drawings

Lucy Skaer

June 30, 2016By pablogtArtists, Blogt

Lucy Skaer created these drawings consisting of rhythmic black sharpie spirals in grids, pictorial shapes, and patterns additionally filled in with graphite like a tapestry. She wove together different earlier drawings as a patchwork and utilized a few assistants to carry out the tedious, repetitive labor. Here, we see a play with drawing on paper at an architectural scale. A tension exists between the intricate, repetitive detail in graphite (which we may see as lushly decorative) and the bodily scale shift to a larger, wholesome framework. – Drawing Art Center

Bob Law

June 15, 2016By pablogtArtists, Blogt

In 1959, Bob Law lay in a Cornish field and wondered how to describe the space he was in. His solution was a series of drawings in which figurative elements – such as trees or houses – are arranged along a doddery pencil line at the perimeter of the paper. A year later, Law had distilled this approach to his signature device: the rectangular perimeter alone, bounding empty space, sometimes accompanied by a date, a title or his name, always in block capitals. – Jonathan Griffin

See more artworks by Bob Law here.

Forests & Boutonnières

October 23, 2015By pablogtArt Texts, Blogt, Statement

Intense moments of perception with the subtleties and grandeur of nature—and they are often one and the same—are among the most potent and lasting archetypes of Beauty and Transcendence which we, citizens of the post-industrial world, still experience. These moments—a small flower blossoming, a spider web, a chrysalis, the arousal from sleep of hidden faunae, a call from an unseen and unknown animal in the distance, the scent of coming rain, among countless others—offer an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

Forests & Boutonnières is a large-scale project that looks for new social possibilities between spectators and artworks. I will base the project on the essence of the primeval forest and the sharpness with which the urban shaman must confront it. It will draw on the tension between human and natural history. The works will explore ideological projections onto landscape and how they shape our experience of the beautiful and transcendent. As do all artworks grounded in reference to nature, the rebirth of shadowy zones, forgotten tales, and vestigial histories will impact the process and the images which result. One counterpoint is inevitable. Human history is cyclical; peace and war, oppression and freedom, the reign of collective and individual values, reign of worldly and spiritual ideals—these recurrences find their parallels in the cycles of nature across seasons as well as millennia.

The project will honor Monet’s Nymphéas, a large-scale oval installation at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris while keeping a contemporary perspective and approach. The project consists of different works around the subject of the primeval forest and the city jungle, but one piece in particular will consist of four large-scale paintings measuring 2 meters high (6.5 feet). Two of the canvases will measure 3 meters wide (9.8 feet) and two others will be assembled to form a 9 meter wide painting (29.5 feet). They will form an octagon in which the spectator will be immersed.

Silke Otto-Knapp

September 7, 2015By pablogtArtists, Blogt

From a distance the densely worked surfaces resemble the smoothness of enamel. Yet the painterly experiment of London-based German artist Silke Otto-Knapp could have taken quite a different turn: after all, it’s not so far from garden landscapes, atmospheric light, tangled leaves and teeming meadows to the Impressionist ideal. Otto-Knapp came to prominence as a painter of land- and cityscapes in which vegetation – rendered in heated colours and with an almost naive clarity – was rendered in a manner far removed from the often-clichéd illusionism of the landscape genre. – Catrin Lorch

See more by Silke Otto-Knapp here.

Dove Allouche

July 29, 2015By pablogtArtists, Blogt

Dove Allouche

The messy but magical nature of early photography fascinates the French artist Dove Allouche, whose first American solo has been beautifully installed in this gently renovated former factory, on Grand – By Karen Rosenberg

See more artworks by Dove Allouche here

Hasegawa Tōhaku

July 3, 2015By pablogtArtists, Blogt

Tohaku Hasegawa is one of most important Japanese painters ever, and the most important painter of the country during the Azuchi-Momoyama period, along with Kanō Eitoku, with whom he developed an important artistic rivalry. He was the founder of the so-called Hasegawa School of painting, which kept its importance for over two centuries.

The “Pine Trees” screen (Shorin-zu-byobu) is Tohaku’s most important work, and one of the most famous Japanese paintings inside and outside Japan, where it has been declared a National Treasure. The influence of Sesshu Toyo and his “splashed ink” technique is obvious in this screen, considered one of the first paintings of the history to depict only trees as subject matter – only a small part of the top of a mountain is slightly visible at the far right of the left screen.

Although the work is already beautiful at first glance, to appreciate it in its entirety we should understand the Japanese concept of Ma, a word that has no equivalent in Western languages. It refers to a negative space, a space that is substance. In the words of the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu, “Walls and doors form the house, but the empty space within them is the essence of the house”. In the Shorin-zu-byobu, the pine trees form the landscape. The empty space is the landscape.

Gabriel Fernández

Hans Op de Beeck

January 10, 2015By pablogtArtists, Blogt

One realizes that op De Beeck has something of his fictional characters within him and, under the auspices of fiction, is opening a discussion about the benefits of building a symbolic structure to inhabit, a latticed bulwark against life’s turmoil that is more important than any single creative product. – Martin Herbert

See more artworks by Hans Op de Beeck here.