digital creations, encapsulating the abstract, the grotesque, the personal, the obsession with technology, and the political turbulence of the current era.
digital creations, encapsulating the abstract, the grotesque, the personal, the obsession with technology, and the political turbulence of the current era. <|startoftext|>FOR HIS APPROACHING AUDITION to the challenge of one of the few spaces left where abstraction meets figuration, Italian artist Lucio Pozzi turned to the streets. The panorama of the Italian city that has hosted the artistic evolution of the last two centuries is at once our own and that of the other twenty-one nations of the world, but with no geographic boundaries to divide us. For this reason, Pozzi offers a paradoxical element that successfully attempts to understand the recent past, its effects, and the centrality of identity today. This paradox is illuminated in Pozzi, who considers the dark shadow of the 21st century that now surrounds us. Pozzi, who is based in Turin, is interested in the intersection of photographic representation and the spaces that record and control it.His work is, in a certain sense, a narrative of the decline of the Western legacy, which, despite its protection and sanctification, has lost its basis for authority. For Pozzi, these spaces are those that are out of step with our times. They are places where what is visible now becomes impossible to ignore, where knowledge and physical perception, and the systems of comprehension and interpretation of things, become entangled. He explores this relationship between perception and knowledge with a clarity that renders it possible to perceive the present in a completely new way.This exhibition of Pozzis photographs and drawings explored the relationship between photography and politics. The artist chooses photographs that are of the moment, usually taken by construction workers or security guards. He does so, however, with the idea that they will be displayed as representations, or in other words, as memories. This exhibition does not seek to romanticize the act of moving pictures from the contemporary medium, but rather to contextualize the history of the way that photographic memory is often exercised and constructed by the authorities.
digital creations, encapsulating the abstract, the grotesque, the personal, the obsession with technology, and the political turbulence of the current era. <|startoftext|>The proliferation of packaging and marketing has become a major concern of the global art world, and the design and mass production of image touts is no exception. In the early 1980s, one of the most influential artists to emerge from this area was Nicolás Siqueiros, who became known for his brand of conceptual art that eschews all marketing tactics. Instead, he focused on issues of quality, quantity, and frequency. An exemplary example of this approach is his Two and a Half Mats, 1986, which depicts a table with two other images in a geometric configuration, the three known as TWO and ONE. The twenty-eight images that comprise Siqueiros work represent the intersections of multiple culture and individual experience. In his simple yet rigorous use of materials, Siqueiros attempts to approach the problem of constructing an identity within both time and space.For Siqueiros, authenticity is the most immediate issue. As a teenager he took up photography and set up a studio in his hometown of Havana. From the window of the gallery, one could observe the studio and the three figures in the window; they were photographed in the midst of daily activities, making the world in the space of the photograph a simulacrum of the real world. This strategy of capturing and presenting a simulacrum of reality put an immense demand on the photographer, who had to make the images conform to the formal requirements of the medium. For the first time, the studio was transformed into a photographic structure, and his subjects were transformed into three nonhuman creatures: a marble statue and a wooden, one-legged creature; two children playing; and a tripod. But Siqueiros rediscovery of photography is secondary to the photographic role it performs for the artist.Siqueiros has long been fascinated by the relationship between photographys capacity to make visible a world still in a state of limbo—a state that is completely lacking in the world—and his own experiences.
The challenges that face contemporary art today, particularly in the form of current events, is not limited to the mainstream of art, but extends to painting and sculpture. As the crisis of the social order in Europe and the intensifying confrontation between the ruling elite and the working class erupts, the ability of some artists to confront the everyday comes to the fore. In the context of this moment, Jan Stemers new paintings show how painting can contain the violent eruption of emotion, an explosive energy that can be tamed, control itself, and produce art.
digital creations, encapsulating the abstract, the grotesque, the personal, the obsession with technology, and the political turbulence of the current era. The shows poster shows a face of a grinning girl, all lithe, easy-to-lick flesh, and an enormous telephone, the left hand holding a mirror. Half-awkward, half-entrenched, the girl is caught in an awkward moment that is both scandalous and funny. It is not as if the gallery space itself is uptight. Paint-by-number pieces depicting the artist, like a picture of the mimesis room, appear to have come out of a nineteenth-century palace to show a sculptor who uses figures of stately female form as a basis for a universal expression, and who, one could argue, is responsible for their existence. A certain vehemence is implied; the female figure is not shown as innocent, the mirror on the wall, even. And the given poses are not as loose as they might be. An exception is a hand holding a mirror, which looks as if it has just had a cigarette. And even the dress is revealing. It is no longer a gown, but the equivalent of a train ticket, a piece of dirty clothes for another day of the exhibition.The best part is that the works are so gratuitous. Our dazed consciences can only avert our gaze at them, like pettied waves of thoughts, to which we cannot at this moment respond. And the works take on a curious power of the regrettable. For the artwork is both illuminating and unsettling. We will not be able to complete our contemplation. The works are not so much sculptures as they are actions that take place inside the gallery. In the case of a mirror that is taken away, an illusion, and an appeal to the sense of both pleasure and disgust. By bringing the art and the personal together, to show us something of the glamour of the artist, the viewer becomes an agent of attraction, but only ends up as a potential victim of the art, not an ennobling of it.
digital creations, encapsulating the abstract, the grotesque, the personal, the obsession with technology, and the political turbulence of the current era. <|startoftext|>Geoffrey Koshnikov, Real Time, 2016, digital video, color, sound, 36 minutes. From Immersion: Moving Images and the Body. Philip Guston, who died in 2015, had a way with words. In his seminal 1973 essay The Memoirs of Dorothea Dyer, we learn that in an attempt to conceal the seriousness of his loss, he resorted to pretending to be a drunken sailor. And while the details of this ritual can be found in a catalog entry for the paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one feels the weight of his memento thoughtfully sliding back into his personal milieu. Indeed, the exhibition Immersion: Moving Images and the Body is the artists first in New York. The show includes forty-eight paintings (a mere six years after his death), five of which were in this show, and a film (a collaboration with director Vadim Zakharov, who traveled to India with the group Lipomi), all of which depict the artist surrounded by his wife and his children. The pictures range from mid-90s motifs (a tattoo on the artists leg) to more recent pieces (a teenage heart) to a double representation of iconic nineteenth-century painters such as Rembrandt and van Gogh.Koshnikovs canvases are characterized by a wide spectrum of motifs, encompassing portraits of the artist and his wife, his children, his parents, and him, his mistress, as well as portraits of his mistress and their son. In the paintings, the themes are confined to family, nature, and seaside or sky motifs, but they seem to be driven by an obsession with the body and sexuality. For example, there are depictions of a nude female torso, but also works of the aforementioned sexual imagery, the latter here suggested through a feminine mannequin who appears at once suspended in midair and crashing down from a high ridge.
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