Suren Manvelyan’s macro eyes
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Animal eyes is a continuing series of macro photographs by Armenian Photographer Suren Manvelyan.
Guinea pig
Discus
Gecko eublepharis
Lama
Blue-yellow macaw parrot
Raven
Coral zebra fish
Husky dog
We are recovering
Franc Grom’s eggs
Slovenian artist Franc Grom creates amazingly beautiful and delicate eggshell art. A painstaking process, drilling one hole at time, a single egg will typically contain around 3,000 holes. In some the remaining connecting bits of eggshell are little more than a millimeter wide. Inspired by traditional Slovenian designs, his work ranges from asymmetrical botanical motifs to cut-outs that glow brilliantly when illuminated from the inside. Happy Easter!
Looking forward to Easter
Michal Rovner’s distorted images
New-York based artist Michal Rovner (1957 in Tel Aviv) studied cinema, television and philosophy before enrolling at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, receiving a BFA in photography and art in 1985.
Through multiple processing and re-shooting of the basic images and often adding colours, she creates an image several degrees removed from the actual reality she started with, yet retaining a haunting familiarity with it. She quotes Giacometti approvingly: ‘Has the artist erased enough data?’
Via / read more at BBC.
Outside (1990–91), distorted images of a Bedouin shack in the Israeli desert
Decoy (1991), distorted radar and surveillance images
One-Person Game Against Nature (1992–93), distorted photographs of people floating in the Dead Sea
Anya Gallaccio’s 10,000 little deaths
Anya Gallaccio‘s ‘Red on Green’ (first exhibited at the ICA in 1992) consists of 10,000 red tea rose heads placed on a bed of green stalks and thorns. The blooms are left to decay during the exhibition.
“I pull the heads off the long stems. I make a bed of the green, and then the heads of the roses are really tightly packed. So for a couple of days anyway there is this really fantastic surface which is velvety, really seductive and tactile. Because they’re slightly raised off the floor by the layer underneath, they dry into perfect rosebuds.”
Mihoko Ogaki’s starry nights
Milky Ways is a series of figurative sculptures in which artist Mihoko Ogaki explores life and death. Dying figures are made of black plastic and contain LEDs, which – when the room is dark – shine through little holes, illuminating the surrounding walls into a Milky Way display.
Elena Oganesyan’s moody blur
Elena Oganesyan is a young Russian photographer living in Moscow who’s moody blurs are truly captivating.
© Elena Oganesyan
Spring
Today it’s Spring yet still seemingly winterish here at 52.2066° N, 5.6422° E; somewhat like Egon Schiele’s “Early Spring”.
Egon Schiele, Early Spring, 1913, Oil on canvas
Kunsthaus Zug , Sammlung Kamm via PaintingDb
Domenico Grenci’s “ukiyo-e” portraits
Italian artist Domenico Grenci is heavily influenced by Japanese art and portrays Western women in “ukiyo-e” (literally translated: floating world); impermanent, fleeting beauty divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world.
© Domenico Grenci
Nobuhiro Nakanishi subtle passage of time
Nobuhiro Nakanishi’s Layered Drawings contain scenes that are repeatedly photographed, capturing change and the subtle passage of time. Laser printed and mounted onto acrylic they are layered into sculpture installations.
“The theme of my work is: the physical that permeates into the art piece. In a foggy landscape, we no longer see what we are usually able to see – the distance to the traffic light, the silhouette of the trees, the slope of the ground. By capturing spatial change and the infinite flow of time, I strive to produce art that creates movement between the artwork itself and the viewer’s experience of the artwork.”
Nadav Kander’s vulnerable bodies
Nadav Kander (born in Israel, raised in South Africa) has lived in London since the 1980s. He is a photographer, artist and director. His series “Bodies, 6 Women, 1 Man” serves as a monumental studies of the human condition by displaying honest photographs of the human form with a reference to the renaissance.
“Revealed yet concealed. Shameless yet shameful. Ease and unease. Beauty and destruction. These paradoxes are displayed in all my work; an inquiry into what it feels like to be human. Wherever I may be, my pictures seek to expose the shadow and vulnerability that exists in all of us, and it is this vulnerability that I find so beautiful.”
For those of you, who – like me – would love to own one of these, but most likely never will, fortunately, there is also a book available.
Christian Boltanski’s traces of lives
French artist Christian Boltanski (1944) began his artistic career at the age of 12, when he started painting and drawing. In the 60s he moved on to creating art installations revolving around life & death and the ephemera of the human experience, tracing the lives of the lost and forgotten through objects that serve as relentless reminder to human experience and suffering.
10 Portraits Photographiques de Christian Boltanski, 1946-1964 (1972) is an artists’ book seemingly featuring photographs of Christian Boltanski at ages 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, and 20. In fact, all photographs were taken by Annette Messager one afternoon near the waterfall in the Parc Montsouris in Paris. Only the last photograph portrays Christian Boltanski, at the age of 28, not 20.
Photos © Annette Messager
The Shadows (1984) consists of light focused on figurative shapes and forms generating a mysterious environment of silhouettes in movement.
Photo: source unknown
“Personnes” Monumenta, Paris (2010) is a series of monumental exhibitions at the Grand Palais is a work in sound and vision. “Personnes”, meaning both “people” and “nobodies” is a “social, religious and humanistic exploration of life, memory and the irreductible individuality of each and every human existence – together with the presence of death, the dehumanisation of the body, chance and destiny.
Photo © Shann Biglione
“The wheel of fortune” is part of the installation “Chance” at Venice Art Biennale (2011). A thematic exploration of the luck and fate of newborns, whose beginnings are subject entirely to chance.
Photo: source unknown
Francis Bacon’s triggers of ideas
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film in Tokyo will present an exhibition of works by Francis Bacon opening today to April 6. The exhibition will include 11 contact sheets, which were used as important image sources in his production process.
It is well known that Bacon worked from photographs rather than live models. While he hired John Deakin and other established photographers to make some of the photographs, he also frequently hired unknown photographers who were active in New York at the time. Some of the contact sheets show sequential photographs, which evoke Eadweard Muybridge’s works, but they also betray his idiosyncratic perspective on the human figure. In 1974, Bacon explained, “I want to isolate the image much further and take it very much further away from the photograph. I only use photographs as I would use a dictionary in a foreign language.” He wrote directly onto some of the photographs to formulate ideas for his works.
Contact sheet of female nudes from the floor of Bacon’s Studio, ca. 1975, Prov. The Robertson Collection, vintage gelatin silver print, paper size: 41.9 x 50.8 cm, Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
Contact sheet of two men wrestling in a studio from the floor of Bacon’s Studio, ca. 1975, Prov. The Robertson Collection, vintage gelatin silver print, paper size: 41.9 x 50.8 cm, Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
Bill Gekas’ portraiture with a fine art aesthetics
Australian photographer Bill Gekas draws inspiration from classical paintings from Rembrandt, Raphael and Velazquez and makes portraits of his 5-year-old daughter to pay tribute to well-known portraits.
“The key to executing a shoot like this is to have it all planned before the subject enters the scene, the lighting, props, composition etc. From thought to finished post processed shot ready for display a typical shot can average a total of 8 hours.”
© Bill Gekas
Alain Delorme’s little dolls
Inspired by the advertising aesthetic with western female stereotypes (Barbie in particular), French artist Alain Delorme takes an ironic and worrying look at the identification by young girls in his series Little Dolls; a caustic criticism of making little girls objects of consumption useful to the laws of the market.
© Alain Delorme
See also: Alain Delorme’s totems
Miseon Yoon’s thought-provoking textile portraits
Inspired by unstable human emotions, Korean artist Miseon Yoon‘s makes thought-provoking textile portraits that are the result of a compulsive process of cutting and attaching hand-painted fabrics. Via Saatchi Online.
© Miseon Yoon
Sculptural photography by Szymon Roginski and Kasia Korzeniecka
Polish photographers Szymon Roginski and Kasia Korzeniecka worked together to create these photographic sculptures for the “O Mia O” Spring Summer 2009 collection of Ania Kuczynska.
Roeland Otten’s urban camouflage
Dutch artist and designer Roeland Otten‘s Transformatie Huisje (2009) aims to bring back the lost view in this historical part of Rotterdam, that was taken by a concrete electricity substation by covering unattractive areas with high-resolution photographs that blend seamlessly into the surroundings.
Aron Demetz’ scorched wooden sculptures
Italy-based sculptor Aron Demetz constructs life-sized figurative wooden sculptures and sets them ablaze. On their own, before they are scorched, the stoic human figures are presented in a variety of poses that appear to be rather classic. Though their anatomic construction is impressive, it’s after their dematerialization that viewers are offered something far more emotional. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Demetz’s sculptures are reborn as new entities
The charred remains of the artist’s works evoke a new range of sentiments that delve deeper into the vulnerabilities of both the wooden materials they are composed of and the human figures they represent. Demetz’s sculptures present mankind and nature as one, reflecting the fragility of both. The burned structures peel back the facade of the figurative forms and expose their susceptibility to hindering elements, both in the literal and metaphoric sense. The wood-turned-charcoal figures present an interpretive look at the outcome of physical and emotional onslaught. Via My Modern Met.
