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Peter Shillinger
Portia Munson
Athi-Patra Ruga
Tof Vanmarque
Vincent Proce
Ramsey Dau
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LIVE: New Age Art
Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach recently completed a tour of duty at sea, in what she aptly describes as a “freakily challenging painting.” The historic fireboat known as the John J. Harvey got a new look with Auerbach’s interpretation of dazzle camouflage, the inspirational WWI ship-painting tactic used to distort optics and confuse the enemy.
The connection to modern art movements such as Cubism and hard-edge painting is clear, and Auerbach’s modern take on dazzle camo was inspired by the fluid dynamics of water and the wake patterns that trail boats of all sizes. She used paper marbling in pre-production to mimic the flow of water and create the design for her jarring red-and-white aquatic masterpiece.
Athi-Patra Ruga
Fantasy Art With Vincent Proce
Drawing the line against impossibility,
Proce visualizes a world unknown through the depiction of his fantastical creations. Gaping the world between real and insane, Vincent Proce designs eye catching photo like illustrations that captivate the minds of thousands.
Fantasy seekers would give Proce much deserved credit to the world of mystic. For his creations are a evolution to the earth realm of fantasy.
The amazing images seen here are your gateway to his portfolio. An amazing artist with grand talent and foresight, continues to wow the world through mind pleasing imagery. We hope to see the future of Proce as he develops this visually teasing style. and of course all hail fantasy art.
Portia Munson
Tof
Vanmarque
Tof Vanmarque continues to evolve the shifting perspectives and details of his elaborate acrylic paintings. One of the hallmarks of Vanmarque’s style is blending lush hues with makeshift bodies and eroding structures, each scene its own strange narrative.
Strange Abstraction & Ramsey Dau
Ramsey Dau’s paintings combine masterfully rendered photorealism with a personal graphic vocabulary of primitive shape, pattern and expressionistic mark-making. Beginning with prodigious observation of his subconscious aesthetic and intellectual preferences, Dau creates hyper-realistic “painted collages” that challenge the viewer to discern their meaning and mode of creation. His compositions draw heavily on his background in graphic design and rely both on chance and focused intention.
I make work that I am drawn to make. Aesthetics plays a major role, but as to my motivation – I believe that to be buried in my subconscious. Modern neuropsychology emphasizes the power of the subconscious and questions the existence of free will, so maybe it is beyond my knowing. Perhaps, in time, it will reveal itself through the making of the work itself. Like some future archaeologist finding an ancient machine and trying to figure out what it is by plugging it in and letting it run – seeing what it makes.
Dau was selected as one of Modern Painters' 25 Artists to Watch in 2014. That same year he was awarded the Art Park Artist Residency in Byron Bay, Australia, which culminated in a solo exhibition at Sydney’s Mild Manners Project Gallery. In 2015, Dau's first Los Angeles solo exhibition, The Singularity is Near, was presented with KM Fine Arts, followed in 2016 with the solo show, An Ocean Beneath the Sea.
As to my motivation – I believe that to be buried in my subconscious.
Politically Charged Art Of Cleon Peterson
Cleon Peterson’s powerful paintings challenge modern-day anxieties; directly criticising global and national politics. Blood & Soil, a title taken directly from a Nazi slogan, opens this Saturday at Over the Influence, LA.
Moving from expressive nudes to figures in uniform, this exhibition observes Cleon attacking America’s here and now. Drawing from classical art forms, with his figures reminiscent of those created by the Greeks, the artist highlights how history never seems to progress — justice remains an unreachable ideal, law and order remains violent and corrupt.
Concerned that we are slipping into a new form of fascism, Cleon has decided to speak up instead of remain silent. With their bold, uniform blocks of red, white and black, these threatening, ferocious paintings speak volumes.
Jack Whitten: An Artist's Life | Art21 "Extended Play"
Renowned abstract painter Jack Whitten discusses the personal philosophies that drove his work over the course of nearly six decades, chronicling his development as an artist and his relentless innovation in painting. "I can build anything I want to build," said the artist. "It's all about the materiality of the paint." Filmed at work on what would become his final painting, Whitten spent his life pushing abstraction into new territories. He passed away shortly after this interview.
His earliest work combined figuration and abstraction; but, in the late 1960s, Whitten switched from oil to acrylic to focus on the material nature of paint rather than the image it conveyed. He built a tool called the "developer" and used it to create paintings that existed as a single line—"one gesture, three seconds." These "slab" paintings led Whitten to his next artistic development: a new kind of tesserae (a material used in the construction of mosaics) made by cutting cubes of color from large slabs of acrylic paint.
Whitten's experiences growing up in the South during the height of segregation, as well as his participation in the civil rights movement, informed his lifetime of work. His "Black Monoliths," a series of abstracted tributes, memorialize important Black figures such as James Baldwin and Barbara Jordan. "I find that with each one, I have to locate the essence of that person," said the artist. "That person becomes a symbol and I build that into the paint." Now a symbol himself, Whitten was one of the most influential abstract artists of his generation.
The painting filmed in progress, "Quantum Wall, VIII (For Arshile Gorky, My First Love In Painting)," is on view as part of a special presentation in memory of the artist at Hauser & Wirth New York through March 31, 2018.
"That person becomes a symbol and I build that into the paint"
Roman Ermakov
Sebastian Martorana
Sebastian Martorana is a sculptor and illustrator living and working in Baltimore, Maryland.
For over ten years, Sebastian has focused on the art of carving. Much of the material used for his sculptures was salvaged from Baltimore’s historic, though often discarded, architecture.
Mark Wallinger Talks "SITE"
Article By Catherine Gaffney
Order, chaos, and chance play throughout Wallinger's SITE
The largest installation, 10000000000000000, consists of thousands of differently shaped stones placed individually on the black or white squares of an enormously extended chessboard. The initial effect is of a remote shoreline, evoking an expansive rain-washed beach where the tide is far, far out and where shoes are a definite must.
On further inspection, however, the intense regularity of the checked floor-surface reveals itself, reminiscent of school corridors and Vermeer’s tidy domestic scenes. This overlapping and breakdown of conventional binaries – such as order and chaos, or wilderness and domesticity – is fitting for an artist who, in this exhibition, showcases a range of work that confronts physical and cultural constructions.
What now seems like a lifetime but is merely a decade ago I sat slumped at my desk, head on arm pushing a pencil round a piece of paper dreaming up ways to kill time and break the chains holding me to my desk, Monday to Friday each day became the same and I was eating my brain.
Then one day whilst dreaming up further ideas in the series of ‘Ways to kill time’ the pencil lines on the pad started to become characters, strange and dysfunctional they formed my dysfunctional world which had no rule. Slowly I figured the pencil could be replaced with a marker pen (the Pentel N50 to be exact) and the paper replaced with cheap vinyl which was acquired from DIY stores, these characters once resigned to a life on paper filed in a folder under ‘Not suitable for visual consumption’ began to have a life of their own; adhered to lamp post and electrical boxes they plotted and linked my route home, one became 10 and slowly 10 became more than I can remember. Each evening and as much of the day as I could rob was spent drawing and cutting out stickers. Stickers became posters, posters became more ambitious and somewhere in between I quit my job or maybe that was I got fired, either way the inevitable had happened. Like a river cuts it’s own path, I’d cut mine.
This family of dysfunctional characters began evolve, they started to satirise and hold to ransom all that fell into their grasp, a welcome jolt of subversion in today’s media-saturated environment, the very same thing I’d grown up on. Bank notes were drawn and printed over and put into circulation for the unsuspecting to receive in their change, billboards taken over with public service announcements. I wanted to encourage people to not just to ‘see’, but to look at what surrounds them and their lives, reflecting our increasingly bizarre popular culture, re-thinking and reworking cultural figures and genres to comment on our ethos of conspicuous consumption. A Pandora’s box of bittersweet delights, sweet and sugary on the surface, but with an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, taste beneath.
This isn’t the beginning, it’s not the end it’s happy never ending.
Magnificent Miniatures Of Leah Yao
How can the smallest art form convey large ideas?
Leah Yao’s talents in crafting miniatures have taken both bright and bleak forms, with the recent “Mini Memento Mori” representing the latter. More often than not, the artist’s Instagram bio aptly describes her output: “I make clay food.” The RISD student’s above piece impresses in the details that add both humor and intrigue to the work.
““How can the smallest art form convey large ideas?” the artist wrote. “By juxtaposing current issues with classic art themes of mortality and feasts, I hope to encourage the viewer to consider the sometimes-toxic food systems that constitute modern diets, and to think about what we create (ahem, miniature concrete pieces…) will exist on the planet after we are dead and gone.”
The 5th Perception with
Mernet Larsen
