Exposition Art Blog: December 2015

Philippe Vandenberg

Philippe Vandenberg (Ghent, 1952 - Brussels, June 29, 2009) was a Belgian painter.









Nusret Özliman






 

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero (1926 – 2009, born in Cleveland, Ohio) is regarded as a pioneer in feminist art whose work confronts social and political injustice with creative ingenuity. Her work has received considerable international acclaim with more than a dozen solo museum exhibitions around the world, including the ICA in London, de Appel in Amsterdam, Malmö Kunsthalle in Sweden, the New Museum in New York, and MOCA in Los Angeles as well as a limited retrospective in 2010 at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris




 While her work is now widely recognized and respected, Spero worked in relative obscurity for almost twenty-five years, resisting the predominant art world trends and protesting inequality in the art world and beyond. Graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949, she married artist Leon Golub a few years later. Together they moved to Paris where, in domestic isolation, she painted while raising her three young sons. Her dark and existential series, Black Paintings including her first use of text in works such as “Fuck You / Merde,” presaged the radical transformation of her art upon returning to the U.S. in 1964.






 Horrified by the war in Vietnam, Spero painted the War Series (1966-70), using sexual imagery to shock the viewer into recognizing the relationships between sex and power, war and obscenity. Her outrage and anger was expressed in both art and action: she joined several activist groups including the Art Workers Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and also helped found the all-women’s cooperative gallery A.I.R. where she had her first solo New York show, Codex Artaud, in 1973. This work, while less overtly political, was more subversive in method, collaging non-illustrative imagery with the fractured, tortured texts of Antonin Artaud to create a complex indictment of the powers of oppression and an intimate portrait of pain. This early experiment developed into an innovative, wide-ranging, and enduring artistic practice that is unapologetically feminist, anarchic in spirit, and tenaciously political, a practice she continued well into her eighties.(Siglio Press )

Mixed-Media


Conceptual art photography Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (March 29, 1947 – June 25, 2013) was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.





Charlesworth worked in photographic series, but stated in a 1990 interview that she had not really thought of herself as a photographer. She stated, rather, that she viewed her work as investigating questions about the world and her role in it, but realized as of that point that she had been investigating those questions through the medium of photography for the past twelve years.Wikipedia





Charlesworth’s work was the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva (1977) and the Queens Museum of Art, New York (1992). Her work was also featured in the Whitney Biennial (1985) and the Venice Biennale (1986).(artnet)




Mixed-Media Keo Gathman


I use paper from magazines to make portraits on canvas.  I invite the viewer to get to know the subject by including positive images and messages in each portrait. 






 

 

Robin Reynolds





Trude Sojka

Gertrud Sojka, better known as Trude Sojka (9 December 1909 – 18 March 2007), was a Czech - Ecuadorian painter and sculptor, creator of an original technique using Recycledmaterials and concrete. She was born in Berlin, Germany and died in Quito, Ecuador.Gertrud Herta Sojka was born in December 9, 1909 in Berlin, German Empire of Czech parents, in the bosom of a wealthy Jewish family. 





 Trude Sojka's work evolves according to the various experiences in her life. Sojka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (Akademie der Künste), where she became familiar with German (such as Die Brücke) and Jewish Expressionism. She became familiar with the works of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Georges Rouault. She deeply admired the sculptures of Ernst Barlach and is likely to have personally known the work of the expressionist-realist Käthe Kollwitz.
Moreover, in Europe, Sojka became interested in the primitive art of Africa, Oceania and America (which can also be considered somehow expressionist). This she had surely learned visiting ethnographic museums. Thus, when after the war, in 1946, she came to Ecuador, she was amazed to discover so closely the Pre-Columbian Andean symbolism. Her first paintings in Ecuador, created during the years 1950, depict her experiences in the concentration camp: the anguish and loneliness, the barbed wires, the sad procession of women walking perhaps to the gas chambers, but also her prayers that helped her survive the horror, as well as the hope of freedom and a new life.Wikipedia





Kathleen Munn

Kathleen Jean Munn, painter (born 28 August 1887 in Toronto, ON; died 19 October 1974 in Toronto, ON). Kathleen Munn is recognized today as a pioneer of modern art in Canada, notably for experimenting with abstraction earlier than most Canadian artists. Considered too “advanced” by critics and the public in the 1910s and 1920s, she remained on the periphery of the Canadian art scene during her lifetime.( the canadian encyclopedia )





 Munn kept extensive notebooks and she read constantly about colour theory whilst embracing an intellectual and spiritual approach to art. Her extensive reading on Cubism and the relationship between colour and music attracted her to the tenets of theosophy and a variety of Eastern religions.Wikipedia







Jean-Paul Riopelle

Jean-Paul Riopelle, CC GOQ (7 October 1923 – 12 March 2002) was a painter and sculptor from Quebec, Canada. He became the first Canadian painter (since James Wilson Morrice) to attain widespread international recognition.
Riopelle's style in the 1940s changed quickly from Surrealism to Lyrical Abstraction (related to abstract expressionism), in which he used myriad tumultuous cubes and triangles of multicolored elements, facetted with a palette knife, spatula, or trowel, on often large canvases to create powerful atmospheres.





The presence of long filaments of paint in his painting from 1948 through the early 1950s has often been seen as resulting from a dripping technique like that of Jackson Pollock. Rather, the creation of such effects came from the act of throwing, with a palette knife or brush, large quantities of paint onto the stretched canvas (positioned vertically).
Riopelle's voluminous impasto became just as important as color. His oil painting technique allowed him to paint thick layers, producing peaks and troughs as copious amounts of paint were applied to the surface of the canvas. Wikipedia





Milena Olesinska


New paintings


Portrait  oil painting 70cm x 50cm


Copy of an oil painting by Okrassa Marek 140cm x 120cm    



German expressionism Max Pechstein

Hermann Max Pechstein (December 31, 1881 – June 29, 1955) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker, and a member of the Die Brücke group.
Pechstein was born in Zwickau, the son of a craftsman who worked in a textile mill..Early contact with the art of Vincent van Gogh stimulated Pechstein's development toward expressionism. After studying art first at the School of Applied Arts and then at the Royal Art Academy in Dresden, Pechstein met Erich Heckel and joined the art group Die Brücke in 1906. He was the only member to have formal art training. Later in Berlin, he helped to found the Neue Sezession and gained recognition for his decorative and colorful paintings that were lent from the ideas of Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves. His paintings eventually became more primitivist, incorporating thick black lines and angular figures.






From in 1933, Pechstein was vilified by the Nazis because of his art. A total of 326 of his paintings were removed from German museums. Sixteen of his works were displayed in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. During this time, Pechstein went into seclusion in rural Pomerania.
He was a prolific printmaker, producing 421 lithographs, 315 woodcuts and linocuts, and 165 intaglio prints, mostly etchings.
Pechstein was a professor at the Berlin Academy for ten years before his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933. He was reinstated in 1945, and subsequently won numerous titles and awards for his work.
He died in West Berlin. He is buried on the Evangelischer Friedhof Alt-Schmargendorf in Berlin.Wikipedia







Ricky Dowrick




Emerging from the yet to be a loving peace transpireth , a silent stage devoid all sound where no earthly thought has yet dwelt. 
Of virgin space untouched , invisible and unseen, gently carressing hopes' event horizon in shrouded mystery. 
The quiet beat of a distant drummer draws me toward the void ;  the faint whisper of Lifes Cantor bids us embrace the vast unknown.
One door closes while another opens as behold we the glistening throne.
Our senses fill with wondor as all our thoughts are stilled..we  leave behind all comfort  gone before in the Freedom of a Dream.  



Julien Boissinot

I am an amateur painter and drawer, living in Angers, France. For my works, I mainly use acrylics or pastels. I like working on abstract paintings, with simple, geometric and coloured shapes, trying to give as much importance to their position as to empty spaces between them.