artist 33

Adel Abdessemed

Adel Abdessemed was born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria.  He is a conceptual artist who now lives and works in Paris.  Abdessemed attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, Algeria from 1987 to 1994. Due to political unrest in Algeria, he moved to Lyon, France in 1994. He continued his fine arts education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, before completing his studies in Paris, France in 2000. The following year, he enrolled at the International Studio Program at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.

Abdessemed transforms everyday materials and images into unexpected, charged, and sometimes shocking artistic declarations. He pulls from a plethora of sources- personal, social, and political- to create a visual language that is simultaneously rich and economical, sensitive and controversial, radical and mundane. Many situations created by Abdessemed are based on singular and deliberate actions, or, as he calls them, acts, which are testified, more than documented, with videos and photographs, and are often later juxtaposed with a sculptural remainder from the action itself.  

Abdessemed is an example of a contemporary conceptual artist.  For more than a century, artists have given up on idealization, the dominant aesthetic vision at least since the Renaissance. Instead of showing us what we could be, artists have reflected back to us an imperfect image of who we are and the world in which we live. This shifting attitude has resulted in a variety of artwork that is troubling, ugly and rooted in the baser instincts of human nature.  Abdessemed shows us a new side of art, he takes us into a new realm of the art world that seems to be more and more commonplace these days.  

It kinda scares me a little bit to be honest.  

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E0DF143BF934A35751C1A9619C8B63

new piece

hello artist friends.  this is my first piece from the summer.  i do not have much to say about it, i guess we will find out when critiques start in two weeks right?

basically, i'm trying to show that even though ethiopian orphans are fading from view, invisible, and commonplace (why i paint the kids in coffee), they have just as vibrant a heart as any other kid.  their spirits are alive and their hopes and dreams are full of color.

artist 32

Jon Pylypchuk

Artist Jon Pylypchuk (cool last name, huh?) was born in 1972 in Winnipeg, Canada.  He studied in 1996 at the Yale University Summer School of Music and Art, New Haven, earned a BFA with Honors in 1997 at the University of Manitoba, and an MFA in 2001 at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He now lives and works in Los Angeles.  His work is really different, he does sculptures that are, well, unusual.

His work evolves from the realm of the pathetic. His drawings and sculptures bring to life a make-believe world populated by abused cuddly creatures, where emotional frailty and menace are worn on every shirt sleeve and pet tag. Mirroring the naked state of the human condition, Pylpchuk’s tragic-comic figures are both loveable and loathsome, recreating instances of pitiful irony that ring all too true.

 Jon Pylypchuk makes his sculptures from the most impoverished materials: scraps of wood, remnant fabric, felt, glitter, and glue. Rendered with wonky ‘best attempt’ aesthetics, Pylypchuk mines all the sentimental authenticity of the unloved yet hopeful media of craft camps and community workshops. Reducing the moral sophistication of the adult world to artless simplicity, Pylypchuk plays out horror and grief with child-like naiveté and chilling matter-of-fact-ness, authoring a folktale of tactlessness, discomfort, and inadequacy.  Discomfort is really the theme of his work, I don't dislike his pieces, but I don't feel good looking at them.  They somehow speak specifically to a part of the soul that we don't want to think about, or that part of our culture or history that we are ashamed of, that past that we want hidden.  Bleh.  

 

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/jon_pylypchuk.htm

artist 31... apathy artist award

John Wonnacott

John Wonnacott was born in London in 1940. He trained at the Slade School from 1958-63 before moving to Southend in Essex where he still lives and paints in a studio overlooking the Thames Estuary.  His paintings and drawings are known for their panoramic and unexpected pictorial space which is a dynamic of working from direct observation.

Here is a small excerpt from an interview with Wonnacott that I found helpful: "The first thing that strikes me about John Wonnacott's studio is that there's a copy of Lucian Freud's portrait of the critic Martin Gayford hanging upside down on the wall.

"I went to Lucian's studio to see that painting and absolutely hated it. I thought it was sloppy; I thought he was just being lazy. But now I think I was wrong," explains Wonnacott. So he's hung it upside-down to test it. "Painters often turn their work upside down, you know. That's how you can tell you've got a good picture. I'm always working sideways." "

I love that he looks at paintings from different angles to find out what is wrong with them.  However, that is pretty much all I like about him.  Wonnacott is apathetic artist of the year.  Check out this quote from him, about his own lack of insight into his portraiture:

"I paint appearances. I don't understand insight into people. I don't know what that means. My colleagues in portrait painting say that they can see beneath the skin. Well, I think they're jolly clever. I find it hard enough to see the skin."

http://www.johnwonnacottgallery.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3647614/In-the-studio-John-Wonnacott.html

artist 30!

Janet Fish, Still life painter extraordinaire.

Janet Fish, much like Georgia O'Keefe, knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. She was born in 1938 to a family of artists, and continued her schooling at Yale. After taking many sculpture classes, Janet found her calling through painting. She then began to paint realistically and graduated in 1963.

Janet Fish then began her search for her own unique style. She began to paint glass bottles and and vases. Janet found that she was talented in dissecting the way in which the light broke up the forms. Soon she was painting every glass object she could find.  Janet Fish's artwork is unique in the sense that there is no central or focal point. Her paintings draw the viewers' eyes through the painting, never resting on a single element. Her earliest paintings were mainly in black and white (Wine and Cheese Glasses, 1975), while her later paintings literally exploded with color.  

I thought with all the funky strange art I have been reviewing lately, it would be nice to see some plain, good, old fashioned still life.  And Fish's work is really remarkable.  She paints light in ways that I could only dream about.  

http://www.ndoylefineart.com/fish.html

http://ww35.janetfish.net/

artist 29

(prepare to be creeped out)

Spencer Tunick

Looking at Tunick's work creeps me out, like a lot, so I figured he was worth including.  He was born in New York, 1967, and his father owned a keychain photo-viewer franchise (reason for initial interest in photography, perhaps?)  He began photographing nudes in 1986 when he visited London.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988, and has been taking pictures of naked people ever since.  You think you've seen a nude shot?  Wait till you see this guy's work.  Below is a brief history of Tunick's legal troubles involving his large scale nude photography, as well as a bit of explanation as to why someone who go through all the trouble anyways...

Spencer Tunick stages scenes in which the battle of nature against culture is played out against various backdrops, from civic center to desert sandstorm, man and woman are returned to a preindustrial, pre-everything state of existence. Tunick has traveled the globe to create these still and video images of multiple nude figures in public settings. Organizing groups from a handful of participants to tens of thousands, all volunteers, is often logistically daunting; the subsequent images transcend ordinary categories and meld sculpture and performance in a new genre.

Spencer Tunick's body of work explores and expands the social, political and legal issues surrounding art in the public sphere. 

Since 1992, Tunick has been arrested five times while attempting to work outdoors in New York City. Soon after his fifth arrest in Times Square in 1999, determined to create his work on the streets of New York, the artist filed a Federal Civil Rights Law Suit against the city to protect himself and his participants from future arrests. In May 2000, the Second U.S. District Court sided with Tunick, recognizing that his work was protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. On June 3 of the same year, in response to the city's final appeal made to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the court at large, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled in favor of Tunick by remanding the case, allowing the lower court decision to stand and the artist to freely organize his work on New York City streets. Four months later, Tunick applied for his first New York City permit after winning the case, and he was rejected. 

In order to make his work without the threat of arrest the artist took his work abroad. He has not undertaken a group installation on the streets of New York in ten years. 


http://www.spencertunick.com/

Check out a couple of his large scale pieces from around the world:

Mexico City 3 (Zócalo, MUCA/UNAM) 2007
c-print mounted between plexi
h: 71 x w: 89.25 in / h: 180.34 x w: 226.7 cm

Melbourne 2, 2001 
c-print mounted between plexi 
h: 60 x w: 48 in / h: 152.4 x w: 121.92 cm 

Sydney 1, 2010
c-print mounted between plexi
h: 48 x w: 60 in / h: 121.92 x w: 152.4 cm

artist 28 (also british, i'm on a UK kick...)

This artist has a name, the name that his mother gave him.  That name is:

Patrick Brill

However, this artist has another name, a name he assigned himself when he decided to take on the self title "artist" and start showing off his bizarre set of skills.  That name is:

Bob & Roberta Smith

Teehee, this guy is cool, funny, and a little strange.  He paints slogans in a unique brightly coloured lettering style on banners and discarded boards of wood and exhibits them in galleries of contemporary art across the world. The slogans are usually humorous musing on art, politics, pop culture, Britain and the world in general and they often support his activist campaigns.

This is a fascinating quote from Brill from a letter he wrote to Michael Grove, the Secretary of State for education in England.

"From birth Human beings seek to understand, find their place in society and control their worlds. Through looking and understanding the child interprets the world. Give a child a piece of paper, a brush and some colour and you put them in control. Children's art is so appealing because they have no problem with being in control of images. As school progresses, poor teaching in some schools, impresses on the child that they are not in control. Not only are they not in control, but they are the most insignificant cog in a system of control in which they may never play an important part. From Galileo to Darwin, from Caravaggio to Amy Winehouse creativity is rebellion."  -Bob & Roberta Smith

His work definitely signifies that kind of creative rebellion.  He says in an interview in a video on his website, (which you can watch in the link below) that his purpose in creating art is to encourage others to create.  The process is more important to him than the results, and he wants the whole world to engage in that process.  I am on this guy's side for sure.... seeing as I hope to become a kids teacher someday:)

Link to video of Bob & Roberta Smith:  http://vimeo.com/14025684

http://bobandrobertasmith.zxq.net/