Gunter Damisch

 

 "Gunter Damisch (1958 - 2016 ) was an Austrian artist known for his lush paintings of rhizome-like forms and undulating lines. “My pictorial system is strongly guided by the idea of transformation and metamorphosis. These ambiguities fascinate me,” he once explained. Born on May 20, 1958 in Steyr, Austria, he went on to study under Arnulf Rainer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, during which time he was a member of the punk band Molto Brutto. After finishing school, Damisch began exhibiting his work and established himself in the Viennese contingent of the Neue Wilde movement, alongside Otto Zitko and Hubert Scheibl. In the decades that followed, the artist was the subject of exhibitions both in Austria and abroad. Damisch died on April 30, 2016 in Vienna, Austria. Today, his works are held in the collections of a number of Austrian museums, including the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, and the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus."(artnet)
"Gunter Damisch works as a painter, draftsman and graphic designer but in recent years he has turned his attention increasingly to sculpture, developing a highly personal and complex cosmological view of the world. This world is inhabited by a large number of invented beings that can be ascribed to either a microcosmic biological or a macrocosmic spiritual world.
These beings drift in the streams of air, water, earth and fire emerging from a universe that has been subjected to a never-ending process of change by the creator. Gunter Damisch’s “Flämmler”, lucid amblers between time and space, can be seen in this context as metaphors for the fleetingness of human existence, at least for its consummation in a processual dimension."(artsper.com)

 

 

Bridget Bate Tichenor - Surrealism in Mexico

 

 Bridget Bate Tichenor (1917 –1990), also known as Bridget Tichenor or B.B.T., was a Mexican surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris and of British descent, she later embraced Mexico as her home.Bate was the daughter of Frederick Blantford Bate (c1886-1970) and Vera Nina Arkwright (1883-1948), who was also known as Vera Bate Lombardi. Although born in France, she spent her youth in England and attended schools in England, France, and Italy. She moved to Paris at age 16, to live with her mother, where she worked as a model for Coco Chanel. She lived between Rome and Paris from 1930 until 1938.....The cultures of Mesoamerica and her international background would influence the style and themes of Bate Tichenor's work as a magic realist painter in Mexico. She was among a group of surrealist and magic realist female artists who came to live in Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her introduction to Mexico was through a cousin she had first met in Paris in the 1930s: Edward James, the British surrealist art collector and sponsor of the magazine Minotaure. James lived in Las Pozas, San Luis Potosí, and his home in Mexico had an enormous surrealist sculpture garden with natural waterfalls, pools and surrealist sculptures in concrete. In 1947, James invited her to visit him again at his home Xilitia, near Tampico in the rich Black Olmec culture of the Gulf Coast. He had urged her for many years to receive secret spiritual initiations that he had undergone, and a lifetime change and new artistic direction resulted from her epiphanies during this trip.After visiting Mexico, Bate Tichenor obtained a divorce in 1953 from her second husband, Jonathan Tichenor, and moved to Mexico in the same year, where she made her permanent home and lived for the rest of her life. She left her marriage and job as a professional fashion and accessories editor for Vogue behind and was now alongside expatriate painters such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon, and photographer Kati Horna.Wikipedia

 

 

 

Robert Ryman - Monochrome Painting

 

 Robert Ryman (1930 – 2019) was an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He was best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings.He lived and worked in New York City. Ryman was often classified as a minimalist; but, he preferred to be known as a "realist", because, he was not interested in creating illusions, but, only in presenting the materials he used in compositions at their face value. As he wrote in a statement for a 2010 exhibition at Pace Wildenstein, "I am not a picture painter. I work with real light and space, and since real light is an important aspect of the paintings, it always presents some problems."The majority of his works feature abstract expressionist-influenced brushwork in white or off-white paint on square canvas or metal surfaces. A lifelong experimenter with media, Ryman painted and/or drew on canvas, linen, steel, aluminum, plexiglas, lumasite, vinyl, fiberglass, corrugated paper, burlap, newsprint, wallpaper, jute sacking, fiberplate, a composite material called gator board, feather board, handmade paper, and acrilivin. He used painted and/or drew with oil, acrylic, encaustic, Lascaux acrylic, casein, enamel, pastel, oil pastel, graphite, guache, and enamelac. Ryman also experimented with printmaking, creating etchings, aquatints, lithographs, and silkscreens. His most famous quote is "There is never any question of what to paint only how to paint."Wikipedia

 

Eleanor Hilowitz - Abstract Expressionism

 

 Painter and Sculptor Eleanor Hilowitz (aka “Helani”) was born in 1913 in New York City. Pursuing her first career choice, she earned a Masters degree in Psychotherapy from Columbia University in 1938.  In 1941 she joined the Art Students League where she studied until 1947 with Bernard Gussow (1881-1957); Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1893-1953); and, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), whose influence was the strongest on Hilowitz.
In her early work, there is formidable evidence of her robust abilities as a figure/portrait painter, however, she quickly embraced abstract art as her artistic path