Uri Katzenstein - Experimental Art

Uri Katzenstein  was an Israeli sculptor, visual artist, musician, builder of musical instruments and sound machines, and film maker.
Uri was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951. In his youth, he played music and joined several Rock bands. In 1969, he joined the Israeli Defense Forces and fought in the Yom Kippur War.During the late seventies of the 20th century, Uri studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and after receiving his MFA moved to New York City where he lived and worked throughout the eighties. His early works, starting from the late seventies, involved different avant-garde media Exhibits, music, performance, video and sound art. In the mid-nineties of the 20th century, he began creating sculptured Figurines, in addition to objects and sound machines which were all merged and composed as one time-based viewing / listening events.Wikipedia

Alberto Savinio - Surrealism

Alberto Savinio real name Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico (25 August 1891 – 5 May 1952) was an Italian writer, painter, musician, journalist, essayist, playwright, set designer and composer. He was the younger brother of 'metaphysical' painter Giorgio de Chirico. His work often dealt with philosophical and psychological themes, and he also was heavily concerned with the philosophy of art.Throughout his life, Savinio composed five operas and authored at least forty-seven books, including multiple autobiographies and memoirs. Savinio also extensively wrote and produced works for the theater. Savinio's work received mixed reviews during his lifetime, often due to his pervasive use of modernist techniques. He was influenced by and a contemporary of Apollinaire, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Fernand Léger, and had a significant influence on the surrealist movement.(....) 1927, he gave his first one-man show as a painter, at the Bernheim Gallery in Paris. Savinio's contributions to the Avant-Garde movement during this period sharply contrast with the provincialism that was favored by the National Fascist Party in Italy at this time. Angelica o la Notte di Maggio (Angelica or the Night in May), which was a parodical and surreal revisitation of the Ancient Greek myth of Eros and Psyche was published this year, as well. The novel tells the story of Angelica- a poor actress working in a second rate theater in Greece at the end of the nineteenth-century and Baron Felix Von Rothspeer, a loveless, older aristocrat. In many ways, Savinio makes the theater a central character in the plot; it is painted as a place where the senses and romance can be deeply explored and discovered.Judgments of Savinio's work varied wildly depending on the phase of his life and the reviewer. Many of Savinio's most critically praised works are also amongst his most disliked and misunderstood. This is largely due to Savinio's frequent and controversial use of modernist techniques for creative expression.From a very young age, Savinio's piano playing impressed critics nearly unanimously. Guillaume Apollinaire once said of Savinio's piano playing: " I was surprised and beguiled; Savinio mistreated his instrument so much that after each piece the keyboard had to be cleared of chips and splinters. I foresee that within two years he will have gutted every piano in Paris. Savinio will then go on to destroy every piano in the universe, which may be a true liberation."Judgment of his body of work as a whole was seen in 1954, when the Venice Biennale created a room devoted solely to Savinio's artistic legacy.According to the art historian Jean Clair, the works of Savinio and his brother Giorgio de Chirico were the basis of both the surrealist movement and magic realism.Wikipedia

Prince Twins Seven Seven - Nigerian painter, sculptor and musician

Twins Seven Seven, born Omoba Taiwo Olaniyi Oyewale-Toyeje Oyelale Osuntoki (3 May 1944 – 16 June 2011)in Ogidi, Kogi State, Nigeria, was a Nigerian painter, sculptor and musician."Prince Twins Seven-Seven he came to the United States in the late 1980s and settled in the Philadelphia area, although he traveled abroad frequently. His life entered a turbulent period, filled with drinking and gambling, he said. Destitute, he found work as a parking-lot attendant for Material Culture, a large Philadelphia store that sells antiquities, furnishings and carpets.
When the owner learned that Prince Twins Seven-Seven was an artist, he had him decorate the store’s wrapping paper. Later, he was given a small room to use as a studio.His career rebounded. In 2000, the Indianapolis Museum of Art opened a wing devoted to contemporary African art with an exhibition featuring his work, which was also included in an exhibition that year at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian.In 2005, after being nominated by President Olosegun Obaganjo of Nigeria, Prince Twins Seven-Seven was named one of Unesco’s Artists for Peace, a position that gave him new international visibility.
Prince Twins Seven-Seven, who lived in Ibadan and Oshogbo, is survived by many wives, children and grandchildren."(New York Times)

 

Neo-conceptual art Steven Parrino

Steven Parrino (1958 – 2005) was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism. He is best known for creating big modernist monochrome paintings (his colors were limited to monochrome black (or black-and-white), orange, red, blue, and silver) that he violently slashed, torn or twisted off their stretchers. He died in a motorcycle traffic accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46
Parrino was born in New York City in 1958 and grew up on Long Island. The family was Albanian-Arbëreshë originally from Sicily. He earned an associate of applied science degree from SUNY Farmingdale, in 1979 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Parsons The New School for Design in 1982.

 

Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. As early as 1981 he detached the canvas from the stretcher in places to create rough, folded, cleft surfaces, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting.
Parrino first showed his paintings of deep-seated pessimism at Gallery Nature Morte, an East Village gallery, in 1984, when he emerged as part of a strain of postmodernism called Neo-Geo. Neo-Geo artists, including Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, John Armleder and Olivier Mosset, mixed modernist abstraction with a more cynical form of Pop Art worldliness by adding references to commerce, design, music or the movies. Parrino called his mauled canvases “misshaped paintings,” in response to the shaped paintings of the sixties.

In addition to painting, Parrino exhibited painted environments that involved monochrome walls pounded with sledgehammers such as the 13 plaster panels painted black and smashed to pieces as a memorial to the Punk legend Joey Ramone called 13 Shattered Panels for Joey Ramone (2001). He also made films of the making of these environments along with sleek metal sculptures whose bent and folded elements related to his misshaped canvases. He also exhibited photographs of his desktop strewn with the newspaper stories, magazine spreads and music albums that often inspired him. Parrino used intentionally provocative subjects like abstract swastikas, rebel flags, and silhouettes of Russ Meyer starlets, Elvis Presley as rendered by Andy Warhol, the Hells Angels, Johnny Cash, and other works by Andy Warhol. His work has been called "mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction" by the art critic Jerry Saltz.Wikipedia

Frank Savage

More

Larry Rivers - American artist, musician, filmmaker and actor.

Larry Rivers (August 17, 1923 – August 14, 2002) was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, Long Island, and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.

Painter, sculptor, poet, and musician Larry Rivers was an established figure in the New York School, recognized for creating large paintings merging abstract and narrative elements, as in Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), where the general leads his men through a space defined by murky oil washes and broad gestural brushwork. Rivers studied in the late 1940s under Hans Hofmann, the artist often regarded as the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism, but he never abandoned figuration, his compositions often including human subjects and text, as in Vocabulary Lesson (Polish) (1964). Rivers’ work is often compared to that of postmodern artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and is considered an important precursor to Pop art. As Andy Warhol once said, “Larry’s painting style was unique—it wasn’t Abstract Expressionism and it wasn’t Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop.”(artsy.net)