Artist_Stephan Balkenhol

Stephan Balkenhol, Tre nudi femminili, 2006, legno di wawa dipinto, h 250 cm ca. Londra, collezione privata J.P.D. Geertman

Another wood artist that carves people out of blocks of wood: Stephan Balkenhol loves wood more than anything else. Women that hide in the trunk of a cedar tree, faces inlaid in a log.  His casual and undistinguished “guys and gals”, enigmatic and somewhat sad, are inspired by people he has photographed on the street.

Credit: Christine Jegan

 The artist makes these figures from soft wood (poplar or African wawa) cut with a power saw, hammer, and chisel creating rich surfaces where every mark of the chisel is visible. Calling to mind the great tradition of German figurative sculpture in wood and the expressionist heritage of the Germans, Balkenhol’s people are curiously devoid of emotion and have been described as “German Expressionism without the expressionism.”

I first saw Stephan Balkenhol’s work at the exhibition “Past Present Future”, a collection of work organized by the Unicredit Group Art Collection at Palazzo della Ragione in Verona 2010, with a giant man’s head in the center of the section “Face to Face”.

Testa maschile

Stephan claims: The people that I photograph on the street have no uneasiness. I show with irony the people of our times.”

What do you think about this German artist? Could you be one of his average people?

Artist_Paul McCarthy

Complex Shit

Paul McCarthy, the L.A. based American artist, has a career that spans the last 40 years and is one of the most controversial and fascinating artists of contemporary art. He’s widely known for his early performances involved with Barbie dolls and Vaseline. 

Currently he is making giant inflatable sculptures and exhibiting them worldwide. This piece, titled Complex Shit, was displayed over in Switzerland. One of the pieces of shit was picked up by the wind and eventually brought down a power line, broke a window, and ended up in the yard of a children’s home. 

“Giant dog turd wreaks havoc at Swiss museum

Inflatable artwork blown from moorings and brings down power line”

 The Guardian

To put it into perspective, the pieces of shit were each respectively, the size of a house.  Now that’s some complex shit.

Pig Island, his latest work organized by  Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milano (www.fondazionenicolatrussardi.com)

Wax people queuing

McCarthy has transformed famous people such as Angelina Jolie, Liz Taylor, Elizabeth II, presidents, dancers, Santa Clauses into grotesque figures.

 His aim is to go to extremes with the  clichés of a moralist American culture, combining glamour with the “dark side” of the American Dream. He shocks and amuses people with the famous combination: politics and sex.

However, many people critique this type of work for example: 

How Far Is Too Far?   Contemporary artists have made work depicting graphic sexual acts, damaging property, injuring their own bodies, or paying others to alter theirs. But when does art cross the line from avant-garde to unacceptable? by Phoebe Hoban

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

wttp://www.google.it/imgres?imgurl=http://www.artnews.com/assets/images/articles/article-2522.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp%3Fart_id%3D2522&usg=__PxsFXhEdDWZniPI_NEjWlFDXLxw=&h=432&w=288&sz=86&hl=it&start=4&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=3buGYItyUfeAXM:&tbnh=126&tbnw=84&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpaul%2Bmccarthy%2Bpig%2Bisland%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dit%26sa%3DG%26rlz%3D1T4SNYK_itIT347IT347%26tbs%3Disch:1

Artist_Aron Demetz

Now, this is a new artist for me and I would like to explore his works for you (whoever you are???!!)

Wood for Aron Demetz is what marble was for Canova (for example Le Tre Grazie) : natural, a friend and a beginning point (but also an arrival point) for his whole life. Get it?

  Wow!

Contemporary art is now about video, installations and performance. Forget it, Aron is about chisels, punches and  files: all tools for wood sculpture. He talks about people (like Valerio Berruti does), only using tree trunks, resins and chunks of wood.

Aron lives in Val Gardena, in the Italian Alps and one of my fav places, where forests and mountains condition your every movement. Kids playgrounds and toys, kitchen tools, the sculptures in the little villages: everything is made of wood. So for him, it was a natural choice to use wood as his medium.

He takes a trunk of wood, brings it into the studio, makes a sketch  and turns on the chainsaw (this is not a chainsaw massacre, but a chainsaw creation!). Once he gets the volume that he likes, he redefines it with an axe and then with hot scalpels.

Compare this to Michelangelo Pistoletto, who takes a block of wood, slices an angle from it and adds mirrors.

Log, 1999

The magic from a block of wood! The “Michelangelo” of wood sculpture, for as you know, Michi knew that the figure was inside the marble and had to be sculpted out from the true form that was inside.

Aron does this with his sculptures: they cry to be released from their natural state.

www.arondemetz.it/ 

Well worth a visit.

image of Pistoletto courtesy of http://www.google.it/imgres?imgurl=http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/PROTETCH/pistoletto99/pGIFS/p4.jpeg&imgrefurl=http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/PROTETCH/pistoletto99/p4.html&usg=__yIik2_1v6DCsFkk_HpsXc2IWRtw=&h=250&w=580&sz=30&hl=it&start=189&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=HjmyRTuPZIryeM:&tbnh=58&tbnw=134&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmichelangelo%2Bpistoletto%26start%3D180%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dit%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1T4SNYK_itIT347IT347%26ndsp%3D20%26tbs%3Disch:1

Artist_ Valerio Berruti

Valerio Berruti’s work talk about kids that play, kids that are “malinconici” and sweet, kids that sit there and stare, don’t do anything, little girls outlined in dresses and pinafores, with undershirts on.

 

Family photo albums insiprie him, everyday life inspires him.

I believe in the poetry of the image and in that silence that remains unaltered for years between a work of art and who looks at it.

Valerio Berruti, born 1977, , is already a Art Star. With his series I Wish I Was Special , whose title was inspired by a Creep of Radiohead, investigates the themes of personality and the magic moment when it comes out.

Two little girls that play, hold hands, hold each other, they come close and they move away, they look at each other and they look away.

My friend Tiziano has a Berruti, my lawyer has one. Should I get one? I don’t have a little girl, I can’t appreciate the “little girlness” of the works,  even though I have always wanted a little girl. Is that what it is – the wonderful world of little girls….

Image of Valerio courtesy of

http://www.google.it/imgres?imgurl=http://www.wundercam.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/berruti.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.wundercam.it/%3Ftag%3Dvalerio-berruti&usg=__BNwkTbaOVaIMr3orfkBhVbuJcBw=&h=200&w=300&sz=13&hl=it&start=2&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=TPm_HMGjkZai0M:&tbnh=77&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvalerio%2Bberruti%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dit%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1R2SKPB_itIT369%26tbs%3Disch:1

http://www.google.it/imgres?imgurl=http://www.teknemedia.net/esposizioni/2010/TKimg4bbc41d990efd.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.teknemedia.net/archivi/2010/5/12/mostra/41729.html&usg=__T6q4VP-3JNVeQKuRrH6pGd6Ry2w=&h=480&w=500&sz=81&hl=it&start=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=9ttNtcPGgRb4vM:&tbnh=125&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvalerio%2Bberruti%2Bi%2Bwish%2BI%2Bwas%2Bspecial%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dit%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1T4SKPB_itIT369IT369%26tbs%3Disch:1

Artist: Marina Abramovic

Balkan Erotic Epic

Women that massage their breasts under the rain, soaking wet and covered with mud.

and then

men dressed in traditional costumes have sex with the ground, then nude  men masturbating into the earth

 To help the grass grow, men masturbate into it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geVbn0cWsjg

Popular songs and rites.

Crude images imbued with passion and signed by Marina Abramovic in the suggestive installation video where the Serbian artist entrusts a reflection on the relationship between eros and death in the popular culture of ex-Yugoslavia.

Balkan Erotic Epic is one of the works that was exhibited in the exhibition called “La sostenibile leggerezza dell’essere” that was on at Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in Venice www.palazzopesaropapafava.it/  from sept 13 to 23 nov 2008,  on at the same time as the Biennale di Architecture where alot of my favorite artists exhibited their works: Candida Hoefer and Yoko Ono. They all confronted the issue of the concept of  physical and cultural space.

The image of the woman fondling her breasts was everywhere and has become an icon. You still see it nowadays.

it moves you…maybe repulses you too.

Her latest challenge was The Artist is Present, a performance retrospective of her career,  on at the MOMA, where she did an extreme performance: 7 hours a day, sitting and immobile, watching the visitors at the exhibiton without saying a word. It involves viewer participation (I love that in a museum, as you all well know), to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.

The Artist is present

You can read a review by Germano Celant in Espresso, entitled “Monumento al silenzio”  at

http://www.google.it/imgres?imgurl=http://download.kataweb.it/mediaweb/image/brand_espressonline/2010/03/23/1269369827711_ap100315111912.jpg&imgrefurl=http://mmedia.kataweb.it/foto/23752227/marina-abramovic-monumento-al-silenzio&usg=__I9J0GqKqvldyxYwcVafGyBJjVLs=&h=400&w=600&sz=46&hl=it&start=16&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=S15Amh8pjgGb7M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmarina%2Babramovic%2Bthe%2Bartist%2Bis%2Bpresent%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dit%26rlz%3D1T4SKPB_itIT369IT369%26tbs%3Disch:1

or the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASS7xMOM1EE.

Have fun!

 

Artist: Kehinde Wiley

Biggie

A Painter with record quotes, Kehinde Wiley is gay and of Nigerian origin, and lives between Peking and Brooklyn.  A black excellence on the pathway of Obama. Yes. But above all, a natural talent tagged “WORLD”.

Kehinde’s main painting subjects are”Portraits of Alpha Males who I want to represent with beauty and dignity”.

The success of Kehinde, only 32 years old, is incredible: born in California, he was brought up by a single mother after his Nigerian father returned to Africa. After his art degree at Yale, he exhibited right away in international museums with the critics praise. The studio of Kehinde, in an old brickbuilding is in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Kehinde doesn’t know how to do anything else except paint, and seeing that he does that pretty well, he’s happy. He was sent to school to be kept off the streets of Los Angeles. In he ’80′s the south center area where he grew up was very dangerous, but now its changing and poverty is still there, but the gang wars are not as cool as they once were.

Kehinde was a real nerd when he was growing up. He listened to Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and John Cage. He uses rococò designs on top of his portraits of men/boys/black male figures and they come from old French wallpaper. He likes to interact and to know that his art has a position in the world, therefore the world  of hip-hop, publicity and street culture. He even lets his models to decide what they will wear and how they want to look or stand.

To get the casting for his portraits, he goes into the streets to look for an Alpha-Male, someone who has charisma, who is sure of himself and is determined. His artistic genre tries to get exactly that kind of black person, a person with beauty and dignity. If you look at many classic portraits, thinking of David’s Napoleon, beauty is one of the central elements even if we don’t want to admit it.

Kehinde pays his models so they can feel that they are not being used or being taken advantage of. Sometimes they ask if they have to get undressed, but that is not the kind of work that he is interested in.

One of the most unresolved points of his work is the insistence on being black. He also goes beyond by adding games of genre, history, power, influence from religious pictures, with all these decorations taken from historical times. He uses old material, patterns and designs and wanted to translate them into something different. He did a series of portraits for Puma of the World Cup Soccer Champions.

Worldstage

Puma sneakers

 

 Kehinde designs his own clothes and gets some of them made in China. Since he travels there often for work, he has the opportunity to get material and make things from all over the world. Then he gives the money to an Onlus in South Africa. He is starting to widen his artistic vision by painting men from other cultures.

At the beginning there were the kids from Brooklyn in poses reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, like Mao’s China. Now that he has come back from Mumbai, New Delphi e Colombo and for the first time he has painted important works that are not of blacks, even though it is known of his influence of a romantic type of Urban Black American Male.

Spooky

 Oops, those are GIRLS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dECwcdJMXg Puma of the Same Earth

Art+Fashion+Africa, the genius of urban art designs for Pum a collecton of shoes, t.shirts and accessories that are already cult.

Artists_Tino Sehgal

tino sehgal

Kids that play without toys. Museum custodians that do a striptease in front of the public.  Kissing couple on the floor of the Guggenheim in New York.

at the guggenheim

These are a few of the of the “works” of Berlin artist Tino Sehgal, 32 years old. He had a big personal exhibition at the Villa Reale of Milano, organized by the Fondazione Trussardi, which was a huge success.

“You can miss them” because his works don’t leave any trace: no fotos (besides these ones) or videos.

Sehgal prefers that everything remains in the mind and memory of those who look or see it.

The critics love him for his use of non-materialism and he is quite high on the business side $$ (he sells his work by verbal contract, however the money is real!)

For him, art is like an orgasm: it comes and goes in a second. But you remember it for a long time.

check out www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-eley/tino-sehgal-at-the-guggen_b_452677.html about his show in march, an empty museum with people wandering around doing things.

mmmmmm

THAT QUILT – victoria and albert museum, london

Tracy Emin. Patchwork

You know, I love quilts. My grandmother, Nanny, made quilts all by hand. My Auntie Shirley, good seamstress that she is, made many many quilts for her daughters, but never gave me one (boo hoo!) . I tried to make my quilt here in Italy when they didn’t even know what they were. Now patchworking and quilting is a big business, but I don’t have a sewing machine, so I do everything by hand and real quilting is not possible.

I love sewing by hand, and with all my speciality interior designer materials, I make all sorts of things…in front of the tv and ruining my eyes and I do it, stitch by stitch.

Quilting is the beginning of women’s art – Judy Chicago, one of the first well known WOMAN artist’s did quilting in an artistic way and got recognition as an artist for it.

This exhibition tells about 300 years of quilts, covers, blankets and textile art. The V&A is hosting an exhibit called Quilts 1700-2010 tahta explores the artistic and philosphic side of patchwork. It really is slow moving, but also real women’s art, as is Michele’s, my sister, who sews and sews and sews her art.

We are all sewers in our family, the quiet artistic hand held type.

www.vam.ac.uk

The wapping project

wrapping project

 The Londoner Jules Wright, set designer for the theatre and cinema is an inventor of innovative spaces. The cult Wapping Project is the new deal, an industrial archeological site transformed into an intelligent artistic and performance space and restauant that is a cool and “in” place to go. All placed in an austere 1900′s building where steel, zinc and cement overrun the place.

Jules this year ran the installation at the Swarovski Crystal Palace Exhibition at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in April, an incubator for cutting edge design, demonstrated the merging of art,design, science and technology. Each of the 4 designer’s creative expression was captured in single room installations,captivating the imagination of each visitor. The final designs were a combination of sculptural pieces, art objects,or works which had a decidedly architectural quality. The exhibition brought on board the The Wapping Project in London and with a  background in theatre,  created a mise-en-scène that brought dramatic life to the different designers’ works.

I’m a director of public spaces. I treat design like a live performance”.

www.wappingproject.com,

www.swarovskicrystalpalace.com

 

 

Artists_Damien Hirst at Montecarlo

hirst cornucopia2

For the centenary of the Oceanographic Museum in Montecarlo,

Oceanographic Museum Montecarlo

an historical building of great importance and tradition, the museum invited ”Bad British Boy” Damien Hirst to show his exhibition “Cornucopia”, a very strong and impressionable exhibition on the relationship between art, science and existence.

hirst_cornucopia

 In 60 historical works (recent history of course for Hirst), he attacks life and death, human fragility and oblivion. So we see the estatic  colourful and shining butterfly mandalas, which I find are extremely evocative and touching

hirst_ butterflies

the series of  ”spin paintings”, which are fantastic color-amas of discs that would be great as an outdoor table in the garden (for me at least),

hirst_spin paintings

His black monochromatic intense paintings, which look like Pizzi-Cannella’s candelier works and are very moving and flightful,

damien hirst – requiem_ white roses and butterflies, 2008

naplesblack works

the fly paintings, made with millions of flies all glued on (yuck) 

fly paintings

 and of course, his famous boxes of sharks, cows and cut up animals, that have great and inticing titles such as

ThePhysicalImpossibilityOfDeath

which is outside,and of course his medical bodies that teach us all about ourselves.

Hirst_Body

Now that is what I call a RETROSPECTIVE! All this surrounded by the acquariums with over 4000 species of fish, skeletons and objects. So if you happen to be in Montecarlo, you must go and see it!