Nicholas Hondrogen contemporary abstract painting

 Nicholas Hondrogen (1952-2007) was a prolific painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. A part of the art-star generation of 1980s New York, Hondrogen had more in common and spirit with the Minimalists and Conceptualists of decades prior. The artist began his career in Paris in the early 1970s following an accelerated course of study at the Boston Museum School. Achieving almost immediate recognition in Europe, Hondrogen enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions and was collected by both individuals and notable public institutions. He returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, settling in New York City where he founded a successful design and construction business and refocused his art toward filmmaking. Hondrogen’s award-winning 1997 film, Perfect Moment, created after his move to Los Angeles, documents the life-defining recollections of a wide-range of individuals both famous (Philip Glass, Vincent Gallo, Norman Lear) and unknown. Hondrogen was the recipient of two Pollack-Krasner grants in 2000 and 2005.
The Nicholas Hondrogen Trust was formed in February 2007 at the time of the artist’s death. Hondrogen’s long time patron and supporter Jeff Vespa was chosen to chair the estate, with the artist’s brother John acting as a trustee. Hondrogen's Mumonkan Series marked the Trust’s inaugural show.(wunderarts.com)

 

 

 

Jacques Monory - European Pop Art

Jacques Monory ( 1924 – 2018) was a French painter and filmmaker whose work, highly influenced by photography and cinema, is an allegory of the contemporary world with a focus on the violence of everyday reality. His canvases evoke a heavy atmosphere, pulling subject matter from modern civilization through the lens of his signature monochrome color blue.His work, along with the movement, was developed out of an opposition to the informal painting that typified the era. Not to be mistaken for Pop Art, Monory has said; “What has developed in France has moved away from American Pop Art, we have expressed a critical narrative of society while the Americans have almost always, in my opinion, embraced their system.”

The artist’s numerical painting titles and monochromatic color schemes, typically in his signature blue, act to distinguish his work within the movement. Many of his compositions are both drawn from and embedded with photographs of news media and film. He presents the ephemerality of media as cinematic sequences, occasionally appearing as painterly collages and others in diptychs and triptychs.

Lygia Pape - Neo-Concrete Movement

Lygia Pape (7 April 1927 – 3 May 2004) was a prominent Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, engraver, and filmmaker, who was a key figure in the Concrete movement and a later co-founder of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s.Along with Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, she was a formative artist in the expansion of contemporary art in Brazil and pushed geometric art to include aspects of interaction and to engage with ethical and political themes.
By the age of 20, Lygia Pape had joined the concrete art movement. The term "concrete art" was coined by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg in 1930.Concrete art intended to defend the objectivity of art though paintings that "have no other significance than [themselves]." It forbade the use of natural forms, lyricism, and sentiment.
After her involvement with the Grupo Frente Concrete artists, Lygia Pape transitioned into the short wave of Neo-Concrete art. In 1959 Pape was a signatory of the Neo-Concrete Manifesto, along with Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica.The Neo-Concretists believed that art represented more than the materials used to create, but that it also transcended these "mechanical relationships".The manifesto claimed that art does not just occupy mechanical space, but it "transcends it to become something new."Neo-Concrete artists aimed to create a new expressive space in which an artwork is a living being to have a relationship with and to experience through the senses. Thus, Neo-Concrete artworks usually required the viewer's active participation. It is through the presence and participation of the viewer that the artwork becomes complete.The Neo-concrete artists did not totally reject Concrete art. Concrete art remained the basis of Neo-concrete art, but it was reformulated. Neo-Concrete artists adapted concrete art's geometric shapes and transformed them into organic three-dimensional objects to be manipulated by participants and to be experienced sensorially. The works intended to counteract the urban alienation created by a modern society and integrate both the intellect and the physical body for meditative experiences.
In explaining her approach, Lygia Pape said:
 "My concern is always invention. I always want to invent a new language that's different for me and for others, too... I want to discover new things. Because, to me, art is a way of knowing the world... to see how the world is... of getting to know the world."
Pape specifically during her Neo-Concrete period was interested in the “proposal to ‘live the body.’”This phrase indicates Pape’s interest in how the physical body acts as our mediator for all sensual experiences. Pape sought to explore this idea of the body’s relation in space by creating multi-sensorial experiences in her artwork.Wikipedia

Sigmar Polke - Pop Art

"Multi-media artist, Sigmar Polke, had the capacity to be at once irreverent, playful, and acerbic. From painting to photography and film to installations and prints, Polke's work, which often incorporated non-traditional materials and techniques, was above all a critique of art itself. Sometimes veiled and sometimes confrontational, the messages conveyed in his work raise serious questions about aesthetic, political, and social conventions. For Polke, the production of art was consistently a dialogue between himself and the viewer, which presented virtually limitless interpretive possibilities. Along with a group of fellow artists that included Gerhard Richter, he introduced the term, Capitalist Realism, which refers loosely to commodity-based art. Further, and specifically in the case of Polke's work, Capitalist Realism constitutes not only a critique of Pop art and the commodification of art and capitalism overall but also of the idealistic and overtly nationalistic Soviet Social Realism that Polke was particularly exposed (and opposed) to.The cynically witty Polke helped launch the Capitalist Realism style as a response to American and British Pop art. Rather than simply commenting on mass production and conspicuous consumption Polke went a step further. With works such as Chocolate Painting, he eliminated signifiers like labels with brand names in order to poke fun at notions of individuality and uniqueness. Indeed, despite the biting commentary of Pop art and its critique of capitalist consumer homogeneity, works like Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans, with their labels and their sameness, still sold for large sums. The objects in Polke's Pop works are stripped of such identifiers, which emphasizes how banal they actually are.At the fore of Polke's experiments was the impulse to challenge virtually every convention of art, often in surprising and ingenious ways. His iconoclastic tendencies extended not merely to content but to the materials of the works themselves, which were often adamantly non-traditional. From uranium and meteorite dust, brightly printed fabric and soot, to bubble wrap and potatoes, Polke's artistic odyssey took him and his work to the potential limits of creation."(theartstory.org)

Steven F. Arnold - American Visual Artist

"Steven F. Arnold (1943-1994) was an American artist and protégé of Salvador Dalí. He was a filmmaker, photographer, painter, illustrator, set and costume designer, and assemblage artist.After graduating from high school in the spring of 1961, Arnold won a full scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. In the spring of 1964, after earning perfect grades for two years at the Institute, Arnold took a break to study abroad in Paris and enrolled at Ecole Des Beaux Arts. Feeling confined by the stiff, traditional curriculum at Ecole Des Beaux Arts, Arnold and a group of American classmates rented villas on the small island of Formentera off the coast of Spain. For the next several months the group lived communally, taking LSD every day, experimenting with paints and costumes, taking up residence in caves, and exploring the small island. Arnold recalls: “This new drug was so euphoric and visionary, so positive and mind expanding… I ascended to another dimension, one so beautiful and spiritual that I was never the same.” Arnold also began keeping sketchbooks around this time, a practice he maintained throughout his life.Returning to San Francisco in the spring of 1965, Arnold resumed his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, turning his eye on film-making. ..."Wikipedia

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