Eye Candy

Willie Cole: Portrait of the Artist as the Upcycler

A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, New York – artist, sculptor Willie Cole‘s body of work is a sign of our times, where traditions of assemblage/construction not only meets sculptural integrity but also holds up a discerning mirror to cultures of relentless consumption and wastefulness in the swirl of industrial capitalism. To quote Tatlin:”The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible ‘style’ but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like.” (from the LEF journal, 1923.) Read More…

Andō Hiroshige: The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaido

As a committed admirer of Japanese wood block printing ‘Ukiyo-e‘, I chanced on the evocative, remarkable prints of Andō Hiroshige much later, overshadowed as his work was, by the more towering and venerated Katsushika Hokusai. Much younger to Hokusai, though his contemporary, Hiroshige (along with Kunisada) remained one of the most prolific ‘story-tellers’ of 19th C Edo period Japan till his ‘retirement’ as a Buddhist monk, and subsequent premature demise. Hiroshige is in his most communicative space when working on themes around peopled landscapes, in weaving in human activities around evocative topography and elements of the natural order. Read More…

Handmade visual opulence: Truck Art from Pakistan

The vernacular idiom of the visual language I have always had a persistent and abiding admiration for. Familiar enough with the wondrous personification, floral ornamentation, and the acerbic wit of truck art in India, I find the visual dialect of our South Asian counterparts in Pakistan decidedly fascinating. Truck-owners and drivers are certainly not subtle about making their presence felt on the roads, and the pride of ownership and the joy of what becomes home for long months, is made evident by the eye-grabbing image making, structural ‘additives’ and ornamental accessorization. Read More…

Hannah Höch: Collage and Photomontage as Commentary

The late German artist Hannah Höch, in more ways than one, mothered collage and photomontage techniques to craft evocative, interrogatory, and irreverent responses to the turbulent circumstances and times that she was negotiating with. Emerging as one of the leading (and much under-rated and neglected) representatives of the Berlin Dada movement in the early half of the last century, her work does find resonances in the idea that “the beginnings of Dada, were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust” (Tzara.) Read More…

Pawel Kuczynski: Illustration for social commentary

A native of Szczecin, Poland, 40 year old illustrator Pawel Kuczynski trained in graphics at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland (now, the University of Arts, Poznań.) I recall bumping into his work in communication journals quite some years ago, and it is always rewarding for me to engage with his satirical, and at times caustic takes on contemporary societies and ‘life’, for the lack of a better word. In the finest of editorial illustration traditions, Kuczynski does away with the tyranny of the written word/text, and is able to communicate powerfully through the single image, an image made pregnant with varying instances of irony, wit, and even derision. Read More…

Mark Khaisman: The Banality of Packing Tape

Of Ukrainian origin, but now working out of Philadelphia, USA, visual artist Mark Khaisman produces work of some intrigue and interest by using an unusual material, that is not only everyday and pedestrian but is industrially produced for disposable, single usage. No, it is not rubber. Trained as an architect at the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, Russia, Khaisman marries his considerable experience in architectural practice with the rather ancient and venerated stained glass practice. Like the stained glass practitioners of yore, Khaisman literally ‘sculpts’ light by using layers of translucent packing (duct) tape to control the passage of light through it, creating effective illusions in various shades of pale, dark, medium browns of adhesive packing tape. Read More…

Hans Ruedi Giger: Biomechanical fantasy as spectacle

The ‘dark legacy’ of Swiss artist-designer Hans R. Giger is undeniably far-reaching and indelibly memorable. A graduate of the (then called) School of Applied Arts, Zurich, Giger came into prominence with an airbrush and free-hand painting style which found their way into the pages of his first published work – Necronomicon (1977). His fantasyscapes were dystopic, drained off luminescent colour, bereft of the life giving rays of the sun, and with his thematic obsession with the biomechanical universe – coupling industrial machine to organic animal-human, he manages to marry the distant future and the distant past with an inimitable, unforgiving bleakness. Read More…

Käthe Kollwitz: Etching and cutting the Human Condition

My recall of a Kollwitz woodcut is from many years ago, titled ‘Die Mütter’ (The Mothers) – a huddled heap of bereaved and bereft humanity, seeking to console and comfort each other, with futility, for they appear to be calcified by a known or unknown terror. That woodcut remained etched in my consciousness for a long time, tucked away in some obscure drawer, but always there, always gnawing. The work of 19th C / early 20th C German artist Käthe Kollwitz, is not one of tentative, delighting probing but of cathartic, universal anguish. Unleashing a visceral chronicle of human suffering and struggle – through depicting injustice, poverty, and the terrible price of mindless man made conflicts, her work achieves an emotional tenor and intensity that resonates beyond her immediate circumstances in Germany of the early 20th C. Read More…

Richard Tuschman: ‘Hopper Meditations’

I have long admired American painter Edward Hopper‘s poignant interpretations of twentieth century urban resignation, longing and alienation. So, it was with a bit of a pleasure that I discovered the ‘Hopper Meditations’ photographic art project by a graduate of the University of Michigan school of art, graphic designer and photo-artist Richard Tuschman. Separated by time but not in spirit, Tuschman’s project is not only a tribute to the poetic perceptiveness of Hopper, but also, to my mind, brings interesting material to the co-relations and tensions between traditional painting and contemporary digitally enhanced visual art. Like the perennial debate of the relationship between word and image, the relationship between the painting and the photograph is hinged on the tensions of the ideas of contradiction, irony, mimicry, and ‘what is complementary?’. Read More…

Paul Caparatta: Central African butterfly wing Portraits

New York, USA, based artist Paul Caparatta takes inspiration from an ancient Central African practice of the use of a very unique material to create striking portraits. Butterfly art – a native, popular art form from the Central African Republic, evolved during a rare, annual phenomenon in which thousands of butterflies fill the sky during the months of October and November. These butterflies, having lived their natural lifespan, fall to the ground where their delicate, colourful, textured wings are carefully collected and used to create pictorials of animals and scenes of rural life, mainly. A butterfly specialist, Caparatta does take care not to use the wings of any endangered species. It’s a fair bit of painstaking labour to create these striking profiles / portraits of ladies, all from the splendid wings of butterflies. Take a look.  Read More…

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