Exposition Art Blog: March 2016

Grace Crowley

Grace Crowley (28 May 1890 – 21 April 1979) was an Australian artist and modernist painter.Crowley studied in Paris in 1927 with the Cubist André Lhote,and took part in Exhibition I in 1939, the self-proclaimed first show of abstract art in Australia. Others in her circle included Ralph Balsom, Dorrit Black, Rah Fizelle, Frank Hinder and her best friend, ceramicist Anne Dangar. "The Artist and his model" The subject of Crowley's painting is fellow artist Ralph Balson, painting an elegantly posed model on the roof terrace of Crowley's studio in George Street, Sydney. Revealing a disintegration of figurative forms and division of the pictorial space into decorative areas, this work signalled a growing commitment, shared by both artists, towards complete abstraction. In 1939 Crowley and Balson participated in the important Exhibition I at David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney which summarised the concerns of local painters of the 1930s, then moving towards geometric abstraction.




 During a period of study in Europe, Crowley was influenced particularly by her studies with French Cubist painter André Lhote whose teaching emphasised the importance of subsuming colour to geometric structure. The Crowley-Fizelle school, subsequently established with Rah Fizelle to teach the principles and practice of modern art according to these constructionist, cubist-inspired principles, became the principle centre for modernist painting in Sydney until its closure in 1937.
There was an exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Australia in December 2006 to May 2007 called Grace Crowley.Wikipedia









Art for sale Anna Skowronek


Polish contemporary artist  Anna Skowronek


Sea - oil painting on linen canvas, original, unique, signed 80x65 cm

Clouds - oil on canvas 2000 - 50x61cm - 800 Euro

Rural Landscape - oil painting, Linen 2013 - 56 x 75 cm - 800 Euro


Ethno - oil painting on canvas 2014 - 73 x 92 cm - 1000 Euro

The woman in the chair - oil painting on canvas 1999 - 100x100cm - 1000 Euro


Wild garden - colored drawing, mixed technique, work in passe partout 30x40 cm

Abstract Botanical 2  -
Watercolor on handmade paper 2011 - 24x30cm - 150 Euro

Mountain Landscape -
Watercolor and pencil on watercolor paper - 21x30cm - 150 Euro




Sea Wave - black and white drawing 21x30, original, unique, signed

Sea Wave - black and white drawing 21x30, original, unique, signed

Sea - black and white drawing 21x30, original, unique, signed

Mountain sketch, black and white drawing,
original, unique,
signed work in passepartout 21x 30 cm

Mountain sketch, black and white drawing,
original, unique,
signed work in passepartout 21x 30 cm

Mountain sketch, black and white drawing,
original, unique,
signed work in passepartout 21x 30 cm




http://milenaolesinska.blogspot.com/p/art-for-sale.html

Manon-Dee Szluha

My name is Manon-Dee Szluha and I am a South-African artist.. I mainly work with oil on canvass.The new series I have started that comments on the fractured society in S.A. It ponders whether we still have cultures that are clearly definable, e.g. the Afrikaaner culture:many look back in the past with nostalgia even though it has deteriorated and changed into nothing more than an idea that has deteriorated and in reality has turned into rust...How people from different backgrounds and race are lost in this modern country...The young and innocent looks at a new future with hope.
Perhaps they will have the ability to mold and change the traditional norms of culture...





Marek Zdrojewski






Ethiopian modern artist Gebre Kristos Desta

Gebre Kristos Desta ( 1932–1981) (also Gebrekristos Desta) was an Ethiopian modern artist. He was also known as a poet and an art teacher.
Desta was born in the town of Harrar, the son of a clergyman, Aleka Desta Nego. As a boy he played soccer and volleyball. Gebre Kristos also spent a lot of time copying and illustrating religious manuscripts while assisting his father as an apprentice. His early influence and introduction to art was the traditional religious art of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.






 He attended Haile Sellassie School, and graduated from General Wingate High School. In college Desta studied agriculture, but left school to become an artist.
Desta worked as an independent artist in Addis Ababa, creating paintings representing poverty-stricken people in that city. In 1957 he earned a scholarship, and studied art at Werschule fur Bildende Kunste und Gestaltung in Cologne, West Germany. After graduation he continued painting in Ethiopia, and held his first solo exhibition at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa.
Desta later joined the faculty of the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts.His art was displayed in many further exhibitions, both in Ethiopoia and abroad.Wikipedia





Pop Art Kiki Kogelnik

Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) was an Austrian painter, sculptor and printmaker. Born in southern Austria, she studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and moved to New York in 1961. Kogelnik is considered Austria’s most important pop-related artist, despite having been known to take issue with being considered part of the pop art movement.Kogelnik began her career at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan in Vienna in 1961, showing abstract works. At the time she was influenced by Serge Poliakoff of the École de Paris, but later found her own unique genre while surrounded by the pop art movement in New York. At one point she was engaged to Austrian abstract expressionist artist Arnulf Rainer.Kogelnik was close to another abstract expressionist, the American artist Sam Francis, and spent time with him in 1961 in New York and Santa Monica, California. Kogelnik then moved to New York in 1962 where she joined a close-knit group of artists that included Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselmann, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, among others. Pop was a way of life, and with Kogelnik extravagant hats and outfits Kogelnik became a captivating happening wherever she went.






In the 1970s Kogelnik’s focus shifted to what later became known as her Women works, specifically addressing the female role portrayed in commercial advertising. Broaching feminist issues indirectly with irony, humor and a cool pop aesthetic was unique to Kogelnik’s work during this time. In 1974 she also began to work occasionally with ceramics, employing sculptural form as an extension of painting.





In the 1980s, fragmented people, signs and symbols begin to fill Kogelnik’s work and in her Expansions series she used ceramic modules shown in conjunction with her paintings. She also produced and directed a short 16mm B&W film CBGB in 1978, featuring Jim Carroll and others.
In later works, the human body is depicted in increasingly fragmented and manipulated form, until in the 1990s much of her work portrayed highly abstracted yet expressive faces. During this time Kogelnik created a series of glass sculptures, related drawings and prints, in which she sought to comment on decorative and commercial themes in art-making.Wikipedia






Jan Kotik

Jan Kotik (born 1916 in Turnov, died 2002 in Berlin) belongs among few Czech artists whose work has its' own unique position within an international context. An attempt to situate him in the Czech art scene goes not without problems. Kotik's artistic expression has always been very individual and it seems his entire life he has resisted against dogmas. As a result, his work at some point has truly became uncategorizable. Therefore, this unusual "classic" of Czech art is relatively unknown to a broader audience.Through his entire body of work, Jan Kotik was oriented without compromise on Modern art and intellectual flexibility, even at times when Modern art was being forced out of society. The formal rationality in 1950's painting is very much connected with Kotik's typical color fullness into even unity. Even though those paintings remained long hidden in the studio, his theory and way of thinking finally found its way out to the public sphere. Thanks to various activities such as his collaboration with a glass maker, being head of the studio of industrial design, and as an editor for Tvar magazine, Jan Kotik was able to stand against the doctrine of Socialistic Realism with his own open-minded modern conception. 






  Kotik's works from the second half of the 1950's are comparable with foremost international artists of that time such as Danish born Asger Jorn, Carlos Saura from Spain, Achille Perilli from Italy, or American Arschile Gorky. Not only in the way of formal resemblance, but mainly as an understanding of himself, of themselves as artists with a public mission. In that time context, Kotik's radicality, directness, and abrasiveness presented itself as a unique expression within the Czech scene. The 1957 exhibition of his work at "The Gallery of Czechoslovak Writers" had started critical discussion even on the pages of the daily news, with the official cultural politic about the position of art in society and its right to freedom. This discussion in fact ended after August of 1968.






 Kotik's works from the 1960's show obvious conceptual orientation in painting, particularly because he began to concentrate much less on what or how he was going to paint, and more on the fundamental questions about what an image is in itself. A painting doesn't just hang on the wall, it is not just decoration, but becomes a part of the mind and mental development. In 1970, during a fellowship under the invitation of the German state foundation DAAD, he and his wife were deprived of their Czech citizenship and so stayed in Berlin where he died.




 His artistic experiments during that period are positionable in the context of Conceptual and Minimalist art in very reduced forms. Several of the series of drawings he completed in the 70's strongly show his attempt on one side to free painting from metaphors and hidden in a direction towards minimalist abstraction. On the other hand, he still insists on developing this idea of the material experience and disturbs, through involving the flatness of the surface plane of the wall into the painting and its originality. In this way he has remained a European artist, revealing his skeptical thinking opposite that of the abstract with its sometimes ruthless principles held by American art from that time. The extension of painting into a new non-rectangular spacial dimension is comparable to contemporary attempts by the Italian painter Emilio Vedova, even though it comes from a different tradition. In the 1980's, Kotik collaborated in Berlin with some of the young German artists for example Hermann Pitz and Raimund Kummer, which showed how his experimenting would look and which became wholly synthesized in the actual and new generation of that historical milieu.
Through his entire body of work, Jan Kotik was oriented without compromise on Modern art and intellectual flexibility, even at times when Modern art was being forced out of society. The formal rationality in 1950's painting is very much connected with Kotik's typical color fullness into even unity. Even though those paintings remained long hidden in the studio, his theory and way of thinking finally found its way out to the public sphere. Thanks to various activities such as his collaboration with a glass maker, being head of the studio of industrial design, and as an editor for Tvar magazine, Jan Kotik was able to stand against the doctrine of Socialistic Realism with his own open-minded modern conception. (jirisvestka.com)





Eduardo Abela

Eduardo Abela (1889–1965) was a Cuban painter and comics artist. Born in San Antonio de los Baños, he studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1921. For the next decade he lived abroad, first in Spain and then in France. In Paris he became acquainted with numerous Cuban intellectuals; among them was Alejo Carpentier, who encouraged him to develop his talent to depict native Cuban themes. Encounters with the work of Jules Pascin and Marc Chagall further shaped his style. Upon his return to Cuba, Abela created the character of "El Bobo" ("The Fool") as a protest against the Machado government. This he drew for El Diario de la Marina from 1930 until 1934. Abela's criollo character played the fool to satirize the difficult social and political situation in Cuba under Machado.






 In the second half of the 1930s Abela returned to painting, employing a naturalistic style influenced by early Renaissance painting and the Mexican mural movement. At this time he focused on an idealized view of the Cuban peasant and the countryside, as seen in his most renowned painting, Los Guajiros (1938), in which the Classical sobriety and order is the result of his contact with Italian medieval and Renaissance art.He also continued to paint, serving later in his career as a cultural attaché to Mexico and Guatemala, and in 1937 operating the short-lived Free Studio of Painting and Sculpture. Abela died in 1965.Wikipedia