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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Opening June 25th, Archimedes Gallery will be showing 25 new wood fired ceramic & cast bronze sculptures by Eva Funderburgh and 6 new paintings by Josh Keyes. Special events include, two different Josh Keyes limited edition print releases offered in-house only, starting at 10 am Saturday, June 25th along with Josh and Eva doing an artist demonstration from 2pm - 4pm followed by an artists' reception from 5pm - 8pm. See preview images of the show after the jump!
Berkeley painter Deth P. Sun's work, taken a whole, can be read almost like a comic book. With each solo show, his blank-eyed cat character — whom longtime fans have come to know well — returns for new adventures. Coming up on April 25, the artist has a solo show at Grumpy Bert in Brooklyn titled "Being and Nothingness." This time, his mystical feline tackles themes of global proportions. Set against a backdrop of a star-lit sky, Sun places the microcosm of his protagonist's world in the larger context of the universe. Amid the endearing visuals are bouts of melancholy as our hero ultimately must face his own mortality. "Being and Nothingness" will be on view through May 24.
David Spriggs uses a combinations of acrylic paint and transparent plastic sheets to create sculptural installations with images floating within them. Spriggs divides his abstract designs into layers and paints them one by one until they accumulate into an illusory final product. His work focuses on radiating patterns that evoke various cosmic phenomena. With his strategic use of lighting, the nebulas come to life and appear to levitate before the viewer.
If there’s anyone whose work could convey the experience of tetrachromacy, it’s Markus Linnenbrink. The multi-disciplinary artist’s trippy installations and paintings might take those with average vision closer to experiencing a condition where the affected see millions more colors on the spectrum than most human beings. However, Linnenbrink’s drips and strips of colors aren’t a result of a biological condition but rather an aesthetic preference (besides, tetrachromacy only affects women).
German-born collage artist Thomas Spieler creates intriguing multimedia works that play with the dualism that exists between the human and natural worlds. Spieler juxtaposes vintage black-and-white photographs of human figures with brightly colored photographs of more abstract forms. Many of the black-and-white photos look like they could be ads or pictures of movie stars lifted from old magazines, while others appear to be photographs of classical sculptures from antiquity. Meanwhile, the colorful photos are of objects found in nature, such as minerals, geological formations, butterfly wings and flower petals.
Drawing and performance art are rarely seen as complementary media, but Ethan Murrow's large-scale graphite drawings begin as performance collaborations with his wife, Vita Weinstein Murrow. The two began working together in 2004 and the source imagery they gather for their videos often inspires Murrow's detail-oriented works on paper. His drawings come with the heavy feeling of the aftermath of disaster.
Italian artist and designer Andrea Minini makes a living creating brand logos and graphics, but as a personal project the artist recently created the "Animals in Moire" series. A collection of black-and-white digital illustrations, the works take inspiration from the animal kingdom. But the shapes in these portraits of peacocks and pumas are anything but organic. Uniform curves outline the contours of he animals' faces. The creatures become abstracted and almost architectural, defined by mathematically-plotted shapes. The high-contrast, monochromatic patterns create the illusion of depth and dimension, yet the forms appear hollow and mask-like. Take a look at the fun series after the jump.
Jessica Hess often tells people she paints landscapes, but "landscape" doesn't quite sum up the documentary function of her work. Her oil paintings are not about the buildings and the trees, but rather an ephemeral, fragile moment: when graffiti gets put up on city walls. The future of a piece of graffiti is unstable — it could be buffed or tagged the next day. Its longevity is unpredictable. Hess memorializes these ephemeral artistic expressions, choosing broken-down, tagged-up locales that inspire her in her daily surroundings in Oakland and San Francisco. Curator Ken Harman shared a story about how a group of people were moved by Hess's work when they saw the tag of their deceased friend in one of her paintings — an insignia that had heretofore been eradicated from the walls on which it was painted. His presence lives on in her work.
At the intersection of fashion and sculpture you’ll find the wearable artwork of Copenhagen-based artist Nikoline Liv Andersen. “My work is expressive, living in the borderline between fashion and art with a big focus on textiles, textures and delicate details” Anderson said, describing her work. Many of Andersen’s designs challenge the purpose of ordinary materials, using them to create intricate works of art.
The Internet has changed the art world immensely, and Giant Robot has been there to witness and evolve alongside it. Conceived as a humble, photocopied zine focused on Asian American arts and culture in 1994, Giant Robot now exists as an unclassifiable entity. It was published as a magazine for 16 years and later manifested in the physical realm as an art gallery and shop, as well as a website. To celebrate its 20 years, Giant Robot 2 in LA will debut "Giant Robot Presents: 20 Years Art x Mags," an extensive group show featuring many established and emerging talents. Among the line-up are Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Ryan McGinness, Geoff McFetridge, Yoskay Yamamoto, Jeff Soto, James Jean and a great number of other artists. "#GR20Years," as the show is nicknamed, opens March 15, 5 - 10 pm, and will be on view through April 2.
Last weekend, Thinkspace Gallery debuted "New Works" by Tran Nguyen and Erik Jones, who both treat the classic human form with abstract elements. Although separated by choice of color and medium, this exhibition seamlessly merges their illustrative styles. The new work of Brooklyn-based Erik Jones clothes his nudes in highly saturated patterns and geometrical shapes. The happy, bright colors of the foreground seem to mask a melancholy expressed by Jones’s subjects. This tension is intentional; Jones offers the idea of opposing visual relationships by merging beautifully rendered portraits with mixed media “fashions." With fashion serving as an inspiration, his “models” convey the indifference of one caught off guard or a moment in time. In some cases, the figure disappears completely. Read more after the jump.