Edmund Kesting - European Avant-Garde Art

 

 Edmund Kesting ( 1892 –1970 ) was a German photographer, painter and art professor.
He studied until 1916 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before participating as a soldier in the First World War, upon returning his painting teachers were Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann and in 1919 he began to teach as a professor at the private school Der Weg. In 1923 he had his first exposition in the gallery Der Sturm in which he showed photograms. When Der Weg opened a new academy in Berlin in 1927, he moved to the capital.He formed relations with other vanguardists in Berlin and practiced various experimental techniques such as solarization, multiple images and photograms, for which reason twelve of his works were considered degenerate art by the Nazi regime and were prohibited. He participated in the controversy between socialist realism and formalism that took place in the German Democratic Republic, therefore his work was not realist and could not be shown in the country between 1949 and 1959. In 1955 he began to experiment with chemical painting, making photographs without the use of a camera and only with the use of chemical products such as the developer and the fixer and photographic paper, for which he made exposures to light using masks and templates. Between 1956 and 1967 he was a professor at the Academy of Cinema and Television of Potsdam.His artistic work was not recognized by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic until 1980, ten years after his death.Wikipedia

 

Julian Boss-Goslawski

 

 Julian Boss-Goslawski was a visual artist, Julian Boss-Goslawski was born in 1926 and died in 2012. Artists born in the same year and of the same generation are Alan Reynolds, Henri Autran, George P. Arnold, James Burr, and Estate Of Nancy Spero.Julian Boss-Goslawski was primarily influenced by the 1950s growing up.

 

 

 

Phil Solomon - Experimental Filmm & Digital Painting

Philip Stewart Solomon (1954 – 2019) was an American experimental filmmaker noted for his work with both film and video. Recently, Solomon has earned acclaim for a series of films that incorporate machinima made using games from the Grand Theft Auto series.His films are often described as haunting and lyrica
"Phil Solomon, who used repurposed footage, manipulated images and striking soundtracks to make evocative experimental films that were widely admired by hard-core cinephiles, died on April 20 near Boulder, Colo. He was 65.
Solomon, an emeritus professor of cinema studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took up the experimental-film mantle in an era when the lure of feature filmmaking was irresistible to most of the creative young minds in cinema. His films, usually relatively short, did not have stars or plots in any conventional sense; he was after something more cerebral.
“Phil’s many films were examples of a truly unique style of what is sometimes called ‘visionary cinema,’ a term coined by P. Adams Sitney to describe films which were primarily concerned with the visual experience rather than with a story or narrative situation,” Jeanne M. Liotta, an experimental filmmaker and colleague of Mr. Solomon’s at the university, said by email. “Phil considered the film frame as a painting — a rectangle full of tensions, textures and pulls — rather than as a window through which to daydream.”(nytimes.com)

As one of the key filmmakers of the American avant-garde, Phil Solomon is known for his ability to extraordinarily beautiful, deeply affecting film works that are often composed out of abandoned or lost pieces of celluloid. In many cases, these works employ an optical printing process to further degrade, burn and amplify certain figurative elements, almost to the point of pure abstraction. And indeed, one could easily view many of his films as great painterly efforts with pronounced sensual and dimensional qualities.

The “Digital Painting” series (2012-2013)
dimensions variable, silent, 47” LCD display
Notes from the artist: “Being an artist who has spent a great deal of his adult life exploring the haptic sense of the (treated and untreated) patinas of film texture and film grain, I have approached the squared off geometries of the digital domain with some degree of reluctance and aesthetic caution. In the past few months, however, I have been employing, various orchestrated chance operations, a sort of digi-roulette wheel - and almost accidentally bumped into what I can begin to think of as a possible “pixel aesthetic” - something that perhaps Cézanne, Francis Bacon or Klimt might have appreciated.

Huang Yong Pīng - Avant-garde Conceptual Art

Huang Yong Pīng ( 1954 – 2019) was a Chinese-French contemporary artist and one of the most well known Chinese Avant-garde artists of his time. Born in Xiamen, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene of the 1980s.
"Huang Yong Ping, a Conceptual artist and pioneering figure of China’s post-Cultural Revolution avant-garde, whose controversial work often depicted the world as a Darwinian power struggle.
Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said the cause was a brain hemorrhage.
Huang was a conceptualist with a powerful visual imagination; in some sense he was also a contemporary version of the scholar-artist of Chinese tradition. A wide reader in philosophy, European and non-European, he infused his art with his learning and wisdom.
He kept a sharp eye on the political world around him and held it to moral account, often using images gleaned from nature — snakes, insects, turtles — to comment on human behavior.
He was acutely aware of how, in a new “global age,” art was being used both to reinforce and to promote cultural stereotypes and hierarchies, like those embodied in the very terms “Western” and “non-Western.” In 1987 he put two canonical art history books — one written in Chinese, the other in English — through a washing machine and displayed the results: a sodden lump of pulp in which individual words and images were indistinguishable.
Underlying all this work was his interest in Asian spiritual philosophies, specifically Taoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism, the one nature-centered, the other a challenge to Western rationalism. He brought these philosophies to his art." (By Holland Cotter
Published Oct. 29, 2019 nytimes.com)