The late Ian Hamilton Finlay is a modernist artist whose work is fundamentally carried through poetry. This month on the one-year anniversary of the artist’s death Victoria Miro Gallery in London will present “The Sonnet is a Sewing-Machine for the Monostich,” which will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s neon works to date. For the length of Finlay’s career, almost 40 years, he created[…..]
The oil paintings of Chinese artist Guo Wei serve as a quiet meditation on the minor details of life. The paintings often portray the artist’s daughter and friends and are rendered in a limited or even monochromatic palette, which aids in the placid imagery of his subjects. The imagery is also manipulated and distorted in unpredictable ways that further increases the physiological implications found in[…..]
With an interest in the human relationship to water, photographer Kerry Skarbakka stages a variety of water-related scenes, including floods and droughts. Skarbakka describes human interaction with water through extreme situations that underscore the substance’s fundamental importance and power. These photos mimic actual documentation, though they are all fully constructed and staged in areas such as swamps, sewers, bathrooms and oceans. The artist received his[…..]
Swiss artist Christoph Buchel creates complex hyper-real environments that often demand a physical commitment from the viewer. Buchel’s 2005 installation “Hole” exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel forced viewers through several small rooms, narrow passageways and disturbing images of a suicide on tape. Each room is found in elaborate detail as if the viewer stumbled onto a forgotten place. Buchel also creates conceptual works that have[…..]
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist who was trained as an anthropologist and a sculptor. She has risen to much critical acclaim with her figurative collages that challenge culture and gender. The artist uses fragments of images taken from magazines to illustrate and comment on the roles of women, cultural identity, African politics and international fashion. Mutu’s figures are simultaneously attractive and repulsive and attempt[…..]
Matthew Ritchie is an artist with an interest in the totality of our universe. Information, the structures of knowledge and belief and the human ability to comprehend the world around us are a perpetual theme in Ritchie’s paintings, sculptures, animations, Web sites, drawings and installations. The artist creates these elaborate worlds by scanning drawings into a computer to manipulate, fragment and reform different elements before[…..]
Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson experiments with visual arts, theater and music to create live performances. Kjartansson’s work often references modes of aggression, masculinity and dominance. In 2003, the artist recreated a scene from a period of Danish colonization in Iceland where a Danish merchant is shown beating a native Icelandic peasant. The image above depicts a knight that is exposed representing sexual power and playing[…..]
