We are big fan of artists using what they can find around them to help them making art or in Nick Gentry’s case, using floppy disks to be his support for his art as well as being integral part of his end product – mainly portraits.
Nick Gentry uses wood panels layered with floppy disks which he might paint or not, but one sure thing is that they are fully integrated in his pieces. Using the round bit of the floppy disk as the eyes is a recurrent occurrence in his art. Nick Gentry portraits all these imaginative or not, I do not know, characters which behind that scruffy brush stroke comes to live.
Erik Johansson is one of those guys who have raw talent. He excels on digital photography and produces outstanding results. And you know what? He has not have any formal training in photography or studio art — or even classroom instruction in Adobe Photoshop
Erik Johansson is keen on surreal landscapes and often depicts characters trapped in their surroundings in some temporal break down.
We have included below the Cut & Fold (2012) piece as well as a very interesting video that will show you how Erik Johansson got to the end result.
Here is what the digital artist says about the work: “Inspired by the cut-along border of a magazine coupon, I wondered what a landscape would look like if it were peeled back along a road’s dotted line like a coupon.”
In 2007 the global population living in urban environments passed the halfway mark, and that trend is accelerating. As cities become bigger and denser, and within the rigid structures of a mass-market society, truly meaningful personal interactions become increasingly elusive. Read the full preview here.
Artists featured: Swoon, Os Gemeos, Banksy, Shepard Fairey
Where –
Black Rat Projects When –
20th May – 23rd June 2011 (Preview – 19th May – 6-9pm)
Photos of the opening night below
Shephard Fairey
Swoon
OsGemeos
PS: “Where are the Banksy shots” you may think. Well, I thought the pieces from the three artists above were a lot more worth being photograph than his so I did not snap any but I am sure you have seem them all already anyway.
Peripheral Vision, (c)2010 David Minton, oil on canvas
But it may be that without meaning there is only space, so in a sense I make my paintings by accident, but knowingly so. The central space created by painting ‘at the periphery’ has a tension that is constantly pregnant with possibility. In order to remain so, the tensions of space are never resolved, but continue and it is this continued lack of resolution that forms the overall content of the picture.[1] Perhaps what’s missing is what’s outside that loop or the fear of its ceasing to be a loop and become something that runs forward in time. All those fears and hopes, everything the intimacy within the home brings, begins to open up to a greater loss and eventually time will bring the loss of things because of the infinite nature of time; everything outside of time is infinite.[2]
At art college we were encouraged to self-analyse our output and I found myself not fully understanding how I travelled from initial concept to final outcome. So, now I find it useful to think of myself as a black box where every new line of enquiry has the potential to reveal more of my inner (often hidden) self and my motivations for doing what I do.[3] Initially it was very important to move away from outward observation, it came out of necessity for me, and I had to close myself off from the real world for a while although outward observation is creeping back into the work acting as little anchors.[4] All that is visible is a barely responsive exterior… This indifference, characteristic to the figures in my paintings, suggests the social is almost taken away. You wonder what is revealed in this state of consciousness, just mindless projections on to others perhaps.[5]
Woman with Cardigan, (c)2010 Melanie Titmuss, oil on canvas
This play on words, mixing up sentences from each artist interviewed so far for This ‘Me’ of Mine, is not intended as a clever ploy at meaning-making, but rather a look at the interconnectedness of the issues of the self and identity. Each of these artists is concerned in their own way with issues of self in their work. It is fascinating for me as curator to see how their concerns link together in the universal struggle to self-identify; something which I hope will become evident through these interviews.
Join us in the on-going discussions. Go to INTERVIEWS at the This ‘Me’ of Mine blogsite to read more from David Minton, Anthony Boswell, David Riley, Aly Helyer and Melanie Titmuss, the artists interviewed and quoted above (see credits below for links to the individual interviews).
Interviews coming up: Sarah Hervey, Shireen Qureshi and Sandra Crisp. Waiting in the wings: Kate Murdoch, Annabel Dover, Edd Pearman, Cathy Lomax, Hayley Harrison, and Darren Nixon. Art Historian and critic, Becky Huff Hunter, is kindly interviewing me and that will be coming up too.
The Hallelujah World Tour is RETNA’s first solo exhibition in the UK. This show will present new works by Los Angeles based artist RETNA and will be hosted at the Old Dairy, London.
RETNA mixed inspirations from Asian calligraphy, Incan and Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hebrew and Arabic script to traditional UK gang style graffiti writings seen since the 1970’s in Los Angeles .
Where – The Old Dairy | 7 Wakefield St | London |WC1N 1PB
When – 9/6 till 27/6/2011 | Tuesday to Saturday | 11am to 6pm
Bristol born artist, Guy Denning final part of his trilogy of exhibitions (It’s the final part of his trilogy of exhibitions interpreting Dante’s The Divine Comedy; PARADISO. Inferno and Purgatorio, which were shown in Bologna and New York) interpreting Dante’s The Divine Comedy: PARADISO has just happened at Signal gallery and has delighted us by his intensity and display of technical art skills.
Each piece in this show is boiling with emotions and dynamism and mirror the ecstatic route to a place of resolution and rest for Dante, the route to heaven that is for Dante.
A quite large part of the show present a series of female portraits appearing soft and fragile but transposed in some sort of tragedy thanks to the sketchy technique used by the artist, although achieved mostly with oil which is remarkable. The artist inspiration comes from Beatrice, Dante’s long dead love, who is the central figure in the poem and who symbolises feminine purity and vulnerability.
Denning’s characters are floating, dancing, tangling with each other and give you a sense of dizziness. The color palette is dark and deep like the multitude faces expressions disseminated all over the canvases. The perspective used for some of his pieces is also remarkable and is an invitation to dive into his vision.
Guy Denning will definitely arouse the viewer’s curiosity about Dante’s life and has given us an unique and modern representation of Dante’s 14th century world.
Tuesday the 1st of December saw the opening of the much anticipated SCOPE, the international fair for contemporary art in Miami, Florida right on sunny South Beach.
SCOPE celebrates its 15th anniversary edition with 120 international exhibitors from 22 countries and 57 cities. MYA makes its debut appearance at the fair with an exhibition of pure French talent from our 400 sq. foot stand, located at #B21.
The exhibition features new paintings from Da Mental Vaporz artists BOM.K, BRUSK, BLO, JAW, KAN and collaborative works that include SOWAT, LEK, DRAN and GRIS1.
DMV was first formed in 1999 in the Parisian suburbs and over a 15 year period, the collective grew to its present day form: a surprising combination of styles, individualities and creativities which still manages to maintain a creative unity. Celebrated for their huge murals representing childlike characters, monsters and dislocated dolls, the collective combine the perfect marriage of cynicism and innocence.
WHAT – MYA Gallery // Stand #B21 at SCOPE art fair
WHERE – MIAMI
WHEN – Until the 6/12/2015
If you are keen on graffiti, you must have seen #codefc stuff on some walls, one of his latest and probably most seen is the Olympic runner with the message “Fuck 2012 – I am ready now ”
The man behind #codefc has been active as a graffiti artist for a long time, for about 22 yrs actually but he has been using #codefc for the last 12 years. #codefc references to a hexadecimal color code use in web technologies which coincidentally can be broken down into the word “code” and “fc”, the initials of our artist in question.
#codefc started to do graffiti in Rome where he got arrested doing a train carriage. Keen on using stencils, most of his stuff are location related, some of his projects are coDe-DAY in Normandy , stuDIED in Cambodia or viet-code in South Vietnam where fictive characters are invented and stencil on a surface.
Some of you will have notice the use of what looks like a filming camera. Talking to #codefc, we found out that he is also a keen film maker and that the camera depicted in his works is S8 cinecam which is also used as a logo.
#codefc paint as much as in London than abroad and some of of his works can be seen below.
We only recently heard from Plastic Jesus, a Los Angeles based artist, and while his motivation are clearly political and on that basis can be compared to other street artists such as Banksy, although Plastic Jesus seems to vary a little more his mediums and art forms by often making bold installations which he will spread around the city of LA.
We have included below some of his works.
Reading a bit more about the artist, I quickly realised that we are looking at a “modern” street artist –
1. Mass audience attention thanks to The Huffington Post in particular which listed two works by Plastic Jesus in the end of year round up of “The Best of Los Angeles Street art 2012”, one of them was “No more heroes” featuring disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong connected to an IV drip
2.Concerns about his work ethic and try to harm as little the environment. The artist will even send someone to remove his work should you not like it
3. Does art galleries show, sell prints of his street artworks and he is represented in the UK by Walton Fine Arts located in Knightsbridge
The last point will make cringe the purists street art heads out there.
I have no particular issue with the points above and like the messages Plastic Jesus tries to get accross, what do you reckon?
