Marc Bauer was May 28, 1975 in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently age 42. He is best known for is blurred style using graphite. “His technique is marked by using graphite and lithographic chalk to draw the subjects and objects of interest and then using the eraser to smear the imagery to create the sense of depth.” (“Marc Bauer/Marc Bauer”) Bauer’s inspiration comes from memories and events. He aims to explore how the media and ideology power influences our personal memories. His earlier works depict images from his childhood which over spanned from his personal experience to broader social and political issues. His artwork is known to vary in size and sometimes encompass several sheets of paper pieced together.
Logan Hicks (born 1974) is from Baltimore, Maryland but now lives and works in New York. He works with photo-realistic material. He was a screen printer, then took his skills and pursued photography and stenciling. Hicks combines these with spray paint and other mediums to form images of the cycle of city life. Hicks captures the dirty gritty visual of the city in a symbiotic relationship with hope for life in this area. He think of his work as a relationship between a cold, hard city and a warm vibrant organism. His images depict life in settings such as tight housing structures, crammed subway spaces and streets.
Sarah Sze was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969. She now lives and works in New York, where she is a professor of art at Columbia University. Sze graduated from School of Visual Arts, MFA, New York in 1997 and Yale University, BA, New Haven, CT in 1991. Sarah is a contemporary artist who builds installations and sculptures from everyday materials, including found objects, plants, photographs, wiring, food detritus, office supplies, electric lights, fans, water systems, houseplants, birthday candles, Q-Tips, and Aspirin. Sze constructs her work by hand, building intricate and often gravity-defying towers that fill their exhibition space. Her works are absolutely beautiful and most of them look as if time has stopped as the objects explode. As if something is growing and decaying. It makes for an interesting, but a pretty piece.
Centrifuge
Her work often takes on architectures, transforming space through radical shifts of scale or colonizing overlooked and peripheral spaces. Sze sees the sculpture as evidence of behavior and she leaves her own raw process of experimentation apparent in her work. As a result, her pieces often seem to hover in a transitional state, as if caught between growing and dying. Captured in this suspension, the works become self-perpetuating systems, seemingly capable of aspiration, decay, and renewal. Within her practice, the sculpture becomes both a device for organizing and dismantling information and a mechanism to locate and dislocate oneself in time and space. It can leave you waiting for something to happen, as though it may actually happen or not.
I found her very interesting, mainly because of the beauty of the suspended sculptures and her “The Last Garden.” It seems as though she uses nature and landscapes a lot in her work. The themes most often used in her work include ecology, interconnectivity, and labor. Ecology is the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.Interconnectivity refers to the state or quality of being connected together, or to the potential to connect in an easy and effective way.
Things Fall Apart
Sze is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship and representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Her work is collected in the Guggenheim New York, Museum of Modern Art in New York, The New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Recent important solo exhibitions include Tanya Bonakdar in 2015, Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2014, and the Asia Society in 2011. In 2016, her mural “Blueprint for a Landscape” was completed for the 96th Street 2nd Avenue subway platform in New York.
Louise Despont is an artist who works and lives out of New York, where she was born in 1983; and Bali, Indonesia. She possesses a bohemian flair that bleeds into her artwork. Ms. Despont chooses to create very large drawings on seperate sheets pulled from antique accounting ledgers, draftsman paper, and other gridded papers. With the help of her assistant, Nicole Wong, Ms. Despont uses colored pencils, graphite, and a hefty collection of architect/artist stencils to make her ideas a reality.
Stepwell Figures
She creates her intricate artwork with elements pulled from her infinite amount of inspiration images—old photographs, Buddhist medical charts, various textiles, patterns, beehives, architectural schematics, soundwaves, etc.
Many different elements may be chosen and woven into these designs, which are themselves very expressive and geometric, but also fluid and earthy.
Fort
More often than not, Ms. Despont finds herself working on her living room floor than at an artist’s table. She fully invests herself into every drawing, and into her work projects as a whole. According to Ms. Despont herself, her work is 90% research and 10% action. Oftentimes, she spends months just collecting images and making portfolios of every photo she finds. Because her pieces are so large, they have to be fitted into even larger frames; and because so much goes into their creation overall, it takes some time to get each drawing into a gallery, and at times she can do only one show a year.
Water Temple
But she never lets that stop her from brainstorming or innovating.
Oftentimes, the antique accounting ledger paper she draws abstract shapes, florals, or designs on contain old checks and balances from their past owners. By letting these numbers and words show through without bothering to change them or white them out, Ms. Despont makes the figures part of her work, which in itself looks antique.
Stepwell Garden
Ms. Despont has also stated that while her work appears very calm and naturalistic, she actually calculates every mark she makes. By using stencils, she creates designs that are so beautifully designed, one would never think they were made with a stencil at all. Ms. Despont’s base of operations is in the comfort of her home, and she often finds herself streched out on her bedroom floor with her huge, sectioned layouts.
Torch Ginger With Elephant Ear
And she has said that she really prefers to work this way. “I find that being able to work at home—that I wake up in the morning, I have breakfast, and I start working—it’s a very smooth transition to a quieter, more centered place.”
Also, because Ms. Despont creates all of her drawings using relatively inexpensive materials, she does not have to wait until she has large amounts of money or has recieved donations to create the pictures, which she just likes to “just let happen.”
Heliconia Mask
All of her drawings started with simple marks that turned into something more.
“Those marks contain the seed of the drawing,” she commented in Louise Despont Draws Deep. This is something that is true of virtually any drawing, or any work of art.
And in Louise Despont’s case, it is the foundation of her media.
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese native artist who deals with a lot of political art. China has a much different restriction and government view on art than America so the significance of Ai Weiwei’s art is very important. He does political pieces that express the oppression that the Chinese government puts on its people as well as him breaking the Chinese traditional ways. He is considered a human’s rights activist and is thought of as a trouble maker by the Chinese government. He was arrested in 2011 and held in jail for three months. after his release he was prohibited to travels out of the country. He is under constant government surveillance.
This is an Ai Weiwei peice of him flipping off important Chinese monuments and government buildings.
this is a piece dealing with the corruption of the chinese communism.
Sunflower seeds comes from Weiwei’s fond memory of being a kid and everyone, even the poorest of Chinese, sharing sunflower seeds with each other. The work includes over 100 million hand painted sunflower seeds made of porcelain. The piece was weighed over 150 tons.
Shahzia Sikander was born in Pakistan in 1969. She studied and trained in the process of Indian and Persian miniature paintings. This style of painting takes 20-30 layers of water-based pigments for them to be created. The paper is stained with tea in layers taking many layers alone to stain the paper even before any of the drawing and painting begins. Shahzia is not only known for her miniatures and videos but also for her wall installations with layers of her work. These installations and layering of her works are what lead to her videos. Thus, later in 2001, she began playing around with animation and combing her miniatures layered together on a larger scale. She began creating these amazing videos of her works in motion combined with music. Her work is about transformation, taking something apart, and merging her miniature painting style and minimalist abstraction. Some of her videos range from the abstract to the illustrated. In her videos, she tries to use as many drawing as she can to make these works. Meaning she uses hundreds of her drawings layered to form these works. I found myself drawn to this artist due to her combing of cultural and political boundaries. She does this with such amazing beauty and sound. Of all the types of works, Shahzia is known for I believe my favorite is her videos. They elicit emotion and thought from them in ways that seem to draw you in. Shahzia stated that one of her most challenging things has been taking her traditional art form and making it more accessible and contemporary. She has achieved this by technology, using her idea of a mirage and the understanding that a larger projection is more than just size she began to change how she approached drawing these images for her videos. Once she started playing with such a dramatic change in size she stated, “It was breaking out of the preciousness around my process and testing the viability of a form,” she says of enlarging an image from ten inches to ten feet, and “seeing whether it gains more momentum or maybe becomes more confrontational.”
The still above is from one of her breath-taking videos called Parallax it is over 15 minutes long. This particular still is about the trade relations of China and the East Indian company over opium. Later the soldier explodes showing the end of this venture. In the Singing Suns, the image shown below, with all its moving stills relates the forethought and planning it takes to complete one of these ideas. I found myself being drawn back into watching the clips I could find again and again, then trying to find more so I could see the whole thing. This is something that has excited me in what I wish to do with my art.
“Sikander’s stories swing between individual and universal experience, between technique and genre, and include poetry, opera, and even contemporary hip-hop. As she herself maintains: “The blurred borders between fiction and non-fiction, storytelling and historiography are all essential in the human search for truth”
Marela Zacarías was born in 1978 in Mexico City. She now lives and works between New York and Mexico City. Marla is a muralist painter. She has been painting for more than ten years. Her mounted painted sculptures make shapes through twists and turns. They are built from window screens, joint compound, and polymer. They are then painted in geometric patterns.
Marela creates works that are inspired by the sites for which they are made for. Examples include Works Progress Administration murals in the Brooklyn Museum, Mayan textile colors for an installation in Mexico, and a map of Brooklyn for a new hotel in the borough. Zacarías says, “I feel like abstraction really allows for the story to be filtered and to come out in a different way in which people can see it or not see it at all. It at least creates a question: What is this about?”
Her work has really sparked my interest through her interesting shapes and colors being used. I like how she uses surrounding areas to inspire her paintings on the geometric shapes.
This one was definitely my favorite of her works. There are only two colors being used, but I love the pattern she created and I love the shape that is being forced through this particular sculpture.
This is one that I could see as either the map or the mayan textiles. This one seemed particularly geometric to me. I also really like the pop of green on the left and upper areas.
This one felt very African inspired to me and really stood out. The colors are very vibrant and could have been involved in her works for the mayan textiles.
Overall I really enjoyed this artist and thought that her works were very abstract but in an easy way and weren’t forced.
Works Cited:
Artsy. “Marela Zacarías’ Sculptural Paintings Find Inspiration in Ancient Textiles.” Artsy, 6 June 2016, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-marela-zacarias-sculptural-paintings-find-inspiration-in-ancient-textiles.
Katharina Grosse was born in Germany in the year 1961. She has been an artist for many years, studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a fine arts academy in Germany. (Art21) She now teaches at this institute. Katharina paints using a spray gun with acrylic paint. It allows her to cover large areas with paint in unique designs, unlike any other artist. She references the spray gun as an extension of herself. She believes it gives her a larger reach, enlarges her body, and helps her paintings be completed faster. She uses many distinctive techniques, often using warehouses to hold her works of art. She can cover the walls and floor of buildings, in and outdoors, with paint. Using a spray gun this way allows her to transition between different surfaces fast and seamlessly. She chooses to paint with an entirely different style. Katharina proposes different ways to look at space of a room with her artwork. It is her goal, and a challenge to make painting visible and a regular part of our life. (Artist Interview with South London Gallery) When she paints, she says everything around her slows down. By using one tool, and only several colors of paint, she has minimal options. This allows her to slow the mental strain of making art, and flow within her gift of creativity. She said, “the architecture space is materialized, and painting is psychological” in an interview. She uses architectural surfaces like windows as components of her art. She uses windows to create techniques so that her paint stops at the edges of windows or other architecture causing her audience to wonder how the painting got there. (Artist Interview with Moca Cleveland) She uses a psychedelic and dynamic way of painting to create illusions. Each piece of art is abstract so that the audience is immersed in the art. Rooms are coated in layers of rainbow paint which gives the viewers a distinctive viewpoint of each section. The art is all about perspective, so the same work can be viewed from different places and have different sizes and interpretations. In her work, “One Floor Up More Highly,” she has spray painted sand and rocks within a building. She is experimenting with texture and materials to create unique images and sculptures. In another exhibit, she has a work titled, “Two Young Women Come and Pull Out a Table.” This piece contains spray painted spheres hanging all over the room. In “Things They Had Taken Along To Eat Together,” there are a spray-painted couch and large rock sculptures in different colors. The title sparks the idea that the couch could represent a love interest that she no longer has. It causes the question ‘why’ to be asked. Why would someone spray paint a couch? She leaves these questions to those enjoying her exhibit. I think a part of her doesn’t know why, but it works. Other pieces have the same oddity to them, and many are untitled. Others have very odd names, shapes, and locations.“Shadow” looks like large disks that have been cut and spray painted. Like all artists, she hopes to convey emotion, yet she does so in a unique way that is all her own. (Application for Curatorship; Katharina Grosse) Explosions of color litter surfaces. By spraying her acrylic paint in sometimes abandoned locations, it resembles vandalism. She is using the urban setting and idea of graffiti in a modern way.
Wunderblock 2013Things They Had Taken Along To Eat Together 2012CincyUntitled 2004Final Cuts 2003Skrow No Repap 2008
Fred Wilson is an American artist who was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, in 1954, he is from African, Native American, and European descent. He received a BFA from Purchase College, State University of New York. The reason why I chose Fred Wilson as my artist is because I have never seen an art style quite like his. I believe that the thing that really caught my attention within his artwork is the different type of images that he puts together all having some type of meaning and background story behind them. His artwork is very interesting to me but there are a couple of images that really caught my eye.
This is the first image that caught my eye. This image is very interesting to me because in all honestly I do not truly know what it is about. The first thing that I noticed about this image is the black to white contrast, there is a lot of white in the background but the different black spots makes it balanced. To me the black spots could be two different things, the first thing that I thought of when I looked at them was little paint drops that rolled down the wall onto the floor, but after i looked closer I noticed that some of them had eyes on them. So the only other thing that crossed my mind was that they were tadpoles. The main reason why I like this picture is because it keeps your mind wondering because we honestly do not know what it is.
This is the second image that was very interesting to me, the reason why it is so interesting to me is because it is an image inside of a image. When you originally look at the image you can tell that it is obviously some type of house or building. Then when you look a little bit closer you can tell that the first image that i talked about was also within this image in the background. The reason why it is very intriguing is because it looks as if you are walking into another room but it is actually the first image, which makes this look three dimensional.
I believe that this might be my favorite work of art by Fred Wilson. This is so interesting to me because it is completely filled different types of white objects. There are statue heads, full statues, and there are also cups and plates. The thing that makes the picture really stand out is the arrangement of the different objects and the two black objects. The two black objects are such a different color than the others that your eye immediately goes to those two objects, then wonder off into the rest of the objects.
This picture is very unique to me because it leaves the viewer hanging with nothing but their imagination to figure out what this picture is about. This is because of the bottom it is a man with two women who seem to be chopping grain, but on the top there is a snake and there is also some type of bird. I believe this could be a symbol of something during Egyptian times.
These last three images are very different but in my opinion they could all possibly have the same meaning. In the first image there is a young white man who has just graduated from either high school or college and he seems to be standing on a black man’s face. In the second image there is a young white woman who has a young black girl in her hand, it looks as if the young black girl could be a puppet. In the last image there is a young white woman who is dressed up and it looks like she is picking flowers, but there is a black man’s head on the ground with no body attached to it. All of these images are different but I believe that the possible meaning that they all share could be traced back to slavery, because in all of these images these it is depicting white people prospering and black being under them.
Fred Wilson is a phenomenal artist in my opinion, and the reason why I admire his work so much is because he is able to blend different objects together, including race and ethnicity within his artwork to have a greater story and meaning behind his work.
Kimsooja is a conceptual artist,she was born 1957 from South Korea that uses installation’s of blurr’s in her videos thats between a aesthetics and transendent experience. She got a BFA and MA degree from Hong-lk University, Seoul. She studied painting at Hongik University, she then work with fabric from her sewing series. That made a series of on site specific installations with Korean bedcover cloth bundles, that later become Bottari that gives the idea of travel andconcept of wrapping and unwrapping. Her first video performance was on top of the valleys of Gwangju of South Korea put scattered bedcovers in the valley and wrapping them in bundles. A year after that she returned to the valley and scattered traditional Korean fabrics. She put 2.5 tons of second hand clothing in the valley to dedicate it to the victims of the suppression of a democratic protest in Gwangju. She did video piece shots of places of violance, disrepair or unresolved conflicts.
