Painting (Painting)

Conrad Ruiz loves to paint subjects related to the “boy zone”: video games, weapons, games, science fiction, fantasy, and special effects. He also often works at a very large scale to emphasize a connection to the tradition of history painting. Blockbuster (2011) was, at the time of its creation, the largest watercolor painting he had ever made.

Painting (Painting)

It may take a minute to recognize the background of New Fall Lineup – the colors are tweaked into a world of cartoon and candy, and it is covered by leaping energetic figures and flying squirrels. One realizes, though, that the image is of the World Trade Center exploding into flame, creating a strange contrast with the painting’s colors and the other images. The combination is peculiar because the role the explosion serves here is non-specific.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining.

Painting (Painting)

In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon. The object and its ground both glow, but the chapel-shape is crisp and simple, reminiscent of a piece of cut paper. Like many of Therrien’s early pieces, this abstraction slips into representation and the visual and spiritual power of the image is emphasized by the strong central placement of the chapel.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall. More than a simple reference to the sport, the work has the disconcerting effect of creating a danger zone in the gallery space. The reference to direct aggression or violence is reinforced by the piece’s rapid pace.

Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape. He travels armed with his camera and insightfully captures scenes of the everyday that other people might ignore. Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan, 1992) is a photograph of a dog regally perched under an industrial shelter in the borough of Tlalpan in Mexico City.

Photography (Photography)

Columpio

Photography (Photography)

Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July. I traveled to Mali for three weeks and took some photographs related to my work. They are very different, but there are links as the graveyard of Timbuktu, which I discovered during the trip.

Photography (Photography)

Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994). The artist arrived a week prior to the opening with no artwork to install, and created three spontaneous works from locally sourced materials. This one was made of white plastic record sleeves that Orozco arranged on the damp roof of the gallery.

In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity . Currently housed at City College of San Francisco as a permanent installation, for a time it was in storage and not on public display. During the same period, he created the charcoal sketchentitled Shasta (1940), of large construction machinery that the artist saw near the Mount Shasta dam.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting. The composition features three unfinished figures, all of whom appear to be observing something unrendered or external to the picture plane. Around the group of figures roughly framed by the outline of a triangle, is a frenzy of loose marks and smudged lines that juxtapose the delicate features of the figures’ faces.

Painting (Painting)

Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different. After the phrase for the title came through his head, the artist set about trying to figure out how to make a mark with pasta. These paintings are the result, made using the pasta as something of a stencil, with the paint being applied after the noodles have been scattered on the painting’s blank surface.

Painting (Painting)

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

Painting (Painting)

His untitled paintings express his concern regarding perception in abstract form. Made with bleached denim, stock images of flames and gold leaf, these works embody “human cultures as ghosts.” The gold serves as a reminder of religious paintings, and the denim as emblematic of Western capitalist waste. When describing his paintings, the artist states, “The idea of what Painting is or could be became somehow akin to the image of the earth, as seen from above, from the viewpoint of a drone or a spirit.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Painting (Painting)

Like the film Le Mouton noir, this dimension is counterbalanced by a burlesque element. The piece of fabric on the rat’s paw or ‘graft’ becomes a patchwork made out of colorful geometric shapes recalling a Harlequin costume, thus referring directly to the burlesque tradition. This leitmotiv creates a contrast with the dull colors, the humility of the countryside, and makes the figurative scene look unreal to reveal its superficiality.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic painting Ticket (also 2015), Person in Red Sweater could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors.

Painting (Painting)

The ongoing “Sea Paintings” series is central to the practice of Jessica Warboys. The series plays with the notion of ritual, performance, nature and consequence. The artist realises her “Sea Paintings” on the Zennor coast, near St Ives, where she emerges the canvas in the seawater, allowing the waves and the wind to mix the raw mineral pigments that have been applied by hand to damp folded canvases.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.

Painting (Painting)

The Lion’s Hunt by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is a large format painting that recalls Delacroix’s paintings and tapestries from the 19th century, where the painterly surface became a garden invaded by wild beasts. In Lutz-Kinoy’s painting, two ferocious lions appear to be preying on several horses. Accentuated by luminous browns and yellows, the lions evoke imperialist fantasies.

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

Painting (Painting)

Shaun O’Dell’s paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and music explore the overlapping realities of human and natural structures. Whether abstract or figurative, they often read like hieroglyphics, in that they piece together a philosophical portrait of reality. Purple Brush 8 is a painting that details a meeting of geometric forms, and the optical play that results.

Painting (Painting)

This is one of the most important works Schoorel has made to date, a triptych that has as its subject matter a garden scene with what looks like a pond. One of her largest works, it seems highly suited to a Parisian collection where Monet’s Nympheas in the Orangerie represent the summit of treatments of such subjects. Typically for Schoorel, the painting is as much about absence as presence and examines the amount of information the viewer needs to construct meaning.

Textile (Textile)

Formed from pillowcases, each of which contains an embroidered calligraphic text as well as drawings depicting dreams, Ali Eyal’s Painting Size 80 x 60 cm is part of a long-term project which records and indexes such dreams. “I rode on my cousin’s back, laughing until the heaviness of my body weighed his to the floor. At the time I was with him on their large farm that he always dreamed of visiting.

Painting (Painting)

At first glance, This Day by Imran Qureshi appears to be an energetic, gestural painting reminiscent of Action Painting from the mid-20th century. But upon closer inspection, highly detailed floral elements reveal themselves amongst the bold red brushstrokes. The botanical motifs in Qureshi’s work represent life and regeneration while the red paint refers to death and mortality.

The various distinct but connected lineages of Himalayan painting remain thriving languages employed by artists from across the region to express their unique perspective in our shared contemporary world. In Bhutan in particular, this language is prevalent and its maintenance is seen through the political prism of preserving Bhutan’s identity in the global world. That being said, o ffering by Gyempo Wangchuk presented an attempt to bring a critical dimension within the traditional Himalayan forms of expression.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (2016) is characteristic of the artist’s practice. Apostolos Georgiou invites us into a scene of cinematic tension. In the foreground, a man is kneeling with his hands on his head.