You may have heard that Absolut has launched a limited-edition of city series which Gorillaz’ Jamie Hewlett has produced an amazing design for. It celebrates the vibrant cultural city, capturing London’s creativity and rich style heritage in a unique bottle design which goes on sale in Selfridges and Harvey Nichols on 1st March 2012.
Set against a London backdrop, the bottle introduces key characters from the past who have influenced and shaped London’s present fashion scene. The seven characters encapsulate the city’s diverse heritage, spanning the ages from Dickensian and 18th Century Dandy, through to Pinstripe gent, 60’s chick, SKA, Punk and 80’s Casual.
To celebrate the launch, ABSOLUT will be offering consumers the chance to win one of 50 bottles via Instagram from the 9th of Feb. There will also be the chance to buy one of only 50 unique ABSOLUT London collectors gift packs, which go on sale on 22nd March. More information can be found on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/ABSOLUTUK
As soon as you step in Stolen Space, you cannot help but look to the right as you have spotted something big from the corner of your eye. It is there. The vultur is looking at you.
No I have not gone mad but am only looking at Haroshi‘s masterpiece depicting what looks like a vultur with one noticeable detail – the wings are made of old skateboards decks. The gallery is hosting until the 3/11, Haroshi’s first solo show in this space and promised us something radically different, something fresh and unseen before. So far, they have not lied, I had not seen a vultur made of old skateboard decks before.
Originally from Tokyo, Haroshi has been collected and used discarded remains of broken down skateboard decks to produce wooden sculpture. The concept of reshaping what once was used as skateboard into pieces of art certainly sound like something that should have been done before.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was worth waiting all that time to see it done as Haroshi’s sculpture are beautiful, polished and colourful. It is hard to believe that the artist did not have any formal training in sculpture but is a 100% self taught artist. This is for the visual aspect.
Now, his works also transpire emotions, and especially “Agony into beauty” which depicts the face of a man who seems to be in pain.
Haroshi’s first solo exhibition at StolenSpace is indeed looking at the effects of emotional pain and how it can be a great motivating force in the creation of art. In short, the artist looked back at painful experiences and recycled them into his sculptures using recycling material, ie old skateboards decks.
A truly refreshing body of works that combines two worlds you would think will never meet – sculpture and skateboard
Haroshi first solo exhibition “Pain” runs until the 3/11/2013
The festive season is upon which has and always will inspire artistic creativity.
While British street artist Moose just created a pretty incredible Christmas scene with only a toothbrush and moss (!) on South Bank wall Moose – see more of Moose aka Paul Curtis Christmas scene, there are many holiday themed street and graffiti artist creations.
Scouring outdoors and the web, ten recent and some less so graffiti or street art Christmas-related awesomeness caught our little eyes, see below.
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.
Another day, another pair at it, another sexy piece from Remi Rough who was invited to collaborate with Nawer on a new mural which announces the upcoming Traffic Design Festival
For those familiar with Remi Rough’s stuff, this piece is immediately recognisable and true to the artist’s style in terms of the color palette and elements used – a series of intricate lines cleverly coloured and composed to give a very interesting depth to the piece. The black and white background gives emphasis to the bright colours in use here.
Worth noting the very delicate and skilful details within the larger lines and going through in some cases (see picture below) which gives even more depth to the whole thing. And have you noticed that the front wall have also been painted to make sure the piece look good from every angle.
Artists REMED and OKUDA have flooded the streets of Southbank in London with colours and passion for the second consecutive year.
After the success of the previous editions of Streets of Colour, this creative union between the two artists and Campo Viejo continues bearing fruits and they have surprised us again with an unusual art action: this time Remed and Okuda have worked inside of a cube of methacrylate of 40 cubic metres (2.4409e+6in³) next to the Thames river in Southbank, offering to the thousands of pedestrians who have been there during the four days that have lasted the action, the unique experience of watching the artists painting in front of the public and not turning their backs as it is the usual when painting a wall.
The transparency of the methacrylate has allowed us to be privileged witness of the creative process of these two vibrant artists of international renown, that as well as a year ago in London, and in other experiences in Logronio, Madrid and Brussels have offered us a stimulating show with lights, colours and passion as protagonists.
“Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p.33
White 12 (L’Atalante), (c)2011 Cathy Lomax
My first question was what exactly is a ‘reified person’? “In Marxism reification is the thingification of social relations or of those involved in them, to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects,” I found that definition in Wikipedia, it made an impression on me once before and I wondered if it would shed light on what Debord might mean as a ‘reified person’.
Some possibilities perhaps:
1. a person who worships someone in the public eye turning them into an idol and collects all manner of idol memorabilia
2. a person who takes on the attributes of a worshipped idol in the projection of a personal identity
3. a person who expresses personal identity through the outward display of status brands
4. a teenager
5. each and every one of us in the Western World (I cannot speculate here on other cultures)
As I wrote the first three, I realised the fourth and fifth. Some of these possibilities present themselves through the work of Cathy Lomax and other artists in This ‘Me’ of Mine such as Annabel Dover and Kate Murdoch, though, in their work, not as idol worship but the simple expression of social relationships through objects or the exchange of objects. This idea of ‘reified people’ is implicit throughout my interview with Cathy Lomax, The Perfect Wrapper.
Muslin, (c)2008 cathy Lomax
Jane Boyer: Your work often deals with pop idols (Sixteen Most Beautiful Men, Dead Filmstars) and iconic film imagery (Film Diary, The Count of Monte Cristo). Curiously though, it’s not pop culture which is your subject, but the fascination, escapism, hero-worship and fan-love we’ve all experienced. What fascinates you about our psychological propensity to fascination and ‘longing for something unobtainable’?
Cathy Lomax: I think that pop culture in general is just a wrapper for supplying the things that the market demands – i.e. what we want. These things do not change much; they are excitement, desire, escapism etc. So with this in mind I let myself lead the direction of my work by following what it is that I am drawn to. I do not like to think that I am in any kind of elevated position in my commentary on my subjects; I am in and amongst the subject matter. Looking deeper into what it is I am interested and fascinated by, it is apparent it is something that I do not actually want but rather that it is something I can think about and live out in my head – probably because this is the safest way to do it. This is what led me to the Film Diary as film for most people is the most intense way to experience other lives and worlds.
Before you dive into ‘dead’ artists, this bunch of artists below is well and truly alive and is using their art to raise awareness for environmental issues such as deforestation, plastic pollution or global warming.
Who would you say are the most influential artists of all time? Vincent Van Gogh? Cézanne? Monet? It’s surprising to think that, despite these artists’ worldwide fame and appreciation, they weren’t really recognised as masters until after they had died.
Here are eight famous artists who gained appreciation after death:
Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh is renowned the world over. There can’t be many people who haven’t, at some point, seen a representation of his sunflowers paintings or his own self portrait. Van Gogh was a prolific painter – he produced more than 900 paintings during his lifetime – but they were often criticised for being too dark and lacking in energy. It was Van Gogh’s sister-in-law who, after his suicide in 1890, preserved his works to be appreciated at a later date.
‘Self portrait’, Van Gogh | Art-Pie
Paul Cézanne
Cézanne is widely touted as the essential bridge between the Impressionist art of the 19 th century and the Cubism of the 20 th century. Many young artists revered Cézanne during his lifetime – Picasso and Matisse referred to him as “the father of us all” – but his work was consistently rejected by the official Salon in Paris and made fun of by art critics. Just a year after his death in 1906, Cézanne’s artworks were given the exposure they deserved in a retrospective at the Salon d’Automne.
‘Pyramid of skulls’ from Paul Cezanne
Claude Monet
Monet’s waterlily paintings are surely amongst the most famous in the world. Yet during his lifetime, his unique form of painting – choosing nature and landscapes as subjects and using short brushstrokes to create a sense of movement – were rejected by the art world of the time.
“Soleil levant” By Claude Monet | Art-Pie
Paul Gauguin
Another artist who pushed at the preconceived limits of his craft and went largely unappreciated during his lifetime was Paul Gauguin. His deeply colourful Post-Impressionist paintings influenced many famous 20 th century artists, including Picasso and Matisse, and now sell for millions of dollars.
Henri Toulouse Lautrec
Maybe it was Toulouse Lautrec’s unusual painting style or his less than respectable subject matter that saw his work underappreciated in his lifetime. He painted the gaudy world of brothels, prostitutes and can-can dancers in 19 th century Paris. It was only after his death in 1901, that Toulouse Lautrec’s mother began to promote his art and it began to receive acclaim.
‘Selfportrait’,Henri Toulouse Lautrec
Domenikos Theotokopoulos “El Greco”
El Greco was born in 1541 and spent much of his life in Spain. The painter, sculptor and architect only became properly appreciated four centuries later. During his own lifetime he was described as a “mad painter”, one who didn’t work within any of the recognised artistic schools and was criticised for his antinaturalistic style.
Georges-Pierre Seurat
Seurat, a French Post-Impressionist, is perhaps most famous for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . The painter is also responsible for bringing pointillism to the world. The term pointillism was actually invented by art critics of the time who used it to mock Seurat’s work.
Johannes Vermeer
Dutch painter, Vermeer, painted domestic scenes and portraits. Paintings like Girl With a Pearl Earring demonstrate a masterful use of light. However, Vermeer painted few works during his lifetime and left his family in debt when he died. It’s only with the passage of time that Vermeer has been recognised as one of the most influential Dutch painters of all time.
It’s incredible to think that these artists were ridiculed for their artworks and didn’t sell much at all during their lifetimes. Experimenting with new techniques and unorthodox subjects, they were ahead of their times. They inspired generations of artists to come and rightly deserve the posthumous appreciation they have all now gained.
Foley Gallery is very pleased to present Thomas Allen’s solo exhibition Paint by Numbers.
Inspired by a View-Master and “pop-up” books as a child, Allen became interested in recreating these three-dimensional experiences by using old books and pulp fiction paperbacks as still life subjects.
In producing his new series of photographs, Paint by Numbers, Allen has gone to the hardware store and has selected standard paint swatches to use as his primary generative medium. As announced at Allen’s 2009 solo show Epilogue at Foley, Allen has parted ways with his signature use of cutting from book illustrations.
Utilizing wit to illustrate titles such as Birthday Cake, Carnival Candy, and Sweet Tea, Allen playfully employs the idea of color with historical and cultural associations. Titles offered in the paint swatches are implicative: his deftly cut figures reference popular subjects, each of which are enlisted by the name of the paint sample they are carved into.
Allen selects figures such as Donald Trump or Gene Wilder, subjects able to perform the lexicon of narrative titles like Blowfish and Golden Ticket. In the process of assemblage, Allen is able to create narratives that reveal the constructed nature of images and incorporative aspects of collage, photography, and montage.
What – “Paint numbers” by Thomas Allen Where – Foley gallery 59 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002 When – Until 24/01/15
You may have heard that Absolut has launched a limited-edition of city series which Gorillaz’ Jamie Hewlett has produced an amazing design for. It celebrates the vibrant cultural city, capturing London’s creativity and rich style heritage in a unique bottle design which goes on sale in Selfridges and Harvey Nichols on 1st March 2012.
