Levi Van Veluw is an artist based in the Netherlands who sculpts onto living people and photographs the results. There isn’t much information about him on his website but his work is fascinating. You can also view a film of one of his sculptures in action at his site. He is currently exhibiting in locations across Europe and the states.
I think I posted something about Thomas Keeley on my last blog but his work is worth another post and then some. His work is all about the concept and it’s refreshing in that regard. There is virtually no information about him on his website other than his work, but his work is worth a browse if you are feeling short on ideas.
I was reminded of his work while browsing Joy Engine this afternoon.
Above is his latest creation and below his earlier sculptures.
Joshua Allen Harris is a NYC street artist who has been constructing some extremely unusual sculptures out of plastic bags that he attaches to the above ground vents of the city subway. When the train passes by underneath a gust of air rushes up through the vents filling and breathing life into the sculptures. You can see more of them in action at Wooster Collective. It’s an interesting combination of art and environment. I love the concept and I love that it stops people in their tracks and makes them think about where they are. It’s great when art can pull people into the moment and force them into the here and now, if only for a moment.
State of Fear
Dan Tague is an artist who isn’t afraid to use his artwork as a vehicle to protest or rather a mirror to hold up to the hypocritical face of American society to force some serious questions as to our motives. His recent work for his exhibition at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery is no exception. The show is titled, ‘Cash Rules Everything Around Me‘ and involves large scale photographs of American Currency folded to reveal messages involving war and commerce. It’s a simple but genius idea that has conjured iconic images.
Tague lives and works in New Orleans. There is little doubt that the massive fuck up that was Hurricane Katrina has had an impact on his work and perception of his nation. His past show titles are case in point to this fact with titles like, ‘Paradise Lost, In Harm’s Way, Katrina & The Waves, America: Are We Drowning, American Muscle and Natural Disaster.’ It is good to see an artist being so active and using his work as a vessel to deliver his protest to a sad time in American history.
Notorious stencil artist Banksy will be exhibiting in Hong Kong late this month at the “LOVE ART” show curated by Fabrik Contemporary Art. The exhibition will also feature the work of several other high-profile controversial artists such as Damien Hirst, Keith Haring, Romero Britto, and Mel Ramos. I can’t thin of another exhibition where such an infamous group of artists have all been grouped together. I only wish someone would buy me a ticket to Hong Kong so I could see it for myself. The details of time and place are listed below.
Place:
Hong Kong Arts Centre:
2 Harbour Road,
Hong Kong
Time:
Opening Night:
April 23 (Wednesday) | 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Dates:
Exhibition dates:
April 23rd (Wednesday) – April 28th (Monday) | 10am – 8pm
Justine Ashbee creates the kind of art that I think would be a lot more interesting in person than it appears small-scale on the internet. She creates large drawings using sharpies with the kind of curves you would swear had to be computer generated. It’s an interesting methodology and execution in what is definitely an original perspective.
I read this in Wireless today and thought it was worth noting here. So, have you been hankering for some affordable art and don’t want to wait until I get around to producing my prints. Well, fortunately Web 2.0 has once again made art accessible to just about everyone and anyone from college bound to upper crust.
So where to buy this art? Well there are several options. I have listed some in the past but there are 3 here that were mentioned in the Wireless article.
DORM ROOMS TO HIPSTER APARTMENTS:
Thumbtack Press: Originally Thumbtack’s founder Tony Bailey asked his cache or art buddies to help him stock out his site. Since then, he has pulled in more established talent and now there is something there for just about any amateur collector interested in dabbling in the low brow. Prices range anywhere from $15 to $45 bucks for unframed archival prints and a $100 up for framed.
SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS DESIGNERS WHO OCCASIONALLY SKIM JUXTAPOZ:
Blueflip Art: With prints from artist/illustrator/designer hybrids like Brazilian Eduardo Recife and the deftly-skilled and also coincidentally Brazilian (Paulista) Will Murai, there will no doubt be something there that will satisfy the appetite of any in the know designer. Prices range from $15 to $45 for archival giclée prints. It gets better with Blueflip however because they also donate 10 percent of every sale to the charity of the artist’s choosing.
HIGH ROLLING NEW YORKERS & CREATIVE DIRECTORS:
20×200: Soho gallery curator extraordinaire decided to take her taste for the finer side of art online by offering up carefully selected limited edition prints by artists any good NYC art socialite would be proud to adorn their brownstone with. Prices reflect taste and range far and wide from small prints starting at $20 ranging all the way up and out of most lower brow pocket books to $2,000. The bigger price tag does mean a much larger print. So, if you have the coin there are far worse things to do with it than support a hungry artist.
Paul, better known in the design industry and art world as ‘Insect’ served for several years as the creative force behind the London design collective, ‘Insect’. Paul was born in southeastern England. He studied graphic design for 4 years at Hastings and Salisbury art colleges. Since his design days he has gone on to work more individually and has recently launched his own website where you can finally get a look at some of what he has been up to lately. His images have graced the covers of creative magazines the world over and he recently created the cover for the last DJ Shadow album. He is one of the rare and strange birds spawned by the digital revolution. A strange computer working, screen printing, collage and painting kind of Franken-artist. You can see a little of each represented in much of his work. He also takes his work to the streets of London pasting up posters and writing the occasional tag. If you don’t spot his work there you can always find him exhibiting on the gallery circuit. I am sure many of you will recognize his work, it’s nice to finally see a collection of it in one place on the web.
I posted an entry about Byroglyphics on my last blog but much has happened since then and there is now a lot more work to see by this talented artist and illustrator. Byroglyphics is the work of 36 year old Brighton-based Russ Mills.
In his own words from his Myspace page, Russ describes Byroglyphics and it’s inception:
“Byroglyphics was born in the wee small hours of the morning one day in 2004, when I used to be a world champion alconaut, the name was shouted by my friend Hambot and it stuck in my head, we used to make up many words, most far more expressive than the one’s in circulation today. My illustrations are not too scientific, they begin life as sketches in ink, the tool of choice is the Bic ‘fine’ because it gives me a lot more mileage than more expensive, snootier fine liners that break if you give them too much stick. The sketch is transported into my ageing mac and then abused in photoshop (you may have heard of it) i use this because of the joy of multiple undo’s plus its the closest I can get to painting without painting. The next stage in byroglyphics’ life is to turn these illustrations into big canvases, it’s taken me many attempts to get to a stage where i’m confident enough to attack canvas and leave the relative safety of the computer, as with everything else it’s a constant learning curve, sometimes a downward one. The results of these curves will be in circulation soon.”
His commitment to his craft is evident in the work. It just gets better every time I visit his website. If you want to purchase prints of his work you can do so at Big Cartel. You can also stay up to date on his work at his blog. His work is a great study in what is capable when the best of both worlds collide with digital and analog produced art. It’s truly inspirational.
Eno Henze was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1978. He was educated in Germany as well. He has also exhibited all over Germany. His work is very unusual as he works in a variety of mediums. I apologize that I cannot tell you more because that was the little I could translate since his site is entirely in German. Art is universal however and you will not need to speak German to appreciate his original work.
Bert Simons is a Netherlands-based Designer/Programmer who has created some very unusual sculptures. Using a 3d modeling program he maps portraits of people, including himself as pictured above of over a wireframe model. He then breaks the image down into a series of geometric shapes and outputs the pieces. He cuts them apart and then after what I could only imagine would be a lengthy and trying bit of time manages to glue them together to create the striking papercraft sculptures above. Yes, that’s right they are made out of paper. Ah will the wonders of technology never cease. So bizarre but utterly fascinating, if not the least little bit disturbing.
Alright, I cannot honestly say I understand exactly what is going down at Zamak because I am a unilingual American and I can’t speak French. It appears to be mostly character design however and that is not something you see very many people specializing in. Whatever it is, you can view a Flash website here where you can see some of the fascinating characters created by Zamak. There is a blog as well, where you can keep up to date with more current entries of Zamak’s creative endeavors.
Oliver Hibert was born in 1983 near Seattle, Wa. He is a totally self taught artist and has been painting since he was all but 15. By the time he had reached the legally cigarette buying tender age of 18, he had already shown in numerous galleries. By age 20 he was only one year shy of downing a cold one and had shown his paintings in two different museums in Arizona. According to the last known report he now resides near Phoenix, Az. with his girlfriend and his living collection of 1,000 albino peacocks.
Oh crap, that peyote just made me throw up.
The art of Stephan Balleux really knocked the wind out of me. It’s completely original and totally amazing. He also likes to focus on a subject I have been obsessed with in the past, skulls. In the heart of every rock n’ roller there lies a skull.
Balleux’s work goes way beyond the subject matter and dives into the conceptual. Here is the artist in his own words from his website, “At present, my work investigates the closeness of the ‘antique’ form of representation – painting – and the ‘up-to-date’ forms of image production – 3D virtual images and computer-manipulated images. Despite of the different ways of working and of their opposition in terms of what is animated and inanimate, visual as well as conceptual connections exist: the figural painting process and virtual images share a same approach of creation which depends on a re-conception of reality “by way of the hand” (by opposition to the historical basis of photography which rely on the mechanical recording of reality, showing “what was”), they are both the coating of a texture on a surface (on pigmentary and material, the other completely virtual and mathematical).
Paradoxically, my work consists in confronting these two modes of image production in close spaces and open a field of perception located at the border of each medium. The relation to the spectator/visitor is established both in a contradictory and pertinent movement, by the contrast between the effects induced by the video – a definite and fixed (almost totalitarian) movement, and painting, an immobility which offers to those who watch their own time of perception.”
He is no doubt someone who will continue to evolve and amaze. So keep a close eye on his work and development because he will no doubt be surfacing again in any number of art publications and websites.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to their site, but the Sauerkids never seem to leave my creative peripheral. Sauerkids is a illustrative duo out of the Netherlands who, in the past years, have provided me with a great deal of creative inspiration. I have a lot of creative influence, in a lot of mediums but these guys are one of the few that sit on the top of that list. Yeah, they do the whole illustration thing, but they throw in this odd, underlying theme of cynical humor mixed with morbid surrealism. They’ve had a pretty good amount of press in some great publications and have exhibited their work in a handful of galleries across the globe. Their characters and compositions have no doubt, lent something to the creative industry as a whole and will reassuringly continue to do so for years to come.
The “Magazines and War 1936-1939” exhibition was held from January to April 2007 at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. The exhibition included serial publications from more than 20 public and private collections. It was the first of its kind in undertaking a study of the role of artists in Spanish Civil War magazines.
Since the show, a website has been assembled allowing visitors to browse, 30 selected individual magazine issues from the Museum’s library and the University of Illinois’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. You can start browsing those issues and bare witness to an era of design you most surely have not yet seen right here.
Aurel Schmidt is a Canadian-born 23 year old artist based out of New York. Her work recently caught my eye because of the extreme detail in her paintings combined with her bizarre method of creating surreal landscapes and figures out of tiny illustrations of flies, insects, hair, rope, twine, bones, cigarette butts and other detritus. She uses pencil, paint and ink to create her strange compositions. It’s fascinating work that is hard to take your eyes off of. She has an interview at Fecal Face where you can learn more about her background and methods. If you want to see her work in a little more detail you can do that at Tiny Vices.
A Blue Chicken is an online art storefront that sells high quality giclee prints from some interesting artists. There are some really interesting prints up for sale at fairly large sizes. Be warned however my fair Americans, you will be paying in Euros, so get ready to take a hit to the wallet. If you are an art lover, however I guess you could consider that a noble sacrifice.
