Retired Pillar represents the death and deterioration of legacy of colonial Shanghai. The silicon Corinthian column lays horizontal upon its pedestal, inflating and deflating in the rhythm of difficult breathing, as if exhausted by its lifelong labor. Shan comments on the deterioration of the influence of French colonialism within Shanghai as well as the adoption of Western forms of architectural decoration as symbols of wealth and power.
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.
The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker. The images in this series are taken from a photo essay on the struggle for civil rights in Alabama, directed by Charles Moore in 1962 (and published by the magazine ‘Life’) which showed the repression of the black population and persistent inequalities in the southern United States. The title “Black Star Press” is taken from the name of the news agency where Charles Moore worked, and it refers to the young black man shot fighting for the rights of his community.
Untitled consists of a small wooden sculpture that leans against a wall. Here, a rectangular piece of wood holds a folded article from a vintage design magazine whose Italian text states: “Villa per una persona sola. Arquitectura Pasadena California.” On the flipside of the paper is a feature with different images of paintings and architecture, including a painting by Piet Mondrian.
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure. Each is pictured four times: a photograph of the plant, a photograph of its shadow, a drawing of the plant, and a drawing of its shadow. Instead of lending structure to disparate entities, this system serves a counterintuitive purpose, dissolving the object.
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In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment. However, Kirk’s passive pose doesn’t so much suggest the aftermath of a battle as it does heavy contemplation, depression, or utter despair. Captain X is part of a series of paintings depicting various Star Trek characters who are stricken with human emotion-—a tactic that diminishes the mythological grandeur associated with this heroic captain and his indefatigable crew.
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity. Matt Lipps created this diptych by photographing a single arrangement of cutouts. As in his analogous portrait of men, the middle section appears twice, on either side of the split, signaling a stutter, a caesura, or a schizophrenic break.
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Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk. In this series, the artist attempts to organize meetings somewhere in the world. The audience is given the details of a meeting—the place, date and time—and nothing more.
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes. The artist has said that the appropriation of popular imagery is a way for him to take pictures without a camera and to register the things that happen in the everyday as visual essays that evidence the fragility of the world.
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. By using Carrara marble, a material usually associated with heroic public sculptures, Martinez casts the history of African-American revolutionaries into the artistic tradition of monumentality. Like the artist’s earlier work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an interactive piece made up with pins that read, “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE,” A meditation on the possibility… continues Martinez’s effort to expose cultural contradictions and increase public awareness.
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964). Ezawa uses his signature cartoon-like style to remix and reenact these crime scenes, leaving only the artworks as “real” objects (as they are depicted in the films), rather than illustrating them. Reversing fiction and reality in an unexpected way, this gesture invites the viewer to question the reliability of the visual footage.
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future. The video follows a moped carrying a woman holding a very large mirror. The mirror is large enough that she can’t see what lies ahead, she can only see what has already come as reflections in the mirror.
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). The work uses collage techniques—it is stapled down and has a thick strip of contact sheet paper taped over it—that convert the media coverage on Godard’s film into a filmic object itself. The black paper enacts a kind of cinematic “jump cut” on the article, while simultaneously drawing attention to the medium of the film, as well as the photograph reproduced in this newspaper article.
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room.
H.2. N. Y Skeleton of the Dump revolves entirely around the performance “Homage to New York” (1960), of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), during which the machine built by the artist in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) had to self-destruct itself in 27 minutes, but, in the end, it had to be finished off by firemenbeing called in after it erupted in flames. Since the discovery of Jean tinguely’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, in 1982, Michael Landy spent two years researching and sketching (charcoal, oil, glue, ink) from his previous research carried out at Museum Tinguely in Basel, and at the MOMA in New York.
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Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters.
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition. Elad Lassry explores how visual languages are constructed across multiple disciplines and media. His larger body of work responds to the relationship between artistic mediums and their forms, and his prints question familiar modes of viewership and our continuous desire to find and identify clear narratives in photographs.
In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions. An example of this is Floor, Legs (2013), a gelatin silver print in which a large black rectangle obscures the upper half of a candid photograph with two figures that are ultimately only identifiable by their legs and feet, which are even then indiscernibly crossed and posed beyond easy recognition. Even though its unclear if Lassry’s source image is a found photograph or an original composition, the underlying themes – of the photograph’s function as an object, and the impossibility of discerning “the real” through its representation – continue to resonate.
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Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor. The series riffs on previous investigations by the artist such as his meticulous depictions of masculine political figures, which included a headless J. Edgar Hoover and a Hitler head floating vulnerably in the center of a white expanse (Hitler’s iconic mustache was crafted from the artist’s pubic hair). Rendered in soft graphite, the imposing Knights embody the ostensibly conflicting ideals of chivalrous deference and invulnerable masculinity.
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric.
Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc. : Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads.
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience. The video presents us with a reinterpretation of footage from his unreleased avant-garde film, Easter Morning Raga , from 1966. In contrast to his more famous pieces like A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) which are juxtapositions of fragments from newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, the images in EASTER MORNING serve as a reinterpretation of footage.
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.
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Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content. Meaning, therefore, changes depending on one’s perspective—and in the case of Thomas’ installation, only emerges when one knows that there is always something hidden, always more to one of his works than immediately meets the eye. This lenticular print with text shifts as you walk in front of it from its title, “Black Imitates White” to the inverse, “White Imitates Black”(and some other possibilities in between) emphasizing that there are always at least two perspectives to the same scenario, and thereby encouraging us as viewers to consider them all together rather than trying to identify with any one subjectivity.
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism. Historically, in countries such as the US and South Africa, the term “boy” was used as a pejorative and racist insult towards men of color, slaves in particular, signifying their alleged subservient status as being less than men. In response, Am I Not A Man And A Brother?
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s. I am the Greatest presents the famous quote by Mohammad Ali to think about his important presence in the African American community. In dialogue with the painting I am a Man, also in the Kadist collection, this assertion that begins the same way takes the line from the protest poster several steps further.
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Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title. As with many of his works, the artist has taken a found image and manipulated it to draw out and dramatize the formal contrast between the black hands holding white cotton. Cotton, of course is one of the most familiar fabric sources to us, and becomes incredibly soft once processed.
Ozawa Tsuyoshi is a Japanese conceptual artist who constructs satirical takes on history...
Jin Shan is an installation artist who uses humor, satire, and play to comment upon social and political power dynamics within contemporary China...
Wang Taocheng is a Shanghai artist who lives and works in Amsterdam...
Following its display at the General Idea retrospective in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam The post AIDS Sculpture By General Idea Finds Permanent Home In Amsterdam Park appeared first on Artlyst ....
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
Drawing & Print
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
AIDS Ring by General Idea is a cast metal ring, which takes as its basis Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” design, appropriating its pop aesthetic, and totalizing, simplistic universal messaging to instead emphasize the severity of the AIDS epidemic that occurred in the 1970s...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
Drawing & Print
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Drawing & Print
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Drawing & Print
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
Drawing & Print
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Drawing & Print
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...
Drawing & Print
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Drawing & Print
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
In his project Instituto de Vision (2008), Consuegra investigates how modernism gave rise to many new technological forms of vision, most notably the camera, yet also resulted in the disappearance of outmoded forms of vision...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
Drawing & Print
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
Drawing & Print
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Drawing & Print
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Drawing & Print
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community...
Oliver Laric’s video Versions is part of an ongoing body of work that has continued to evolve and mutate over time...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...
In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
Drawing & Print
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...