphite, and scissors as his primary tools. He builds many images with collage, and is always making new parts (he has a whole drawer of heads) to fill up his compositions.

Nordström is known for his collages, paintings, drawings and sculptures that knit together references to folk art and outsider art, jazz, surrealist collage, furniture and architectural design, human sexual habits and maritime lore. He has also written children's books and designed album covers. His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Moderna Museet and Magasin 3 in Stockholm, and the Gothenburg Art Museum.

David Lynch

First trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Boston, this was where he was first introduced to filmmaking.

Started at Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts for film, is best known for his internationally acclaimed career in that medium. also a writer, photographer, musician, composer, sculptor, cartoonist, and a printmaker.

The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart. His last feature film, Inland Empire, came out in 2006. Apparently, he was spending much of his free time in the studio.

Practitioner of transcendental meditation - a technique for detaching oneself from anxiety and promoting harmony and self-realization by meditation, repetition of a mantra, and other yogic practices.

The influence of Irish artist Francis Bacon is clear in Lynch’s own paintings. He love FB.

His work as a painter provides a deeper understanding of his vision and also reveals a vital source of inspiration for his instantly recognizable filmmaking aesthetic.

"All my paintings are organic, violent comedies. They have to be violently done and primitive and crude, and to achieve that I try to let nature paint more than I paint." - DL

Stills

Mulholland Drive

Twin Peaks

Eraserhead

Elephant Man

Francis Bacon Inspo:

Prints:

I'm an admirer of David Lynch's films and was only surprised for a moment when I discovered he made prints and paintings s well. The images he creates onscreen seem like they should be paintings; everything Lynch places in a frame is very recognizable as his work due to their dark and often surreal natures. I like how he chose to trust a place and stick to it, by not shying away from the eerie and rather embracing it by unwaveringly honoring a specific aesthetic. I also like the fact that it feels like his paintings and prints seem like a genuine expression of his creativity - they are the middle ground between his meditation practices and bombastic cinematic outputs.

Monday, October 10, 2016

David Huffman (by Dani Garcia)

David Huffman

- Artist from Berkeley, CA

- Raised by a mother who was very involved in the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panthers.

-Studied at California College of the Arts San Francisco

- Painter, printmaker, installation artist

David's work combines science fiction and the black experience in the United States. Many of his pieces incorporate small basketballs and black astronauts, which he calls "traumanauts." He uses symbols to create abstractions that hold meaning about cultural trauma, stereotypes, and politics.

David uses different mediums or "ingredients" to create pieces of work that fit his vision. The basketballs are added using different stamps, he uses ink and etchings, paint, stencils, spray paint, glitter, etc. All of these materials are combined to create pieces that are visually interesting.

I think that his work is a lot deeper than one may think. The combination of recognizable symbols and abstract textures and designs is really interesting. I really like how his work is about social justice and expressing topics that are meaningful and important to him.

Val Britton

Biography

Val Britton was born in Livingston, New Jersey in 1977.
She makes elaborate, oversized collages.
A lot of her work is inspired by mapping, and she includes maps in her work.
Her work is inspired by her father, a truck driver, who died when she was young. When she first started this work she would trace the routes her father drove and use them to make collaged maps, which evolved into the work she does currently.

Art

To make these collages, she works with different mediums, such as printmaking, drawing, painting, hand cut paper, etc.
She also hangs up her cutouts in order to create the same effect her paper work does but three dimensional

My opinion

I think Val’s art is very complex and intricate
It reminds me of a galaxy or of some sort of a complex cloud pattern
I like how she uses aspects of geometric shapes in her work, as well as almost random splatters and shapes and I think this creates a nice juxtaposition
I like the large shapes and I wonder if they are outlines of the routes her father took while he was a truck driver or regions that he drove around
I like the use of dark backgrounds with white shapes