|
|
During her studies at the academy, Yu has always been commended by teachers like Tang Hui and Cao Li on her works. She took pleasure in exploring various artistic styles, especially in the world of portraits. She admires Rembrandt, Ingres, and Durer, whose portraits are exemplary for their detail and precision. On the other hand, the impressionistic touch of Edgar Degas inspires her to go beyond realism. Having gone through four years of training at the academy, Yu has evolved into a young painter adept in illustrating human figures. What distinguishes Yu from other portrait artists is her curiosity to delve into the human psyche and seek for the ultimate reality. She believes that human beings in the modern era only show the most beautiful parts of their lives to others.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
There has been a public debate—at times a very heated and rancorous debate—between contingents of the Catholic Church and the arts community of Cologne, Germany. The community that commissioned and installed Gerhard Richter’s radiant stained glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral, commissioned architect Peter Zumthor’s scrupulously designed, meditative masterpiece, the Kolumba Museum, and have now permanently installed David Rankin’s deeply moving, aspirational, five-meter high painting, the Passage and Crossings triptych, in St. Agnes Church, is the same community that last year heard their Archbishop denounce contemporary art as representing a degenerate culture.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
The nude is an art, an expressive form, a cry of freedom, a call to beauty. The nudes of Luccia Lignan talk to us about sensuality. Her women are sensitive and relaxed. They are grateful to be alive, and they demonstrate this gratitude in their body language. Despite being very conscious of their charms—their voluptuous and sensual bodies and their gazes directed unabashedly at the viewer—they nonetheless evince an air of innocence. They demonstrate the ideal “eternal woman with classical echoes, but under the modern vision of 21st century eroticism.”
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Every work of art embodies the worldview of its creator and simultaneously reveals a facet of the collective mind. As Marcuse said, "Art is a metaphysics in a moment." Considering Modernism and Post-Modernism, the importance of mystic and visionary states of consciousness have been downplayed or ignored by most artists, critics, and curators. Picasso's Cubism flattened the world into broken surfaces and shadows, with very little spiritual elevation. Pollock's chaotic compositions reflect further fragmentation of self and a loss of center, continuing the existential crisis of Modernism. Pop art is a perfect mirror of our shallow, surface-oriented materialist corporate culture.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Gao Shan and I both tend to believe life itself is far more important than art. But it’s getting clearer that life is oftentimes not the way we’d like it to be. We don’t have too much of a choice in life and the infinity of the universe is just a delusion. We choose to spend more time in our studio. The number of our works, however, is not increasing as fast as we expected. The slow rate contrasts strongly against the rapid pace of the outside world. We have to then console ourselves that maybe when we express emotions through art, it takes time. For me, art is more like a monologue. It takes effect on me before it does on viewers. The conversation between me and myself is especially important as I don’t socialize much. The process of making a piece of work is arduous, but the desire to see the result is so strong it keeps me going until the work turns out the way I envisioned it to be.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Taiwanese painter Yang Chi-Hung’s deeply intricate abstractions offer up a hint of figuration that compel the viewer to attempt to find structure in his perfectly static fields of chaos seemingly frozen in time. Having painted for over four decades, Yang, who was born in Taiwan in 1947 and graduated from the prestigious National Taiwan College of Art in 1968, has created an aesthetic vocabulary singular in its steadfast dedication to color, form, and balance. Seamlessly crossing the threshold between abstract and figurative painting, Yang creates sweeping canvases that hint at organic systems budding forth from bold brushstrokes and gusts of painterly wind.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
The drawings of Huston Ripley can undoubtedly be labeled “Visionary.” Firmly rooted in deep levels of collective imagery, they bubble up insistently from the artist's unconscious. For viewers they conjure windows onto a singular world crowded with imagery, action, and aura. They are also obsessive-compulsive, in the best sense of the term—a relentless and recursive projection of a unique inner world, densely populated by beings and bodies. Filled with faces and phalluses, eyes and eggs, nipples and navels, scimitars and sexual cynosures, serpents and skulls, and brains and breasts, his compositions are all portentous, archetypal, metaphysical, psychedelic, sexy—and ultimately—affirmative.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
I’m Nora Ness, life scientist and self-taught photo artist with an eye for the beauty of the female body. Since I can remember I’ve been attracted to the beauty of the naked female body. My erotic self-performance in front of the mirror, showing true erotic moments and passion, catches the eye of anybody who isn’t ashamed to look at. Provocation is an important aspect in my work as well. I use the mirror to let people look into the mendacious morality of our society. Eroticism and nudity aren’t nasty at all. To the contrary true, eroticism and passion are the best things nature has given us, and we shouldn’t be ashamed about the feelings erotic art is able to stir inside of us. Instead of being ashamed, we should enjoy these fantastic feelings as long as we can.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
The Days was inspired by photographs randomly taken in my daily life, which are kept on my computer as part of an electronic album. When you see these images, you go on a trip down memory lane. Memories are triggered by personal experience. While some of the memories are re-enhanced, others are gradually forgotten. The Days is a video installation composed of four TV screens. The stories on each screen come from the same source, which is my electronic photo album. But each story is told in a different way. As a result, the stories seem to vary slightly from one another. In fact, it’s like observing one story from four different angles.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
| The answer to this question depends on society’s current moral compass. In times gone by the flash of a lady’s ankle was enough to deprave a nation. Now we live in a time—at least in the western world—where the bikini is de rigeur for the public beach. On every music channel semi-clad men and women move sensually and explicitly to the current sounds leaving us in little doubt of the intention of the performers. Although prohibited by the constraints of their societies, artists throughout the ages have represented human sexual activity. Turner’s sketchbooks revealed many erotic drawings, the Impressionists frequented houses of ill-repute to sensitively portray the private lives of prostitutes, and even Schiele and Klimpt stylishly portrayed female masturbation. Despite a long tradition of sexual art, the subject remains a topic of debate, and often derision. |
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
| In September of 2007, Gabriel Shaffer and I participated in a joint exhibit combining his paintings with my poetry, allowing both art forms to react with, and against the other. We called it Animal Returns, and as the title suggests, we embraced the experience as a journey through the guts, the teeth, the eggs, and semen of raw creation. For me the result was startling. Without prior knowledge of the subject of my poetry, Gabriel somehow conjured direct images of individuals, memories, and nightmares from my mind as if they were his own. His paintings explicitly illustrated the ghostly presences that haunt and bless my existence. How Gabriel was able to fully envision my abstract thoughts, and raise fantastical paintings of deep and beautiful instinct I will never comprehend.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
In the fall of 1994, I began to photograph lovers in the SM scene in New York. My work had explored issues of sexual desire for many years, and sadomasochism was not new to me. It was the natural next step in a journey that I had set out on many years before. I had worked as a set photographer on over 300 hardcore and SM/fetish porn movies. In that earlier work, I looked behind the scenes of making porn movies to reveal the human beings behind the sex machine image. The moments I loved were when they called a cut in the middle of an orgy scene, and the actors would drop their guard. They'd pull out a cigarette and stare off into space, like combat soldiers with a thousand-yard stare, except that they were still naked and surrounded by the accoutrements of the sex business.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
| “I am not interested in function and logic. I want to achieve transcendence,” says Fredrik Söderberg. The snow-covered clearing in Narnia is the beginning of a journey into a magical world. Much like the dreams of shamans, drug-induced hallucinatory states, and sexual experiences, Söderberg’s work can be understood as the transgression of boundaries and the exploration of liminal states; they are a survey of modes of transcendence. They represent images that fascinate and absorb him, urging him to believe in otherworldly realms. When Söderberg borrows images, his style is also affected. The colors of his oil paintings are often reduced to black, white, green, and red.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
A digital artist from Badem-Württenburg, 52-year-old Eicher first achieved fame from her spatial copy collages. These early kaleidoscopically arranged pop-culture die-cuts—culled from the Internet and other commercial media—helped define the artist’s practice of re-contextualizing popular imagery. As a collector and curator of visual content, Eicher works with the Warhol readymade mentality of many contemporary media artists, but differs in her readiness to revisit the static materiality of the plastic arts. Her collage works escape the purgatory of Web 2.0 by returning to the tactile off-line world in which the original photographic stills and advertisements were conceived.
|
|
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next > End >>
|
|
Page 1 of 8 |
