French artist Sylvie Guillot (1972, Paris) started drawing in criminal courts, which in her view was the best drawing school imaginable; with just that element of urgency to get straight to the heart of the matter and produce a drawing that bears witness and shows emotions. Over the years her work has gradually focused more on the human figure, particularly the nude.
“I like the ideas of tension and movement, using compositions where the body seems either to stretch, to fall or to huddle up. I also like to emphasize the tension within the body by drawing contorted torsos, sharp shoulders or strong and nervous hands.”
Cornelia Parker investigates the nature of matter often using materials that have a history loaded with association.
Cold Dark Matter, 1991. Parker had a garden shed blown up by the British Army and suspended the fragments as if suspending the explosion process in time.
Mass (Colder Darker Matter), 1997. Parker arranged the charred remains of a church that had been struck by lightning in Texas into a visual form looking like a suspended cube.
Anti-Mass, 2005 – detail. A companion piece for Mass, this time using charcoal from a black congregation church in Kentucky that had been destroyed by arson.
Artist Miya Ando is of half-Japanese and half-Russian heritage and is a descendent of Bizen sword maker Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu. Her 2012 art installation Obon – named after the Japanese Obon Festival that commemorates the spirit of the dead and is said to guide ancestral spirits home with floating lanterns – consisted of a thousand ficus leaves coated in a non-toxic bioluminescent resin, floating in a small pond in Puerto Rico. During the day, the coating absorbed energy from the sun and when night arrived, each leaf would emit a soft blue and purple hued light.
Spanish artist Patricia March was trained in Fine Arts and Cinematography, hence her interest in movement and time. She aims to incorporate a cinematic style in her drawings and captures movement in terms of her own time perception, which is something like water; it erodes and destroys forms while building new ones.
‘Falling’, a series of sculptures and drawings, visualises Clara Lieu’s personal experience with depression and anxiety. Unable to “release” herself from these episodes, she waited for the physical limitations of her body to end them.
Diana Al-Hadid is a Syrian-American artist who lives and works in New York. Her sculptures take “towers” as their central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism, problems of cultural difference and conflict. Her works are informed by myriad sources: Eastern and Western-ancient biblical and mythological narratives, Arabic oral traditions, Gothic architecture, Italian and Northern Renaissance painting, Islamic ornamentation, and scientific advances in physics and astronomy.
Israeli artist Ronit Bigal meticulously presents excerpts from sacred Biblical texts on the human body in her Body Scripture II series by getting in close to the contours of the human form, re-imagining the body as an abstract landscape. Via My Modern Met
Italian artist, Nicola Samori intensely disfigures his Renaissance influenced paintings using a palette knife, a scalpel, paint or his hands.
“I like taking the image to a breaking point, putting its form into danger. My work stems from fear: fear of the body, of death, of men. I think my nature as an artist is something like feeling hopeless. Works are just temporary shelters and painting is a leisure place where you can conceal yourself.” Quote via Huffington post
In 2007 American artist Sharon Core recreated a number of still lifes by the 19th-century painter Raphaelle Peale, for her Early American series, by manipulating the surreally beautiful lighting and an assortment of objects ranging from flowers and fish to watermelons alongside genuine antique crockery and glassware.
Evasion is a series of large-format paintings by Portuguese artist Pedro Batista. His figures fade into motion seemingly captured for just a moment in time.
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!
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 ‘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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Serrah Russell uses instant film, photography and digital imagery to illuminate the permanent effect that actions trace upon objects within their environment. Her series “Equivalents” encompasses enticing abstract body images.
In her series Conflict (2011), Melinda Le Guay furthers her investigation into the repetitiveness of ‘women’s work’ through the process of knitting – often considered a nurturing activity associated with femininity. Delicate sculptures made from wire instead of the soft material expected introduce a conflict between protection and exposure in the form of seemingly simply beautiful dresses. Source: Brenda May Gallery
After spending six years learning the cumbersome wet-plate collodion process invented in 1851, photographer Michael Shindler opens a walk-in tintype portrait studio (Photobooth) in 2011.
The wet-plate collodion process involves coating an enameled metal plate with a collodion mixture, which is then sensitized, exposed and processed all within a few minutes while the plate is still wet. The resulting image (while technically a negative) is made up of extremely fine silver particles that are creamy-white in color, which allows the image to be viewed as a positive when seen against a black background.
