Paul R. Evans - furniture designer, sculptor, and artist

Paul R. Evans II (20 May 1931 – 7 March 1987) was an American born furniture designer, sculptor, and artist, who is famous for his contributions to American furniture design and the American craft Movement of the 1970s, and with his work with the influential American manufacturer Directional Furniture. His creation of metal sculpted furniture set him apart. He studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and later settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and shared a showroom with woodworker Phillip Lloyd Powell.Paul Evans was born Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He studied at several institutions including the Philadelphia Textile Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1950), Rochester Institute of Technology, School for American Craftsmen, Rochester, New York (1950), and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (1952).Evans began, in the 1950s making copper chests and followed with sculpted steel-front cabinets. Evans had a two-man show in 1961 at America House, an exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York (now named the Museum of Arts & Design). In 1964, Evans became a featured designer for furniture manufacturer Directional Furniture. With Directional Furniture, Paul Evans introduced several series of furniture lines; such as Argente series, Sculpted Bronze series, Sculptured and Painted Steel, Patchwork Copper, Pewter and Brass, and the popular Cityscape series.Evans pieces were frequently signed, and some of the custom items have a signature and a date. Paul Evans' combination of handcraft and technology anticipated the limited edition art furniture of today. The artist's relationship with Directional Furniture set a unique standard for creative manufacture by insisting every piece is made by hand, finished by hand, supervised by the artist at each step of production, one piece at a time.Wikipedia

Seund Ja Rhee

Seund Ja Rhee ( June 3, 1918 – March 8, 2009) was a South Korean painter, printmaker and ceramist. She was a prolific artist with more than 1,000 paintings, 700 prints, 250 ceramics, and numerous drawings. She exhibited mainly in France and in South Korea, with 84 solo exhibitions and almost 300 group exhibitions during her lifetime. In 1958, she moved to Tourrettes, Var (France) where she finally built the "Milky Way", a large atelier and exhibition room.
Born in Jinju, Gyeongsangnam-do in Korea under Japanese rule, Rhee studied in Jinju Girls' High School before moving to Japan to attend Jissen Women's University in Tokyo in 1938. In 1938, she returned home and married. In 1951, she was separated from her three sons by the Korean War. Then she left for Paris, where she entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1953 to study under Yves Brayer and Henri Goetz. In 1958, she moved to Tourrettes, Var, where she used a stone shepherd's cottage for her atelier. In 1996, she built the "Milky Way", a larger atelier, in the Korean style.Wikipedia

Abstract-minimalist constructivism Carel Nicolaas Visser

Carel Nicolaas Visser (Papendrecht, Netherlands May 3, 1928 - Le Fousseret, France March 1, 2015) was a Dutch sculptor. He is considered an important representative of Dutch abstract-minimalist constructivism in sculpture.From 1948 until 1949 Visser studied architecture at the Technical University in Delft and subsequently from 1949 until 1951 sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. After study in England and France, he settled as an independent artist in 1952 in Amsterdam.
Carel Visser is seen as one of the most important constructivist sculptors of the Netherlands. His later work is characterized by the assembly of a variety of materials, such as tires, oil drums, car windows, leather, sheepskin, eggs and so on. He made organized connections, a kind of assemblages, with this so-called great and sometimes small objets trouvés (found objects). Some of his work has been compared to a musical composition in which repetition and variation play an important role.
Around 1960, Visser was focussed on massive closed cube of iron and "slack" cube wire. Visser, among other things, was inspired by nature (plants and animals) which also explains his use of natural materials such as wood, wool, sand, feathers, bones, rope and leather.His works from the period 1975-1985 could be called environments, as opposed to the more sculptural work as the dying horse (about 1949).Wikipedia

Gutai group of avant-garde artists - Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga  (Japanese, 1924–2008)  was a Japanese artist best known for his performative painting practice. Shiraga’s gestural style was influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and indicative of his participation in the Gutai avant-garde movement. The object of Gutai was to allow action and everyday life into the creation of dynamic artworks. The artist would suspend himself over his canvases, swinging back and forth, creating marks with his feet, creating a unique texture and thickness to his abstract swirls and splatters. “I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion,” the artist once proclaimed. Born on August 12, 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan, he graduated from the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting in 1948, and joined the Gutai group in 1954. In a seminal early work, Challenge to the Mud (1955), the artist explored the gesture of sculpting clay by throwing himself and contorting his semi-naked body in a pit of mud. Through the following decades, Shiraga continued to work on activating art through moving a body in space. He died on April 8, 2008 in Amagasaki, Japan. Today, the artist’s works are included in the collections of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Art, among others.(artnet.com)

 

Avant Garde Art

Michael Mallalieu - collage

   "This is a collage I've done on A2 paper for college a few years ago  in a lesson using cut outs of photographs I've taken of bus stops and pictures from a newspaper and then applied 1 or 2 colours of acrylic paint using  nothing just a folded up piece of paper."Michael Mallalieu

Magda Frank

Magda Frank Fischer (July 20, 1914 – June 23, 2010) was a Hungarian-Argentine sculptor. She was born in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, which at that time belonged to Hungary but in 1918, was incorporated into Romania. Because of Nazi persecution, she left Hungary to settle in Switzerland. Years later, she moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. In 1950, she arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina to visit her brother, her only living family member. Here, she was appointed professor at the Artes Visuales de Buenos Aires and exhibited at the Galería Pizarro. She participated in the Premio Palanza Buenos Aires. She received the Benito Quinquela Martín award at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, and was honored by the Argentine Senate. Her works are part of the collections at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Paris, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. Frank resettled in Argentina in 1995 and built the Magda Frank House Museum in the Saavedra barrio at Vedia 3546. She died in 2010 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.Wikipedia