Art

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Art

A Pair of Two-Story-Tall Pigeons Make a Home in Delhi During This Year’s Lodhi Art Festival

Artist Adele Renault (previously here and here) creates large-scale paintings of pigeons, highlighting the spectacular feather patterns and hues that might otherwise go unnoticed at the birds’ small scale. Recently the Belgian artist completed a mural of two grey and blue-toned pigeons for St+art India’s Lodhi Street Art Festival in Delhi. The bird on the right has its mouth agape, squawking at the one on the left from the other side of a window that peers into a courtyard. Programming for the festival runs through the end of March, 2019. You can view more of Renault’s large-scale paintings on her website and Instagram, and take a look at her Amsterdam-based space Unruly Gallery which she runs with collaborator Niels Shoe Meulman. (via Street Art News)

Art

Pensive Faces Peer Out From the Pages of Bronze Book Sculptures by Paola Grizi

Italian sculptor Paola Grizi creates bronze sculptures of faces emerging from the tousled pages of books, often with an exposed hand that appears to gently push aside the pages. Some of the pieces are sculpted as traditional novels, while others are more abstract— bronze pieces of paper folded and stacked in cube-like formations. The enduring metal works are meant honor the physicality of printed materials, resources which are quickly being lost due to the ease and immediacy of technological devices. You can see more of Grizi’s literary sculptures on Instagram.  (via My Modern Met)

Art

1,440 Portraits Emerge from a Single Ink Drawing in a New Animation by Jake Fried

In an impressive feat of dedication and patience, artist Jake Fried (previously) spent seven months creating Brain Wave, a hand-drawn animation using only ink and white-out. Fried reworked the same black-and-white drawing 1,440 times, scanning each new iteration into Photoshop and sequencing the drawings to play at 24 frames per second. He then added an original music track that frantically connects the hundreds of drawings into one 60-second video.

Centered both literally and narratively around a single, ever-changing face, the short animation takes the viewer through a wide range of emotions, settings, and themes. Because every frame is a new work of art, the piece as a whole feels like snapshots from a dream that have been remembered, recreated, and reassembled.

Working without an outline or storyboard, Fried explained to Vimeo that each successive drawing dictated what would come next. “There is an inherent logic or rhythm that emerges as I make the work, I have developed an instinct or gut-feeling for when the next frame is ready to be scanned. I can get quite obsessive about the smallest shifts within a fraction of a second.”  The filmmakers’s work will be featured later this month at the Flat Earth Film Festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland from February 10-14, 2019 and in a group exhibition at Mills Gallery in Boston from February 23 through April 28, 2019. To see more of Fried’s work online, follow him on Instagram. (via Vimeo Staff Picks)

 

Art

Overlapping Jewel-Toned Fabrics Fill the Nave of a Former Italian Church in a New Installation by Quintessenz

Thomas Granseuer and Tomislav Topic, known as the art duo Quintessenz (previously), recently completed a new hanging fabric installation at CARME, an arts center located inside a former church in Brescia, Italy. Despite the numerous indoor and outdoor locations the pair have installed their signature semi-transparent fabrics, Carme Genesis is the first time they’ve worked within the architecture of a church. Due to the piece’s position at the center of the nave, guests can walk parallel to the hanging work, or cross directly underneath on the building’s first floor. Each perspective presents a new layering of colors, bringing a shifting dimensionality to the collection of flat, hanging textiles. Carme Genesis runs through March 3, 2019. You can see more of Quintessenz’s installations on their website and Instagram.

Art

Impasto Mountains Rise from the Canvas in Richly Textured Paintings by Conrad Jon Godly

Conrad Jon Godly (previously) paints in thick, impasto strokes to form snow-capped peaks and mountain ranges in icy black, white, and blue. The textured formations on canvas have feathered edges that mimic the high altitude wind, a technique that makes you almost feel the subject’s arctic blast. The works are at once abstract and hyperreal. Blunt gestures of his paint knife obscure any sort of image at close viewing, and yet a pristine image of a mountain comes into view when one takes a few steps back.

Godly grew up in Davos, Switzerland amid the Swiss Alps, an environment that has become his muse. “My surroundings have a huge influence on me, artistically and personally,” he explains in the press release of his current exhibition To See is Not to Speak at JD Malat Gallery in London. “I don’t see myself as a landscape painter, I am interested in capturing the mood and feeling of light, or the reflection of the moon on snow.”

Godly had a previous life as a photographer where he learned how to harness light and understand visual texture. These lessons he brings into his large-scale canvases, which evoke the moody experience of cloudy mountain ranges covered in fresh snow. Currently the artist lives between Switzerland and Japan. His work is currently being exhibited at the Zona Maco art fair in Mexico City with JD Malat Gallery until February 10, 2019, and his solo exhibition with the gallery runs through March 2, 2019. You can see more of Godly’s paintings on his website and Instagram.

Art

Flowers Blossom From the Bodies of Wild Animals in New Graphite and Acrylic Works by Nunzio Paci

Bologna-based Italian artist Nunzio Paci (previously) fills his artwork with images that evoke aspects of human knowledge dating back centuries, such as anatomy, botany, and natural medicine. In his works animals are illustrated with lush plants and flowers, elements which seem to grow and thrive straight from their core. Although a touch morbid, the pieces also have a sense of lightness—there is beauty that can be found in rebirth. This fall Paci will be Artist-in-Residence at Lingnan University in Hong Kong where he will teach a Studio Practice course and work on his own projects to prepare for a solo exhibition. You can see more of his anatomical illustrations and paintings on Instagram and Facebook.

Art

Lavish Portraits of Missouri Citizens by Kehinde Wiley

Painter Kehinde Wiley is renowned for his large-scale portraits of Black subjects (perhaps most notably President Barack Obama). His most recent body of work is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and draws inspiration from eight works of art in the museum’s collection, which are referenced in all but one of his paintings’ titles. Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis is comprised of 11 portraits of people the artist met in 2017 on the city’s north side and in nearby Ferguson, the community where 18-year-old unarmed Black citizen Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in 2014.

“My job is to see things in an accurate context in a society where so often black people are reduced to simple stereotypes,” Wiley explained in an interview with the St. Louis American. “What I’m doing is slowing down and taking time to honor people from every little detail of their being.  From their nails to the type of jeans that they are wearing – or that sort of timidity or boldness of their character.” The resulting portraits are filled with Wiley’s signature jewel tones and elaborate pattern work that interacts with his subjects, both showcasing and enveloping each figure. As contemporary Black Americans in their own clothing strike the grand postures of white Europeans of centuries past, Wiley juxtaposes the traditions and tensions of race and representation in the art world.

Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum (which is free and open to the public) in Saint Louis, Missouri until February 10, 2019. You can watch a video of the artist’s in-depth talk at the museum here. Wiley also shares his completed and in-progress works on Instagram. (via Hyperallergic)