Tommy Hartung was born in 1979 in Akron, Ohio, and lives and works in New York. Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, Hartung spent countless days alone in the woods, building forts and living in a world of his imagination, which he considers the beginning of his artistic practice. His artist style is science fiction and he hand crafts his own props using things that are “boring” or “dead.”
Doing a variety of things such as photography, sculpture and video, Hartung’s work addresses topics such as the Bible and the history of colonialism with a surrealist DIY aesthetic, through stream storytelling. The imagery he creates mirrors a “globalized” world steeped in obsession, violence and sympathetic magic. His use of multiple medias addresses the themes of modernism.
Daniel Gordon is an american artist best known for producing large color photographs that fall somewhere between a collage and set-up photography. Gordon was born 1980 in Boston, Massachusetts and his art took off while as an undergraduate, with his “Flying Pictures”. These pictures were a series of low-fi simulations of human flight. An assistant photographed Gordon as he catapulted himself into the air, capturing the magical instant before gravity had its way. The resulting images blur the lines between reality and fiction, simultaneously documenting his activity and portraying an impossible event.
Skull and Seashells 59.25″ x 74″, C-Print 2014
Artichoke 7″ x 9″, C-Print 2013
Still Life with Fruit and Ficus, 2016, C-Print, 59.25 x 74
July 10, 2009 16″ x 20″, C-Print 2009
His work Involves creating three-dimensional sculptures made from cut paper and printed images taken from magazines and the internet that he then photographs. Unlike the perfection of images manipulated with Adobe Photoshop, these paper creations are deliberately imperfect and unpolished. Daniel Gordon uses photography to create images that follow along with the lines of obsession with the human body and the discomforts of having one.
Artichokes and Leeks 39.75″ x 49.75″, C-Print 2014
He is the creator of Flying Pictures, Still Lifes, Portraits, and Parts and Flowers and Shadows. He has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions and is represented by James Fuentes in New York City, his work has also been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Review, New York Magazine and more. He is the co-director of The Downstairs Project in Brooklyn where he lives with his wife and daughter and also works
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.
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.
Diana-Al-Hadid experiments with material in such a way, that she floats between the realms of sculpture and painting.
Her processes fluctuate, yet are continuously messy, moving, dripping.
She’s fascinated with suspension, size, liquidation and decay, and has said that the reason for making such large pieces are so she is able to “navigate through them.” Navigation is such a wonderful way to put it, because her intricate lines and massive scale give you this strange sense of bewilderment.
Born originally in Syria, and not always familiar with biblical stories, Diana takes a part of “Western” culture and makes it her own. She allows mainly Northern Renaissance paintings to be her inspiration. There are specific Christian images that can be recognized in a few of her paintings and sculptures, but she tends to stray away from the idea that her pieces reflect certain interpretations. Though they may share the same ethereal characteristics of Mannerist works, for example, her work is very ambiguous.
Architecture appears to be a big part of her life, and though at times her form seems less than practical, Her larger, more three dimensional pieces are heavily supported with hidden steel bars and complex framing. She is amused with giving her sculptures the appearance of instability, “Unfortunately, sculpture has to obey gravity, I have this painting envy of Northern Renaissance and Mannerist paintings. They are given more liberties with illusion and space, while I’m dealing with actual gravity. “To get a sculpture to get off the floor, that’s the first way to rebel, that’s the main event. “I work pretty hard trying to have my sculptures not to fall. I don’t want to burden the viewer with mechanical details, but instead make something that seems improbable. I have enough reality in my life, and not that I live in such a fantasy world, I just want to weigh in on the other side “.
“I’m married to an architect, that’s why I realize I’d be a terrible one, but in terms of drawing out space or building structures, or thinking of counterweights and triangles, I’m still a builder at heart”.
“Al-Hadid creates her works by “painting” in polymer gypsum, fiberglass and plaster, forming a loose image in trails and drips over a wall-like support. She then pries the image off the backing, resulting in a stiff, lace-like scrim.”
These “fossils” are then aligned and suspended, or given frames. Her process is incredibly physical. Layers are continuously added and taken away. She is deliberately always cutting, pasting, warping, and transforming her work. There is a constant state of change, this perpetual movement in her world of celestial beauty. Religion is somewhat an allegory for this layering process. As people form religions in various cultures, she allows herself full range of the exploration of these spiritual images.
“Exquisite Mass.” Cultured Magazine – June/July 2015. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.
“Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended Reality.” ART21 New York Close Up. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. “Ground and Figures.” Exhibitions. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.
“Such Beautiful Decay.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.
Edward Gorey was an American author and illustrator known for his nonsensical and macabre drawings. He was born in Chicago in 1925. His grandmother was a successful greeting card artist, and Gorey claims to have gotten his artistic abilities from her. He graduated from Harvard in 1950. He studied art for a short time at the Art Institute of Chicago.
After graduating, Gorey moved to New York City, where he got a job illustrating books such as Dracula and War of the Worlds.
His first personal piece that he wrote and illustrated himself was called “The Unstrung Harp.”
A friend of Gorey’s who owned a bookstore saw the potential of his works. He started selling his books and displaying his art in his gallery, and takes credit for helping Gorey to gain popularity.
Edward Gorey was an eccentric man. He enjoyed cats, sweaters, and ballet. He liked to watch TV commercials and considered them an art form. He was never interested in romance, and when questioned whether he was gay, he replied that if anything, he was asexual. Many of his works were considered children’s stories, though he did not intend them to be. He disliked children. He had many friends however and was quite social.
Gorey considered his pieces to be surrealist and nonsensical. He was known for his crosshatching ink illustrations, with characters and settings similar to Victorian, Edwardian, and jazz age styles. Many of his pieces were very macabre and dark, often dealing with death.
He published over 100 illustrated books. Some of the most popular were “The Gashlycrumb Tinines” which pokes fun at parental paranoia.
And “The Doubtful Guest.”
Gorey was a man of many talents. He loved the stage and designed stage props and costumes for his own plays and those of others. He won a Tony for best costume design for his production of Dracula. He created macrame puppets and would perform evening-length puppet shows. He experimented with books, making popups, miniature books, and stories that were entirely wordless.
Gorey also created the timeless opening for the PBS series Mystery!
Edward Gorey died in 2000. His house in Cape Cod is now a museum. There is a documentary being made about him that has been in process for over a decade. Here is a short clip of an interview with Gorey that was done for the documentary.
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt. She gained her MFA in painting at the Villa Arson EPIAR in Nice, France in 1989. Ghada now lives and works in New York where she continues to challenge the mind of society as well as the individuals that compose it with her thought provoking paintings, drawings, sculptures, and gardens. Ghada Amer’s art work is very intentionally feminine, seeking to empower woman in any way she can.
Intentionally feminine but not stereotypical, Ghada’s work is more honest than that. The artist attempts to portray women as they are, rather than how society expects them to be.
In her paintings Ghada uses mixed media such as acrylic paint, or gel, almost always accompanied by some type of embroidery. Again this is intentional on the artist’s part to convey a message about femininity to her audience.
“The history of art was written by men, in practice and in theory. Painting has a symbolic and dominant place inside this history, and in the twentieth century it became the major expression of masculinity, especially through abstraction. For me, the choice to be mainly a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery.” -Ghada Amer.
Often used to explore her own sexuality, Ghada creates many paintings and other art work demonstrating strong erotic themes. Some are more obvious than others, some are left for a more keen observer to find in the detail of the work.
In the above painting you see that Ghada has included well known Disney princesses, a theme found in many of her works. She creates a contrast between child and adulthood and at the same time shines light on the figures that young girls are modeling themselves after and what message the princesses convey to developing girls and boys.
As you can see the princesses resemble those in a coloring book, scribbled through by a young child. In the background you see these finely crafted embroidered figures of a nude woman. The artist did not specify what she meant by this but one interpretation that comes to mind is again an exploration of femininity and sexuality.
Other times Ghada creates this contrast without the use of princesses, merely by adding children to the background of an extremely erotic image of a nude woman.
These drawings and prints are used by Ghada, again to explore her own sexuality, but also to really emphasize that woman have it in themselves to explore their own bodies and their own sense of womanhood and sexuality. Ghada wants to empower woman and that is clear in her work.
Aside from her starkly feminine work in her drawings and paintings, Ghada also explores themes of love, war, and peace in her highly critical gardens.
The one I am highlighting is Ghada’s Peace Garden.
“Peace Garden consists of the universal peace symbol, first designed as a symbol for the Ban the Bomb movement in the 1950s, made of carnivorous plants. The garden is also part of a performance in which attendants serve live worms and crickets to visitors who in turn feed them to the plants. The use of carnivorous plants to construct a peace sign represents the shift in attitude of an earlier generation that once strongly promoted and used the peace symbol but then, over time, came to take causes for peace much less seriously.”
Overall it is clear that Ghada owns a passion for her work and her message. Some artists don’t like to be political, they make art for different reasons.. Ghada makes art for herself, she creates a message for others. Important, relevant messages that need to be heard as they address problems that people have faced both historically and in today’s modern world.
Edgar Mueller is a street artist. His work is three dimensional. His tools of the trade are paint, chalk, and a sidewalk.
He was born in Mulheim an der Ruhr on July 10th 1968. He grew up in Straelen, a small city on the edge of Germany. The beauty of his home town inspired him to paint.
While in high school, he entered a street art competition. He was sixteen the first time he entered. When he was nineteen, he won the competition with a copy of “Jesus at Emmaus.” He still holds the title maestro madonnari (master street painter).
His paintings are incredibly technical and takes anywhere from three days to a week to create. He has to work fast due to weather conditions. If a drop gets on one of his paintings, it is ruined.
There is a science to his artwork. He paints a three-d picture on a flat surface. Below, is a picture of one of his paintings from the “wrong” angle. Above, is the viewing point of the picture. There is really only one viewing point to admire the painting the way it was meant to be seen.
This painting was done for the movie Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. It was painted on the pavement at the Westfield Shopping Center in London. It broke the world record for the largest 3-D painting; it was 3,440 square feet. It took six days to complete. Edgar said, “I’m not a record hunter, but because I want to change public areas into a different look, to look different from daily life I have to go huge. If I want to change a street, then I have to cover the whole street, so that’s the reason my paintings are so big.”
His paintings are interactive and meant for pictures!
He can turn a simple sidewalk into a winter wonderland.
The shark painting was created for the Illusion of Art Festival in Hong Kong.
The video below gives us a glimpse into his process.
Edgar Mueller is truly a great artist. He takes an everyday object that everyone is too busy to notice and turns it into a remarkable piece of art. I am in love with his artwork, but as much as it makes me happy, it makes me sad too. The art is temporary. Something as simple as a rain shower could remove his masterpiece that took hours to create.
Andrew Schoultz was born in 1975 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but he has lived and worked in San Francisco, CA since 1997.
Andrew works about 80 hours a week as a full time artist, and has for a little over ten years.
“I’d describe my work as art that’s attempting to create experiences and visuals that in some way record contemporary history.” -Andrew Schoultz.
He works with many medias such as mixing drawings , paintings, collages, print making , and large scale wall paintings and sculpture , sometimes he uses gold leaf as well to create art.
He is inspired by The Nuremberg Chronicles, a book that was written in 1493 in which some of the very first cities and countries were illustrated, basically the start of map-making. Another work that inspired him was the dance movie “Breakin” it was what got him started with graffiti art.
“I’d say that my work has a lot to do with history and how it repeats itself over and over again. I’d also say that there’s definitely been an influence of underground comics as well as graffiti, which may or may not be obvious at this point in time. .”- Andrew Schoultz.
The themes that tend to pop up in most of his works are war, global warming, natural disasters and economic crisis. One way Andrew describes his work is “chaotic, multi-layering and political.”
He tells stories about everyday issues and life through his art work, by sticking political remarks in the form of graffiti and underground comics , mixed with some medieval grip mapping out man and nature’s history.
Andrew Schoultz’s big break was in the Clarion Alley Mural Project, with his “Coffee Machine” mural, supported by Aaron Noble. Aaron Noble is a well know muralist in San Fransisco, he was was the one to push Andrew in to the scene of public art.
He has spent a lot of time on the streets doing wall paintings and murals but he has also spent time doing galleries as well. He has a great passion for doing large paintings on public areas so he can inform the people of the current social and political issues.
In high school he soared through the art program and had one of his own pieces in the Milwaukee Art Museum where he won a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, but he ended up leaving after the first semester because he was much more interested in street art and skateboarding.
Paul Noble was born in 1963. He is a brittish visual artist and was nominated for the turner prize in 2012. He is an english painter and installation artist. Paul completed his degree in fine arts at humberside college of higher education in1986. Afterwards, he moved to london where he became a founding member of an artist run gallery City Racing. Here he held his first exhibitions which involved small drawings and paintings of dream-like worlds. He used new worlds of drawings in a place between hilarity and despair. His most notable drawings of nobson newtown has takin more than half of his life. He starts all of his drawings off at the top left hand corner and creates as he goes through.
Nobson newton was his most recognized work. It was all on a fictional city that he worked on for over ten years. Series of large scale pencil drawings made up this city and resembled a form of soviet bloc housing. he never portrays people in these either. Some of the notable ones were the Nobspital and Nobson central.
Welcome to Nobson
In this drawing you see mounds of stone topped with rocks that give it the same look as a desert. It causes the eye to keep looking at all the countless stones. This drawing uses flat lighting and unchanging angles of shadows. Everywhere you look you can see lurking geometry, even in the sun.
Nobspital.
Lidonab is a large penil drawing done on a piece of paper over 4 meters across,or about 13 feet. This is also part of the series drawing of nobson newtown. The fact no inhabitants are in the picture gives it the eerie feeling of a ghost town.
AH.
Playframe is a drawing done by pencil that shows a childrens climbing frame. It is a realistic drawing using line work and shadow effects which give it depth.
Family is Infinity portrays another part of newtown, this uses an array of circular clumps and a ghostly look to it.
Aside from all of the drawings noble did, he also did some sculptures. When looking at these, the first thing that jumps act that they look like turds. All of his sculptures give this look. In this one it shows a turd sitting on top of another one.
There is really only one viewing point to admire the painting the way it was meant to be seen.
