Richard Hambleton

"Richard Hambleton has been called the godfather of street art. He began producing what he called ‘public art’ in New York City in the 1970s.He’s known for the black figures he first painted on the buildings of New York’s Lower East Side, which he called Shadowmen. The Shadowmen arrived in the early 1980s, and shocked many a denizen of that city who walked the streets at night. In 1981 and 1982 he populated the Lower East Side with these unnerving figures.A reclusive man, physically gaunt (somewhat creepy-looking himself), Hambleton had undertaken work of a similar bent before. In his Mass Murder project in the late 1970s, he drew crime-scene outlines of dead bodies on the street and had volunteers play homicide victims. Passersby mistook the installations for the aftermaths of real murders.Both these projects spoke to the zeitgeist, as US urban crime panics shook the nation in those decades. The Shadow men would shock passersby, who often mistook them for shadows of real people, possible assailants. Many people who lived in NYC around that time have stories of the moment they were petrified by a Shadowman and these stories seem to be almost a badge of honour top the artist with a distinctly morbid streak. For Hambleton audience reaction was integral to the artwork itself.He said:“Other artists put their work on the city, but what I paint on the walls is only part of the picture. The city psychologically completes the rest. People experience my paintings. They aren’t simply exposed to them.”His art was apparently inspired by the shadows left on the sides of buildings by victims of the atomic blast on Hiroshima. In an age of Cold War anxiety, perhaps his work pointed at the way people’s lives seemed to rest on a knife edge.The Shadowmen drew in other urban artists, who daubed over the black figures with their own work. Indeed, Hambleton was not a lone wolf. With Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was one of a legendary trio of New York artists at the forefront of the street art boom. The three regularly met to discuss their work with one another, and sometimes collaborated.His work began to pop up all over the globe. Shadowmen even appeared on the Berlin Wall in 1984, when he painted 17 life-size figures on its eastern side. His Shadowman paintings have been documented by photographer Hank O’Neal."(artpie.co.uk)

Milena Olesinska - Abstract Composition

Abstract Composition  - oil painting on canvas 80cm x 60cm - 700 USD

Contact : milenaolesinska@wp.pl

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Cy Twombly - Abstract Expressionism Painting

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. ( 1928 – 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel. His paintings are predominantly large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL".Twombly's works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York City's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for the ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well."Wikipedia

Daniel Rhodes - American Ceramic Artist

Daniel Rhodes ( 1911 –1989) was an American ceramic artist, sculptor, author and educator. During his 25 years (1947–1973) on the faculty at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, in Alfred, New York (a division of the State University of New York), he built an international reputation as a potter, sculptor and authority on studio pottery.
"Daniel Rhodes was an accomplished painter, and, as a ceramic artist, he manipulates the clay as if it were paint and splashes, scrubs down or builds up for expressive forms, textures and surfaces. The individual elements Rhodes calls “fortuitous forms” are used in an architectural way to build solid constructs that appear woven, wrapped or bound. The natural clay surfaces are terra cotta in tone with color and value subtly altered by the application of slips. Textures are dramatic and pronounced and pay tribute to the elemental surfaces of mountains, valleys, eroded terrains and the moon. Rhodes’ experiences in Japan are evident in many of the pieces especially the ones he calls “Guardians”. They are strong in presence, ancient in spirit and look as if they had recently been discovered in some remote village of an archaic Japan, now long vanished. There are numerous large- scale heads that seem to represent and humanize in an immediate fashion the connection between maker and object; a vessel containing the memories of his life, his dreams and aspirations."(chelsearivergallery.com)