June 21, 2012
Elizabeth Murray (1940 – 2007) was an American painter. In 1967, Murray moved to New York, and first exhibited in 1971 in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition. One of her first mature works included ‘Children Meeting,’ 1978 (now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, New York), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, color, and lines. She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings.
In 1999, Murray was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. This grant led directly to opening of the Bowery Poetry Club, a Lower East Side performance arts venue run by her husband, Bob Holman. In 2007, Murray died of lung cancer. In her obituary, the ‘New York Times’ wrote that she ‘reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself…’
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June 10, 2012
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century. Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series ‘Homage to the Square.’ In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with nested squares.
Painting usually on Masonite (an engineered wood product), he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded colors used on the back of his works. Albers’s work represents a transition between traditional European art and the new American art. It incorporated European influences from the constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, and its intensity and smallness of scale were typically European. But his influence fell heavily on American artists of the late 1950s and the 1960s. ‘Hard-edge’ abstract painters drew on his use of patterns and intense colors, while Op artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception.
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June 10, 2012
Richard Anuszkiewicz [an-uhskey-vich] (b. 1930) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and with German artist Josef Albers, at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts. He was one of the founders and foremost exponents of Op Art, a movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s which explore optical illusions. Victor Vasarely in France and Bridget Riley in England were his primary international counterparts.
In 1964, ‘Life’ magazine called him ‘one of the new wizards of Op.’ More recently, while reflecting on a New York City gallery show of Anuszkiewicz’s from 2000, the ‘New York Times’ art critic Holland Cotter described Anuszkiewicz’s paintings by stating, ‘The drama — and that feels like the right word — is in the subtle chemistry of complementary colors, which makes the geometry glow as if light were leaking out from behind it.’
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June 5, 2012
Matt Mullican (b. 1951) is a American artist and son of abstract painter Lee Mullican. He received his BFA from CalArts in 1974, and rose to prominence as a member of the ‘Pictures Generation,’ a group of artists know for their appropriation of images from the consumer and media saturated age in which they grew to maturity.
Mullican’s work is concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Mullican also works with the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it. Mullican has taught and lectured at Columbia University, The Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), The London Institute, Chelsea College of Art and Design, and The School of Visual Arts (NY).
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June 5, 2012
Jim Woodring (b. 1952) is an American cartoonist, fine artist, writer, and toy designer. He is best known for the dream-based comics he published in his magazine ‘Jim,’ and as the creator of the cartoon character Frank, a bipedal, bucktoothed animal of uncertain species with a short tail, described by Woodring as a ‘generic anthropomorph’ and ‘naive but not innocent,’ ‘capable of sinning by virtue of not knowing what he’s really about.’ The character design is reminiscent those of old American animated shorts from the 1920s and 1930s, such as from Fleischer Studios.
Since he was a child, Woodring has experienced hallucinatory ‘apparitions,’ which have inspired much of his surreal work. He keeps an ‘autojournal’ of his dreams, which have formed the basis of some of his comics. His most famous creation is fictional—the pantomime comics set in the universe he calls the Unifactor, usually featuring Frank.
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June 5, 2012
assume vivid astro focus (avaf) is both an alias of Brazilian-born New York-based artist Eli Sudbrack, and the name of an international group of visual and performance artists, with French multimedia artist Christophe Hamaide-Pierson as a main collaborators. Sudbrack was born in 1968 and moved to New York in 1998.
He exhibited there in 2000, at which time he used the name Superastrolab, switching to assume vivid astro focus in 2001, the name always rendered in lowercase. The name derives from two musical sources: Throbbing Gristle’s album ‘Assume Power Focus,’ and the band Ultra Vivid Scene. avaf’s work includes painting, drawing, photography, film, and digital technology.
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June 5, 2012
Kenny Scharf (b. 1958) is an American painter who lives in Brooklyn, whose works consist of popular culture based art with made up science-related backgrounds.
Scharf came to prominence in the 80s interdisciplinary art scene making sparkly, pop-ed, and monstrous paintings and installations.
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June 3, 2012
Alva Noto is a stage name of sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes.
He is a member of the music groups Signal (with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender aka Byetone) and Cyclo (with Ryoji Ikeda).
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May 16, 2012
Martin Sharp (b. 1942) is an Australian artist, underground cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker. His famous psychedelic posters of Bob Dylan, Donovan, and others, rank as classics of the genre, alongside the work of Rick Griffin, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, and Milton Glaser.
His covers, cartoons and illustrations were a central feature of ‘Oz’ magazine, both in Australia and in London. Martin co-wrote one of Cream’s most famous songs, ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses,’ created the cover art for Cream’s ‘Disraeli Gears’ and ‘Wheels of Fire’ albums, and in the 1970s, he became a champion of singer Tiny Tim, and of Sydney’s embattled Luna Park.
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May 10, 2012
Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte (b. 1947), better known as ORLAN, is a French artist. She lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. She was invited to be a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, for the 2006-2007 academic year. She sits on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy (a suburb of Paris).
Although ORLAN is best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early-to-mid 1990s, she has not limited her work to a particular medium.
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May 1, 2012
James Jean is a Taiwanese-American visual artist, known for both his commercial and fine art gallery work. He is also known in the American comics industry as a cover artist for various books published by DC Comics, as well as for his work for Prada, ESPN, and Atlantic Records. His work, which has been collected in numerous volumes, has been compared to Maxfield Parrish (known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery). Jean was born in Taiwan and was raised in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. He illustrated covers for the comic book series ‘Fables’ and ‘The Umbrella Academy.’ In 2008, Jean retired from illustration and commercial projects to focus on painting.
In 2007, Jean created a mural for the Prada Epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. He also created a backdrop for Prada’s Spring/Summer 2008 show in Milan. Aspects of the Epicenter mural and the Milan wallpaper were transformed into clothing, handbags, shoes, and packaging. Prada undertook a global campaign that featured Jean’s work in advertising environments, animation, and special events. Jean developed an animated short based on the theme titled ‘Trembled Blossoms,’ taken from the poem ‘Ode to Psyche,’ by John Keats (one of his darker and more experimental odes). In 2010, Jean was commissioned by fashion designer Phillip Lim to paint a series of portraits featuring Los Angeles-based actors, musicians, and tastemakers, including Rachel Bilson, Selma Blair, and Devendra Banhart.
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April 9, 2012
Romain de Tirtoff (1892 – 1990) was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté [er-tey], the French pronunciation of his initials, R.T. He was a diversely talented 20th-century artist and designer who flourished in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theater, and opera, and interior decor.
Tirtoff was born in Saint Petersburg, to a distinguished family with roots tracing back to 1548. In 1910, Romain moved to Paris to pursue a career as a designer. He made this decision despite strong objections from his father, who wanted him to continue the family tradition and become a naval officer. Romain assumed his pseudonym to avoid disgracing the family.
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