Two weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend a lecture by Jonathan Katz, art historian, curator and professor at the University of Buffalo about his exhibition “Hide/Seek – Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” and censorship in US museums, which he helt in conjunction with the Mapplethorpe movie series at c/o Berlin. “Hide/Seek” was shown at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington until February 13 and revisited the history of American art from perspective of sexual difference and gender identity. It gained a lot of attention after the museum decided to remove David Wojnarowicz film “Fire In My Belly” after threats by conservative politicians. Katz himself had edited the 4-minute-version of the film shown at Smithsonian. I was really amazed about openly he spoke about the censorship, but also about how clearly he explained the pieces of art shown in conjuntion with “Hide/Seek”. This is why I was glad to find out that even though the exhibition is already finished on the YouTube site of the National Portrait Gallery you still have the possibility to watch a tour through the exhibition by Katz and his co-curator David C. Ward, Historian of the museum. The tour officially starts with an introduction by Katz, but here I’ll post his discussion of two portraits by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and David Wojnarowicz (picture on top) dealing with AIDS, which although kind of old-school-didactical and short are pretty insightful. Click here for an overview of all available videos of the tour.
Taner Ceylan is a Turkish painter. He lives in his flat in solitude outside the city center of Istanbul and invests tremendous labor in his hyperrealist works. He has a very emotional relationship to his paintings too – Sometimes he falls in love with them, sometimes he cries out of frustration when a tiny detail does not work out. In an interview with BUTT Magazine, he says he takes his inspiration from happiness and adds ‘I must enjoy my process because it takes ten hours a day, for weeks and months.’ The artist takes photographic images as a starting point and digitally enlarges these, manipulating them as he works in oil on canvas with the purpose of injecting ‘emotion’ into his work.
Prvtdncr (->Private Dancer) is an artist based in L.A., who caught my attention after I read a really nice interview with him recently published on BUTT Online. In it he talks about his latest work, for which he has been stealing and re-doing what he calls “tweeker hooker folk art posters” (see third picture below). More of his work can be found on his blog (unfortunately here most of the pictures are uploaded in a very (!) small size) and on the website of Work Magazin (+ another little interview). Furthermore you should check out www.sweaterqueens.org for his pretty funny collaborations with another artist called Bodega Vendetta (most of them are collages and paintings), with whom he has also released a little zine that is still available online.
François-Henri Galland is a French artist (as far as I know he’s from Paris), turns images from diffrenent sorts of media like newspapers, dating websites or the television program into minimalist drawings as a way to intensify them. He mostly uses tools and materials such as baboo, ink, colour pencils and watercolours for his work. The pictures posted here are just a very subjective collection of works of the past few months posted on his blog. The titles below them are always the titles of a series. Check out Galland’s website for a little introduction to his work.
“Lurking” is a web project by a Toronto based artist called Sholem Krishtalka. On his tumblr Krishtalka regularly publishes new works of a series of small sized drawings based on his friends’ Facebook picutures. He explains the idea behind the project like this: “The wide usage of Facebook has borne a new vernacular meaning for the verb ‘to lurk’. In this new coinage, ‘to lurk someone’ is to troll through their Facebook photos, to stalk them, to investigate their visual history. I found myself spending greater and greater amounts of time doing precisely this, and I wanted to make a record of it as a means of mapping my community, and also (perhaps less nobly) to in some way justify my Facebook procrastination.” Here are a couple of drawings from the “Lurking”-series, you find many more of them here and more information about the artists as well as works from other projects and writings on his website. Found on Colin Quinn’s tumblr (which I shamefully have forgotten when I did my list of my favourite tumblrs).
I posted a couple of pictures of Norwegian artist Erik Tidemann by photographer Linn Heidi Stokkedal in April. This time you get a little insight on of Tidemann’s own works – here are two of his latest paintings which I found on Sang Bleu a few days ago. This is how Tidemann himself described the pictures to me via Facebook:
“The first one is part of a series both fictional and based on real people, it’s a series of the tattoists in my city by memory as I can remember their tattoos and appearance. That goes for the mustached sailor one. The black guy is all fictional called “Portrait of Sadiiq Al Rashiid, Somalian Pirate”. It was a good way to do really strong black one liner drawings on top of the brushed first layer of the paintings. So you have the spontanity that is uncorrected on something that could be the opposite.”
Check out his MySpace page and Google for more of Erik Tideamann’s works.
Milan’s Nicola Trussardi Foundation is currently showing Paul McCarthy‘s latest work Pig Island, a huge piece consisting of installations, videos, sculptures and drawings McCarthy has been working on for seven years. The exhibition is shown atPalazzo Citterio, a huge bunker beneath the historical center of city that has been closed to the public for more than 25 years. Here are some pictures taken from the website of the foundation.
IXE (pronounced Eeks) is an experimental movie from 1980 by a French filmmaker called Lionel Soukaz – an associative collage that feels like a stream of consciousness or a rush. The movie combines different sorts of film and audio material from various sources (mostly the TV) and through this it deals with various topics such as war, sex, religion and drugs while it also has autobiographical elements. Soukat himself describes the movie like this: “Ixe may be (…) an analysis, working on oneself (a mirror), a snapshot of the ’80s, anything you like, it doesn’t matter – but let Ixe be the shiver of life, that thing that gives you goosepimples.” More about the movie here. Thanks Todd for introducing me to this. Click here to watch the movie:
