Art Fairs Newspaper Summer

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

ART FAIRS INTERNATIONAL

A BRIDGE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

NEWSPAPER ©2012 ART FAIRS INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER

Art Hamptons:

A Spectacular Venue in 2012

ArtHamptons has a new home. This summer, to accommodate the event’s growing popularity, the fair moves to a larger and more suitable location, the Sculpture Fields of Nova’s Ark, just 1,000 yards from the 2011 site. It will be situated on an amazingly bucolic 97 acre nature preserve, featuring a dramatic Sculpture Park, serene pastures with grazing horses and sheep, and polo fields (with several games scheduled during the fair). Our new home at Nova’s Ark Project is located on Millstone Road off Scuttle Hole Road in Bridgehampton, a site well-known for many charity events including the ever popular Super Saturday fundraiser.

Now in its’ 5th successful year, ArtHamptons has not only become the quintessential Hamptons art/social event of

the season, but also blossomed into the nation’s premiere summer fine art fair. In 2011, over 9,500 Hamptonites (a show record) streamed through the aisles to experience the art from 80 respected galleries. International in scope, the fair showcased prominent dealers from 10 countries around the world (UK, Spain, Germany, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Israel, Greece, Russia, Japan, China and Korea.) As the word spreads around the art world of ArtHamptons sales success, we expect even greater international flavored participation. Our Selection Committee will select only those galleries with compelling art programs offering the highest caliber of art, excellent reputations and that exhibit the utmost integrity. 

Contemporary Focused, SH Contemporary Serving primarily the development of the region’s art markets, SH Contemporary is an efficient commercial platform and a curatorially-led project, displaying the most interesting new finds in contemporary art to discerning international collectors and art lovers.

The 2011 edition saw a growth in sales of emerging and renowned Asian and Western artists and a renewed energy with the participation of 90 galleries - complemented by 30 individual artists’ projects - over 30 private museums and institutions, 500 invited collectors and 35.000 visitors. [CONT. ON PAGE A3]

NEW YORK, Issue #17 Summer 2012

Great Britain £ 4 Japan ¥ 750 Canada $7.00 USA $10.00

Presented by

ARTS

A New Scene in New Delhi Held in New Delhi from September 27th through the 30th, United Art Fair seeks to present a carefully curated body of work representative of both the Indian and International contemporary art scene. This year’s “Art Walks” will provide visitors with an opportunity to experience the art through the eyes and mind of an expert as they are guided through the fair by an accomplished curator.

The seminar program, an integral part of the United Art Fair, will feature discussions on carefullychosen topics relevant to the current art scene in India and abroad.

The topics will focus on new artistic trends, their reception, art collection, art education and archiving issues pertinent to modern and contemporary art practices.

The sculpture park will be one of the focal points of the art fair. It will be designed to combine creativity with space and landscape, enabling access to and enjoyment of the best of contemporary sculptures in natural surroundings. The curated sculpture park will offer both artists and visitors a chance to experience the beautiful interplay between art and nature. The park will display the works of both emerging and master artists.

India has grown as a destination of important art market. The most respected galleries across the world will participate with the new and finest works by both renowned artists and young talents. The fair will accompany several collateral events in the city to offer diverse form of art to the visitors. 

artMRKT Hamptons: A Luxury Experience artMRKT Hamptons, a contemporary and modern art fair, will feature 40 leading galleries from across the U.S. who will present painting, sculpture, drawings, photography, video and installation. Showcasing a tightly focused selection of work by important artists in a boutique setting, artMRKT Hamptons will create an ideal context for the discovery, exploration, and acquisition of art.

Our Opening Night Benefit for the Parrish Art Museum is going to be something truly special this year.

We are proud to be working with noted Brooklyn chef Leon Gunn to

Featured Stories SH Contemporary Page A3

artMRKT Hamptons Page A3

Francesca Woodman Page A7

Matthew Ritchie’s Universal Quest Page A7

[CONTINUES ON PAGE A3]

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New Worlds: Lill-Anita O. Svendsen

by Rose Hobart Norwegian painter Lill-Anita O. Svendsen is an artist whose process and philosophy are both heavily tied to her work. Svendsen, whose imagery is evocative of hallucinatory still-lifes’ and landscapes, believes in the multidimensional nature of space and the transformational properties of paint.

Her work has undergone a multitude of notable transitions as her oeuvre expands both formally and thematically.

Her topics range from psychic dimensions, film’s import on painting and the interior vs exterior.

Earlier paintings, such as those from 2011, all revolve around a central motif: a dining room table set for com- pany.

The table, guiding the composition of the work, stands hauntingly alone; empty plates and untouched silverware act as stand-ins for dinner guests who never arrived. Though the table setting is easily identifiable, the rest of the work straddles a fine line between realism and abstraction. Beyond the table exist translucent panes of acrylic, masking

forest pokes through the living room setting. The green palette, in combination with the striking emptiness of the image, creates an alienating effect. This effect is incredibly captivating. So I spoke with Svendsen to discover more.

Rose Hobart: I love the lush color of your new pieces in 2012. The monochrome backgrounds create a mysterious environment. The color is a major shift from the color in your works in 2011, yet it is equally emotionally charged. Can you talk about this new change?

Lill-Anita O. Svendsen: I am greatly inspired by the colors in the movie Avatar in these new works. I’ve seen the movie 7 times and love it as much as the first. In particular, the colors and the light struck me in the ground when I first saw it. They used these ethereal colors, which I have only seen when I meditate and it was overwhelming to see on a screen. Ini-

Wild Patterns, Marcel Bastiaans

by Jill Smith

the ambiguous setting of the house’s exterior. These planes, reminiscent of those used in analytical cubism, create a cloudy atmosphere, revealing a domestic interior that is not so much comforting as mysterious and unnerving.

A painterly technique, coupled with Svendsen’s inventive and vibrant employment of hue, augments the visual complexities of her work. In Rode Toner, for example, Svendsen plays with the conventions of color, using a watery, sky blue tone in the foreground and vertical planes, which should exist within the house’s interior according to perspective. The aqua contrasts with the fiery orange and bold red applied to the background. This color switch tricks the viewer’s eye, confusing interior and exterior, implying the existence of an entirely new shape of space altogether.

Svendsen’s most recent works take a dramatic turn, delving more intensely into her aesthetic. In 2012, the artist takes her exploration of dimensions to another level, altering her imagery and technique. In a reduction from the kaleidoscopic color found in the 2011 works, those of 2012 are nearly monochrome. Harnessing acid green as her signature hue, Svendsen brings the natural world indoors. In Between Two Worlds, the artist depicts a clear interior; however, flourishing vegetation overtakes the space. Roots arise from the green ground, snaking around a ghostly, red sofa — Svendsen’s reinterpretation of her own motif. The lush A2

tially, I didn’t dare try using these colors. When I saw Avatar again a few months ago, I decided that I had to do an experiment. I knew that I had to expose myself, by telling openly that Avatar was such a great source of inspiration. And yet the movie is not entirely politically correct. I think that every one must follow her own path and be true to themselves and their ideas, without be- ing captured in a web of what is defined politically correct at the time.

RH: That’s exciting. I also enjoy the window motif in your new works, it’s more pronounced than table motif in your earlier paintings. It encourages us to look beyond the picture plane and drift somewhere else in thought and emotion. Is this intentional? What do you want the viewer to see?

LS: I am interested in adventure and mystery; the conscious and unconscious. These areas are located in our brains at the mental level and manifest at a physical level of being. The use of light, in thin layers of transparent colors, is a way to highlight different perceptions - not only physical visions, but also other psychic worlds. I hope that viewers will recognize their emotions and dreams by looking at my paintings. I hope that viewers will get a form of recognition in the form of emotions and dreams by looking at my paintings.

[CONTINUES ON PAGE A4]

Marcel Bastiaans started painting when he was eight years old. Realizing that he was different at a young age, he took his childish spontaneity and uncontrolled emotion into his future career. His artworks are positive, joyful, based on dreams, on freedom. The recurrent image of a bird symbolizes that freedom. He is willful; he paints what he wants to paint, and the way he wants to paint it. Each work is a copy of the original in his mind; a combination of emotion, realism, and abstraction. There is a recognizable element, de-contextualized, and integrated into a new, graphical environment, entirely based on the artist’s impression and preference.

He uses acrylic and oil paint, gold leaf and shell, and applies several thin layers on the canvas. Colors contrast with each other, and therefore at the same time, they are in balance. You can see the stratification in each work: firm lines are intersecting; they create a grid; a pattern of squares, now and then confidently filled with a color that covers certain parts of a realistic subject. Those unusual colors prove that Bastiaans sees reality as an illusion, it can be changed.

A warm yellow, almost like honey, is the central color in Great Tit, supported by purple, sky-blue, white, and black squares. The black, brown, and orange lines – some of them are parallel, others are not–almost seem to create a birdcage, but they do not enclose the image of the bird. The fragile bird is combined with brutally shaped rectangles, dominating the painting, until the subject disappears and the environment becomes the center of the attention. By using similar colors, and larger open areas, there is a lot of breathing space in this work. The bird looks into the direction of that open space, its beak resting upon one of the horizontal lines. It is a captivating piece.

In Energy! the fresh green and purple are balanced. Nevertheless, you can sense a kind of creative madness. Black, white and red squares catch the eye, covering specific areas of Albert Einstein’s face, like patches. Einstein, of course, be- ing one of the preeminent thinkers of the 20th century, is depicted in a very playful manner. After all, he did state, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Even when he is not using the characteristic maze in his artworks, Bastiaans is still referring to squares and rectangles. Sometimes he uses them to build an idea of a city, as a background for a robin. Sometimes he just uses vertical lines, to indicate a direction. The results are forceful directional lines that capture great movement. I recently interviewed Bastiaans to find out more about his wonderful work.

Jill Smith: Your starting point seems to be reality, which you de-contextualize by using unusual colors or an abstract frame- work. Is that approach based on your impression of that reality?

Marcel Bastiaans: Yes. For me, reality is an illusion. “You are what you think.” And that can be changed all the time.

I create a ‘flick-flack’ effect. The subject pops up. Then the rest, or a part, of the painting follows.... The subject disappears. And then it goes the other way round. Everything is knitted together by lines, abstract shapes and characters and become one thought, which can also change. So reality changes all the time. It is what you think, see or become aware of. It is a game of focusing. What do you want to see!

About my colors: A pink tree is still a tree.... I play with colors and contrasts for a bigger impact and larger understanding of myself. Therefore, this fragility near brutal and harsh shapes combinations is a way to make image silent and loud, as light faces dark, making both sides scream for attention!

JS: What are you working on right now? And are there any new projects coming up?

MB: This past year has been busy. I’ve had two exhibitions in Innsbruck Austria (chosen by an international jury) and Florence Italy (two, one with ‘Society Artists Florence’) last year, the solo-exhibition ‘SigNature’ in The Netherlands and ‘Home and Abroad’ in New York all at the beginning of this year. Most recently, I have been invited to exhibit in Barcelona in the Gaudi building ‘Casa Batllo’ in Spain this summer. So, at the moment I am painting fiercely for the Barcelona exhibition and completing a huge painting for The Dutch RABO-Bank collection, next to a couple of experimental paintings for Porsche Headquarters. Next to that, new projects are coming up as a new series for the ‘Arroganze’ exhibition in The Netherlands. And the exhibition will be held in the Palace built by the De Medici family in Florence Italy. Finally, I am painting a new series I hope to exhibit some day in the United States. It’s all emotion, you know. That is what it is. It’s pure emotion. Energy.

Judging from his recent track record, Bastiaans is an artist at the height to his career. His seminal paintings explore the interaction between opposites. Made visible when he investigates the connection between reality and illusion, silence and noise, curves and straight lines. These are the qualities of true experimental artists. 

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

Contemporary Focused Shanghai,

SH Contemporary

The 6th edition of the fair is organized into 2 main sections, providing visitors with a selection of cutting-edge and emerging art, including video, film, photography and new media.

With the clear mission of contributing to the international development of the Asian art scene, SH Contemporary will focus on new works by famous artists, as well as on emerging artists and galleries and on international galleries who are actively developing their approach to the market in the Asia Pacific region.

Shanghai is central to SH Contemporary. The fair will be held inside and outside the walls of the Exhibition Centre, involving galleries, the city’s cultural and educational institutions, alternative and independent art spaces, and the most advanced expressions of the city’s creative industries and the media.

By visiting Shanghai during the days of SH Contemporary, collectors and visitors will have a sense of the energies that are reshaping the art world, while international galleries will have the opportunity to take a central stage in an evolving market, exposing their artists to a public that is highly enthusiastic about contemporary art. [CONT. FROM PAGE A1]

artMRKT Hamptons: A Luxury Experience [CONT. FROM PAGE A1] welcome the Parrish Art Museum members, donors and board to our preview event on Thursday, July 19th. An alumni of Wolfgang Puck, Aria, Noho Star and Williamsburg Brooklyn’s Traif restaurants, Leon will be serving up his refined take on the quintessential Hamptons dining experience, the summer barbecue.

Tickets: 3 Day Ticket - $35 online / $40 at door - includes: Admission During Regular Fair Hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday 1 Day Ticket - $20 online / $25 at door - includes: Admission During Regular Fair Hours on Friday, Saturday OR Sunday

-Issue No. 17, Summer 2012Publisher Abraham Lubelski Executive Editor Rose Hobart Editorial Dept Jill Smith Jordan Hoston Curtis Jackson

Copyright NY Arts Magazine 1995-2012. All rights reserved.

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Hours: Thursday, July 19 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm. Opening Night Benefit Preview Reception. Thursday, July 19 - 8:00pm to 10:00pm. Opening Night Party Regular Fair Hours: Friday, July 20, 2012 - 11:00am to 7:00pm Saturday, July 21, 2012 - 11:00am to 7:00pm Sunday, July 22, 2012 - noon to 6:00pm

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New Worlds: Lill-Anita O. Svendsen [CONT. FROM PAGE A2]

RH: Where do you find your inspiration to paint?

Is it personal?

LS: I find great inspiration in children’s art, adventure, science fiction and street art, although they are not physically present in my images. Yet probably my biggest inspiration comes from sharing ideas regarding “the nature of reality?”

RH: What new projects are you working on?

LS: I want to work on more projects concerning multiple dimensions and energies. My truths and experiences may be to- tally different from other people, which asks the question “what is truth and who dictates that what I feel and “see” is not a truth?” Likewise, I can not sit and tell other people that their experiences are not true for them.

Svendsen use of the windowpane motif and interior are exceptional directions filled with psychological import. Her incorporation of the window into her works engages us further in her dialogue between interior and exterior, acting as a gateway between the two worlds the artist attempts to merge. In some images, she employs a skewed perspective causing the window to hover precariously over transparent tables, seemingly unattached to a structure. The monochromatic nature of the work hinders the perception of depth, leaving the viewer in what is—quite literally—a hazy place.

This hazy place is the starting point for a lot of Svendsen’s thematic ideas. Garnering ideas from Avatar—which is about a longing for a Pangaea, a new world, and a hybrid race—she is creating images that take us into new dimensions. These works function as a conduit into astral projection. Astral projection is an interpretation of out-of-body experience that assumes the existence of an “astral body” separate from the physical body and capable of traveling outside it. Astral projection or travel denotes the astral body leaving the physical body to travel in the astral plane.

Rooted in religious thought, astral projection happens when the consciousness or soul of the spiritual traveler leaves the physical body and travels in his/her dreambody or astral body. Their ascent is into higher realms of existence. One might naturally ask: what are we really seeing when viewing a Svendsen painting? Are there actually any walls surrounding Svendsen’s dinner tables? In her window motifs, A4

there are vaguely emerging trees and shrubs, but in what direction are you looking? Are we in an alternate world, safely trying to get a glimpse of the world beyond? Or are you having a picnic, while a fresh breeze is blowing through your hair? Svendsen’s artworks do not give the spectator that certainty of what is interior and exterior; it is like a surreal game of the eye and the mind. She creates different dimensions, a new reality, maybe one that goes further than a physical level. Much like in a video game, where walls and floors are constantly changing, looming or disappearing, the artist brings perspective to the canvas in an expressionist way. Even though the artwork is completed in a formal sense, it is still moving, constantly transforming. This quality lends itself to a cinematic reading.

This cinematic reading is also enlivened by her color use.

The colors that are used, either give the idea of a hot summer day, full of electrifying hues, or a grey, cheerless rainy day. There is no reference to any kind of ‘real’ light, which reinforces the feeling of being close to nature, being outside.

And yet, the paintings have the same intensity of Matisse’s interiors, both in color as in composition: abandoned and yet full of possibilities. Her softer, more transparent colors remind me of Luc Tuymans’ interiors: clean, almost frightening, and uncomfortable. Svendsen’s work finds a kinship with Luc Tuymans in the handling of the paint and emotive subject matter. Tuymans has painted intimate, figurative works since the mid 1980s and few artists can be as closely identified with a particular palette. The best artists have managed to express their selfhood in a way that invites us to explore our own Svendsen is no exception. She is creating works which evoke an exciting interaction between what appears to be reality and what most certainly is hallucination.

Svendsen’s recent work is con- temporary, fresh and experimental. Like a déjà-vu, you are not sure if it actually happened or if it is just a combination of earlier events. She magnificently takes the traditional approach of still life, landscape, and interior and brings it to a higher, more sophisticated level. Perhaps, through Svendsen’s works, we can all dis- cover a plane of contemplation that allows for an experience unmediated by the constraints of reality.  http://www.lillanita.com/

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

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Layered Language:

The Paintings of Mark Moffett

By Rose Hobart

Layered, transparent, mesmerizing— these are the qualities that are most present in Mark Moffett’s new encaustic paintings. Recently showing at Broadway Gallery, NYC, Moffett’s paintings are some of the most challenging pieces on view as they navigate the line be- tween figuration and abstraction. The three pieces being exhibited are built up, glaze upon thin glaze of color, interspersed with linear patterns that feel diagrammatic and work discretely to create a rich panorama. There is a transformative, evolving quality to the works that keeps the viewer in a state of intangible suspense. They are works well suited to the digital age, where information over- load lends itself to the narrative of painting. Although you can clearly see the figurative elements, Moffett’s network of lines does not tell a linear story. Rather, they are more visual motifs, icons that lead us into new ways of seeing the original image.

Some of his works are very easy to absorb; one strong line marks the silhouette of a man, a woman, or an animal. In Drifter, a deep, saturated red background is the backdrop for a Pangaea image (the supercontinent formed around 300 million years ago, that began to rift and drift apart around 200 million years ago—to eventually form the continents as we know them today). The image, superimposed over, among other things, a map- ping of major constellations, is presented in three stages of expansion, repeating like a fetus shape that alters and kerns slightly in space. It is quite literally drifting, seemingly floating in a void of lost and immeasurable time. This piece carries a profound affect that is poetic and mysterious.

In the case of Flèche, the diagram of a plant is presented like an image Moffett couldn’t erase no matter how many layers of information he threw at it. Set in a nebulous gray-green field, a variety of motifs vie for attention: swimming fish, organic clusters of the Ebola virus, a man steadying a woman in a handstand, a cartoonish skeletal figure in gold, a figurative fragment from what appears to be Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, and finally, an elusive cupid figure who appears to have launched an arrow—which rhymes with the painting’s title, Flèche, or arrow.

Taken individually or together, these elements seem to have no particular meaning, but they work with the image of the plant—like another kind of arrow, a plant shoot—in a way that suggests pollution, and coalesce into a haunting portrait of life’s tenacity under duress.

In another example, LL, you can see a woman, sensually curving her body like a dancer. She is positioned against a blood red background, surrounded A6

by falling leaves. Upon closer inspection, you notice the form of a jellyfish, like a cage or a net, by which the ballerina is taken prisoner. And then suddenly a looming presence emerges— a frenzied skeleton, roaring like a maniac. The conflation of terror with beauty makes for a gripping psychological image. This piece plays on vanitas imagery, and resonates with such works as Hans Baldung’s Der Tod und das Mädchen, from 1517. Baldung’s painting portrays death as a grizzly old figure coming from behind, pulling a nude’s hair. Her face recoils in peril.

Moffett’s work in contrast implies this sensation of terror through the use of color and the layering of separate emblematic states: the woman is poised, the jellyfish entraps, and death dances a mad jig. Here death is interwoven and is more an idea of what death is.

Although it isn’t always possible to step away from Moffett’s work and negotiate with it as a consolidated statement, it is clear that his purview is stretched to encompass irreconcilables, or at least opposing charges.

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

partly visible or blurry, as if trying to escape the frame.

As photographer and model, she projected a diffuse intimacy that dissuaded a voyeuristic reaction from the viewer. Although monochromatic, her blue and sienna prints arranged like collages, have a classic Greek/Roman composition (e.g., "Caryatid," 1980). The images are ephemeral and temporal, serial in their narrative-intuitive photographic magic; bodies appear and disappear, complimented by psychosexual references lifted directly from surrealist literature. Woodman arduously studied such texts in Rome at the Libreria Maldoror, a bookshop-gallery that specialized in work about and by surrealists, and which ultimately hosted her first small show. Indeed, she made use of many surrealist motifs, among them mirrors, gloves, birds and bowls. Like Magritte, she often shrouded her subjects in white sheets; like Man Ray, she painted body parts, especially hands. And as Hans Bellmer did, she bound her legs

tightly with tape, and perhaps like Claude Cahun she used mirrors to emphasize ambiguous sexuality.

Woodman's assemblages of objects form nightmarish environments for her nudes, well thought out in advance and spray-painted white, with fragments of the decomposition producing a patchwork of urban decay, a crazy quilt of her fragile and complex emotional landscape, her contradictory impulses and equivocal questions. Never sexually provocative, her work merely suggests loneliness (“I could no longer stay, I could not play by instinct”), romantic hopelessness wrapped around eels, unrequited love and death and sometime a bit of self-masochism, as in clothespins attached to her nude breasts and stomach.

Any eroticism that does come through is almost sadistic or sarcastic, as in the plaster mask placed between the open legs of a headless nude to guard the vulva, or three nude girls hiding their faces behind Woodman’s black and white headshots. Obscurity and ghostly apparitions were favorite settings for her narrative: Francesca became a saint or an angel, and then she fell from grace into a corner, onto crumbling walls, with windows to nowhere, her image disappearing into the perimeters, dissolving into smoke or morning fog, or becoming one with the trees. She achieved a chameleonlike invisibility, as in a composition with ferns glued to her arms, held

upside down like a reflection of pine trees in a lake.

The artist's body oozes out of a grave or from a fireplace and floats like a vapor evaporating into the air.

It is clear that she did not use improvisation or chance operational systems, but instead invented her own neo-surrealist language that explored mysticism, as in her nude in a crucifying position hanging from the doorframe. Her first published artist book was called “Some Distorted Interiors Geometries” (1980-'81), which that reveals that the “magical dexterity of a fugue” can be found her theory and practice, complimented by drawings and photos.

Woodman has been called a feminist, but she was not political or aware enough to be a feminist and felt guilty about it, and she had the most intense girl crushes. She loved women, although she was ambivalent about being one of them. She was infatuated with Gertrude Stein’s writings and obsessed with the photographer Deborah Turbeville, whose work —along with Duane Michal and Miroslav Tichy’s — most directly precedes and now seems to echo hers.

As 1980 ended, she was very depressed from a broken romance, a denied grant application, and a stolen bicycle. Most importantly, she abruptly stopped taking her meds for psychological problems. That marked the end of her life narrative, but after a historical reconsideration, Woodman’s art has become immortal. 

How would God, if he were an artist or a scientist, see our universe from beginning to end in fast-forward? We can find the answer to that question in Matthew Ritchie's multimedia works. The objects he creates are monumental and thrilling.

Ritchie started to think about the universe and its artistic representation in the 1990s by merging together physics, art, mythology, philosophy, religion and history. By starting with the notion of science as the new art, as well as the new religion, he created multiple parallel mythologies and cosmogonies. His apocalyptic video projection, Augur (L & M Art, 2011), starts with a view of the sun from the depths of murky water, then, closer to the surface, a single cell outline, and later, creatures emerge from the water. Then, a tremendous wind whips over the landscape and fires burn living things into metal skeletons. The musical accompaniment–a Bryce Dessner composition – is an ethereal and partly baroque, partly complex arrangement of noise of that could be the sound of parallel universes. Ritchie makes the viewer think about all the possible complexities of life: physical, biological and socio-ecological.

The Morning Line, a sonic, Gothic-like temple is an imposing 10 meters high and 20 meters long, built of 20 tons of black-coated aluminum, intended to draw in the surrounding universe. Ritchie collected data on the human cell, the sacred unit of our measurement, and prison cells.

He recognized that everything was designed around a geometric pattern and saw similarities in our genetic make-up and prison structures. He made several different drawings of all these things and then layered semi-transparent papers on top of each other until they created a kind

of information tunnel. In the end, he scanned them into the computer and created the final image, which he sent to a metal-shop to be cut out and assembled. From his drawings, design innovators Aranda/Lash, the Music Research Centre of York University and Arup AGU, designed a three-dimensional structure of which each part could be replicated at an exponentially smaller scale until it reached the size of a nano spectrum.

Ritchie called it a quantum building, because one piece can support 22 other smaller ones and so on until infinity. The final product is an amazing structure that captures not only the dimensions of space but its moving energies as well. Ritchie's philosophical, theological, and scientific approach works to evoke a sense of the universe, as well as our beliefs and knowledge about it. He wants to "describe the whole spectrum of experience, simultaneously."

The structure of The Morning Line is amazing. Standing within it, you can see the sky, but what you are acutally looking at is the metal curves drawn on the sky. Part of the structure is a glass wall, and on it, images of the universe and apocalyptic videos are projected. You hear stories, recounted by various people and music—classical pieces mixed with sounds created by the structure itself or composed by contemporary musicians inspired by the sculpture. The Morning Line is sensitive to the site’s ever-changing environment. It is a complex and aweinspiring experience.

While The Morning Line tries to reconstruct the universe in a physical way, “Monstrance,” Ritchie's recently closed show at L & M Art in Los Angeles, returns to mythological interpretation. Monstrance, meaning "show" in Latin, is a ritual vessel in the medieval period for the public

display of relics. The show was also about one of Hollywood's myths: The Fallen Star. Upon entering the viewer was confronted with eight paintings of golden angels. These hybrids of feathered humans and gaseous nebula represented "high energy states" such as solar storms, pole dancers and female athletes. The figures were accompanied by dots showing the position of constellations over Los Angeles on the opening day, November 2nd, 2011, The Feast of All Souls.

The lone sculpture in the gallery could be the figure of a fallen angel, or, what was left of him after falling from the sky. The ambiance in the east gallery was very different and dark, reminiscent of a subterranean cave. There were water pools projected on the floor and their reflections on the walls. Prehistoric drawings covered the ground interrupted by meteorite-like sculptures while images floated and music played. There were also four paintings of monsters in this gallery: and their dots showed the position of constellations on October 31st, Halloween. They represented "negative energy states" such as terror attacks and ecological disasters. In this show, Ritchie combined many artistic media to creating a meaningful and complex view of the specific site of the gallery and its place in the universe.

Ritchie said that in the work of painters like David Salle and Julian Schnabel he saw the last of the generation of artists who had to follow "the master narrative of the west." For him that meant a new artistic era had begun and he was free to go off and start his own quest into the Universe.

Francesca Woodman Visible/Invisible On January 19, 1981, photographer Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from the roof of a loft on East 12th Street. She was just a few months shy of her 23rd birthday. Like Rimbaud, Woodman left behind a very special legend and legacy, from which 120 vintage photographs, various large–scale blueprint studies of human figures for the ambitious "Temple" project (1980), two artist books and a selection of six of her rarely seen short videos currently line the Annex Level 4 galleries at the Guggenheim, curated by Carey Keller (of San Francisco's MOMA) and Jennifer Blessing (senior curator of photography at the Guggenheim).

Woodman was a prodigious and original artist, and in her all-too-brief life she created an estimated 10,000 photographs, from which only some 500 published images and 800 negatives are so far known to exist, along with several recently discovered videos. Like Sylvia Plath, her art is irrevocably connected to her suicide, and the path that led to it stems from

her long-held intention to become visible/invisible. She was truly a “spy in the house of art” as the title of a concurrent group-show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests.

Often seen through the lens of the distinctive agendas of 1970s and '80s—surrealism, feminist theory, conceptual art, photography's relationship to both literature and performance, postmodernism, even de-constructionism—Woodman's art also is of a moment in history when photography fully entered the sphere of contemporary art.

Woodman was a complete artist/ photographer. She not only took the pictures, she designed her own sets and lighting, told her own stories, made her own puns and references to mythology (e.g., "Leda and the Swan") and served as her own model (often nude). Some of her work functions as a form of a diaristic correspondence. The sculptural props used and the way she studied the human torso were confrontational in nature. Often the figures are only

Matthew Ritchie’s Universal Quest

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Martina Reinhart Body and Mind

by Jill Smith

Martina Reinhart’s work has focused on continually denaturalizing the human body. Her work has followed a steady progression from conceptualizing the stages of human life in man, woman, and child - to creating a series of chimeras - figures who are partly human and partly anthropomorphized, their body parts completely re-organized. Reinhart has taken this exploration even farther in her series, “Dream-Creatures,” rendering composite figures made up of both natural elements and aspects traditionally considered artificial. By elegantly combining these aspects of materialism, naturalism, and fantasy, Reinhart pushes against commonly-held understandings of what it is to be embodied.

The use of composite figures in visual art, particularly ones that incorporate anthropomorphized or fantastical elements, pre-dates Greco-Roman society and continues to be reinterpreted as a way of understanding the disparate aspects of human consciousness. The figure of the chimera itself has reoccurred and reinvented itself in art throughout centuries, firstly as a simple decorative figure with the body of a lion, the tail of a serpent, and a goat’s head springing from its back. It was reinterpreted in the Middle Ages as a representation of the dubious, shape-shifting, untrustworthy nature of Woman. During the Renaissance, a rediscovery of composite figures like the Sphinx and the Chimera occurred, and were occasionally represented in highly stylized, romantic forms; the brutality and violence of the monsters found no place in Renaissance conventions.

Reinhart’s work picks up on this tradition with a new understanding, drawing from deep wellsprings of symbology as well as figures from our consumer culture. “Dream-Creature 30” begins with the Barbie doll, its willowy legs and slender waist completely unrealistic but also omnipresent.

The traditional Barbie doll’s feet are styled upwards in order to fit into high heels, to the chagrin of feminists and health experts everywhere; Reinhart’s creature has extra support under her lilting heels, with pointed flame-like cuffs splaying from them. The figure’s butterfly-like wings and antennae give A8

it the feeling of flight, but it is grounded by two heavy serpents diving for the ground. The color palette combines a simple greyscale with a bubblegum pink that is ubiquitous in Barbie marketing schemes and products.

It is therefore fitting that Reinhart’s work combines graphite drawing, acrylic painting, and print. This mixedmedia form perfectly compliments the composite content of her works, giving them another dimension beyond the recognizable figures. Composite fig-ures have long been lodged with what we seek to understand or what eludes us about our human condition, and Reinhart’s style invites us to ask these questions of our modern society.

Her work asks us to plunge into our unconscious and elucidate our societal id in an effort to understand our own desires and motivations.

Other works by Reinhart like Brain Inverted and Knowledge, references the invisible inner workings of the mind. Here, sections of the brain are designated particular colors, indicating a plethora of associations from synapses firing to the birth of thought.

These works take the structures of the brain and its physical and emotional manifestations as their subject. They deal too with written culture as a powerful vessel for knowledge. Covering a broad range of subjects, Martina Reinhart posits herself as an artist whose masterful intellect coalesces with her unique techniques to form a significant body of work.

I recently had the chance to interview Martina to find out more about her work: Jill Smith: Your works have a mixed media style to them, using drawing, prints and painting all at once. How did you arrive at working this way?

Martina Reinhart: I came from a background in painting and I used it to create abstract works, while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Then I had a scholarship in Barcelona, where I learned how to use screenprinting. I have always been inspired by life and feel called to themes of beauty and transience. I then started to examine the ‘image of woman’, the

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

ideals of beauty and what impact society has on the perception of different types of women. With this purpose in mind, I began combining photographs, screenprinting and painting with one another to create my compositions.

JS: Some of your work feels somewhat cryptic, is there a hidden message you want the viewer to receive?

MR: The message is always dependent on the series, the theme and content I’m working with.

themselves as ‘Cities Of Knowledge’, which emerge from knowledge-communities and organizations, such as universities, schools and libraries. Yet this is also the case with the computer. The Internet and social networks create such cities and sites – yet without a physical experience in the body or in nature. I want to raise questions of the body and nature existing as places (sites), which save knowledge with experience. 

JS: What future projects do you have in mind for your work?

MR: Most recently, with my series ‘Knowledge And Its Structures’ I have been exploring structures and manifestations of the brain. Since then, I have been working to examine how the written word transfers knowledge in light of new media, thew internet, and cyber communication.

I have also made a contemporary reinterpretation of Descartes; thesis “cogito ergo sum.”

My upcoming cycle will center on ‘Cities Of Knowledge/Sites Of Knowledge’ and is the continuation of this subject. Our digital knowledge society is mainly concerned with acquiring competencies. Over the past decade, some cities distinguish

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Sensuous Sublime

By Rose Hobart Caked in thick blues and cracked greens, Grete Jacobsen’s canvases remind one of the Earth’s surface; the topography of paint mimicking the depths of our valleys and cliffs. It is easy to see her Norwegian countryside within her paintings; its jagged mountains and vast seas. Her use of primary reds and blues and arresting greens and oranges, applied in large sweeping gestures echo the rhythm of a pulse, a heartbeat. Working within the Abstract-Expressionist style, Grete Jacobson examines the process of painting itself. In her heavy application of paint pigments, she explores the connection between painting and our surrounding world, between painting and our inner-selves in an apparent and physical way. Her works portray the middle ground that we, as humans existing in a contemporary age, are constantly suspended in; struggling to balance the dynamism of the world around us and the stillness we experience in listening to the sound of one’s own breath.

If Whistler was concerned with the landscape as a site of emotional transference, Jacobsen is concerned with how nature can mirror an inner landscape, a landscape of the heart. In her painting, Three Kings, Jacobsen uses an intense red palette, nearly monochrome. Golden flecks follow in successive row illuminating the center of the picture plane. Almost a perfect square, it grasps our visual field and our peripheral vision as we enter the painting. The surface of Three Kings is rich and full of palimpsest, peeks and valleys. The result is a work that is optical and frontal, imaging a head, oval, or sun-like shape.

Using thin, seamless glazes contrasted with thick impastoed marks, her work stands out among her contemporaries. This is due to her work conjuring up sensations of the sublime.

Moving, aptly describes the sensuous surfaces that seem to emanate light from within and project light as well.

This quality is most noticeable in her process. Her process allows for addition and subtraction, uniquely curtailing the crevices that arise. This feverish attention to the overall affect of the work is a direct result of an existential yearning for communion with the natural world.

Her impasto application is akin to de Kooning, but her color palette is markedly more restrained. This allows for our attention to be drawn primarily to the contrasts her bold, evocative colors create and not immediately attempt to decipher the shapes. Jacobsen resists categorization and interpretation of her work does not stop at her use of color, in the same way that the greens and blues cannot be bounded by the dark bands of brown. As painter Jules Olitski, another force of influence in the color field artists, “Painting has to do with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do with surface. It has to do with shape. It has to do with feelings which are much more difficult to get at.”

This philosophy is well at-hand in Jacobsen’s work. In Encounter, the vibrant, almost neon greens of the piece A10

jar the viewer with their contrast to the equally as electric red base, but their shapes and reminiscences around the border of the piece beckon us to look more closely. The shapes are so delicately rendered that the texture of the fabric is evident, and the deliberateness of the colors evokes a sense of order in the seemingly indecipherable abstraction. The scarlets grounding Three Kings immediately invoke a sense of nobility and opulence, but the gold figures are incredibly dynamic and appear in motion. The interaction between color and form creates an effect of stirring progress to an unknown and unknowable place. Like a good poem, the forms of Jacobsen’s images is both challenged and buttressed by their contents: their colors, their textures, their alternating thickness and translucence. Heavily rendered to the left of the piece, the golden forms become increasingly filmy as they advance in a downward fashion and as the viewer reads them in the traditional left-toright fashion.

By isolating our experience of formal events on the picture plane she creates a space of ultimate contemplation. Edmund Husserl first introduced this methodology of isolating or “bracketing” experiences in 1906.

By bracketing an experience we reserve our initial judgments, previous encounters, and ethical considerations as a priori. Instead, Husserl suggested the exclusion from consideration of everything that is transcendent and anything else derived via scientific or logical inference; and instead focus only on what was immediately presented to one’s consciousness. Perhaps more than any other image, Encounter captures the Zen-like epistemological notion of Husserl’s thinking.

Encounter is a work which brackets a field of enormous activity in the center of the picture. This effectively captures the sensation of movement and intensity, and designates anything else to the periphery. This invites us on an individual journey; the spectator is entering the world of the sublime. Other western counterparts for Jacobsen are Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. At just 23 years old, Helen Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952), an abstraction that freed up the stalemate in postwar American art following the first exciting spark of creative activity by the Abstract Expressionists. It looks, in reproduction, like a peaceful evocative painting with a series of blue, green and red stains fading into pink – all of which hint at the landscape that the title suggests. These color field painters illuminated our sense of light and nature and changed the face of painting. Jacobsen keeps this torch alight. She creates paintings where the space, location and environment are everything. Her work is elemental. It conveys a rich passion, a described earthy-ness that is palpable.

It is a strength distributed by the earth and its elements and awarded to those who are willing to receive it.

Jacobsen’s work diverges from Frankenthaler’s in the application of her colors; hers have a palpable texture and appear in higher relief than

Frankenthaler’s syrupy pools of color.

Jacobsen’s abstractions are reminiscent not of a placid landscape but of something far more dynamic and even turbulent. The hues that are the most independent and jarring on the canvas are the ones rendered in highest relief. In Harmony, the smallest wisps of bright green emerge from the canvas, adding a striking sense of depth to a canvas with seemingly rudimentary colors and forms. Long bands of dark brown and black appear to border the bursts of green and unsuccessfully contain them. An echo of red appears under the layers of greens and blues, invoking the sense that each of these colors charts its own path, some more prevailingly than others.

Rothko initiated color as a prism through which to access deeper, dormant human emotions, and Jacobsen advances this endeavor with nuance and idiosyncrasy. Most evocative in Jacobsen’s work is the presence of her technique; careful brush strokes and discipline are evident throughout her pieces, allowing for a sense of intimacy between creator and viewer. Unlike Rothko’s blank swathes of color, which create a different relationship between artist and viewer entirely, Jacobsen draws hers in with the poignant honesty of her technique. This approach especially indispensable because Jacobsen is invoking those innermost human experiences, ones which we have suppressed so deeply as to appear almost unrecognizable. Her generous use of impasto and color invites us to be reciprocally generous in our interaction with these images. Jacobsen’s colors, contours, and texture invoke a purging of these emotions and a powerful confrontation with ourselves.

[Top] Grete Jacobsen, Encounter. Courtesy of the artist.

[Middle] Grete Jacobsen, The Tree Kings. Courtesy of the artist.

[Bottom] Grete Jacobsen, Harmony. Courtesy of the artist.

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

[Top] Grete Jacobsen, The Blue Series I. Courtesy of the artist. [Bottom] Grete Jacobsen, The Blue Series II. Courtesy of the artist.

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Manuella Muerner Maroni: Challenging the viewer to confront himself

BY ROSE HOBART

At first glance one sees color, transparency, and maybe even a reflection of themselves in the artwork of Manuella Muerner Marioni. Manuella was born 1964 in Thun, Switzerland and grew up to study Fine Art and Fashion Design in Zurich. This Swiss artist exhibits her creativity and appreciation for history through her colorful, vibrant art, which takes the form of paintings and sculptures.

She defines art as being “the creation of contradiction” which she portrays exquisitely in her work. The contradiction comes about through her use of varying materials such as Perl Acrylic and CDs, affixed to paintings and sculptures, which create prismlike surfaces opening them up to a variety of interpretations, thoughts, and feelings.

Soon after Manuella finished her Fine Art studies, she traveled to Florence, Vienna, Lisboa, Paris, Spain, and more—this is where her cultural education took place. These experiences had a profound impact on her but perhaps the strongest influence on her art was a friendship with collaborator Niki de St. Phalle. Manuella recounts that “she was the best artist in the world and for over 7 years we worked together.” This intense period of collaboration stimulated her thoughts about life and art in general and her new ways of thinking, encouraged by St. Phalle, have accompanied her works for the entirety of her career. She soon came to the conclusion that her works should “move from death to life. Where, with specific perceptual effects, the piece itself becomes alive. Materials are dead, inert. But with my work I want them to become activated.

My beholders should become a part of the work.” This is exactly the case with works like Solar Torso. This stunning, bedazzled work conjures up references to the body and the celestial sphere – prompting us to consider transcendent states of mind. In other works such as Orange Head, she creates a bust with an anonymous face, yet when one looks directly at the sculpture they are confronted with multiple reflections of themselves instead of being able to adequately look at the expression or details of the sculpture in front of them; consequently these works are incredibly outwardly self-reflexive.

Much of Manuella’s artwork is reminiscent of some historical pieces, namely her sculpture Torso Gold which could easily be compared to the Venus de Milo. Although it doesn’t exactly have the same characteristics as the Venus, Manuella’s A12

piece has a similar impact in its scale, authority, and intensity. Torso Gold, as the title suggests, only portrays the torso of a woman’s body, although the Grecian Venus de Milo not only portrays the torso but is also accompanied by the head of a woman. The de Milo was made to pay homage to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. In kind, Torso Gold is a visual manifestation of the abstract ideas of love and beauty. A woman’s torso, in Western conception, is usually considered one of the most attractive areas of the body—due to the slender, sensuous curves of her breasts and waist. The use of mirrored mosaic tiles, however, is what gives this piece the added dimension. A trait found in the majority of Manuella’s artwork is that of self-reflection—one literally is able to see their own reflection in this sculpture; one is able to see the beauty, per say, within his or herself. Manuella explains, “It is important to give meaning to my art.

I often write about the pieces, giving them a narrative. I want to express my sense of life through my work and I want to give ideas to others around me. Art allows us to see things from different perspectives. You don’t have to accept on view. No tunnel vision.

Art allows us to look at things with different eyes, to be open.”

Manuella Muerner Marioni’s use of innovative techniques is especially exciting—she uses Perl Acryl because it “flashes a lot, like lightning. My fascination has always been form, light, colors in sunlight or seen through prisms and crystals.” Combining this medium with reflective surfaces like CD’s creates a mirror like appearance. Painters depicting someone gazing into a mirror often show the person's reflection. This is a form of abstraction—in most cases the angle of view is such that the person's reflection would not be typically visible. Similarly, in movies and still photography an actor or actress is often shown ostensibly looking at him or herself in the mirror, and yet the reflection faces the camera.

In reality, the actor or actress sees only the camera and its operator in this case, not their own reflection.

One thinks of Titian's Venus with a Mirror or Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which capture an expression of intense drama and near shock in the beholder. This same shock is given to the viewers of Manuella’s work. Her fascination is translated in a way that allows the viewer to see the world in an entirely new, ever changing, dynamic way. The subtle changes in daylight thus shift

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our perspective each time, creating the work ever anew. Something as simple as even changing one’s clothing the second time you look at a mirrored sculpture can also make a world of difference. Different colors exude different emotions and therefore changing the color allows for a completely different experience with the exact same sculpture.

Not limited to physical pieces, Manuella maintains a place in the contemporary art world with her foray into digital media. Graphically redesigning her mirror sculpture and renaming it Power of Music adds yet more layers to the piece, forcing the viewer to look at the work in an entirely new respect and reaching out to a whole new audience.

Manuella Muerner Marioni’s artwork is some of the most uniquely made art in today’s society. Her use of vibrant color and mirrored mosaic tiles are what captivates the audience.

Manuella’s art also captures the modernity of today’s society while successfully giving the ‘vintage’ feel of historical pieces that allows her artwork to be adored and appreciated by both older and newer generations. 

“This stunning, bedazzled work conjures up references to the body and the celestial sphere – prompting us to consider transcendent states of mind.”

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Stephane Lejeune: To Be Free

By Rose Hobart

Born and bred Belgian artist Stephane Lejeune has been working and exhibiting in his home country for the past 15 years.A seminal artist, he describes his work as “halfway between realism and pure abstraction. I always search for the ideal boundary that passes the figurative abstraction.”

On first glance, Lejeune expresses themes of the body and its relationship with nature through the medium of ink on canvas. On closer inspection, different layers of his work become more apparent such as his use of contrasting murky, blurred colors with vibrant, sharp yellows in his piece Body in order to emphasize the contours of the undistinguishable body. Even the materials used by Lejeune have been taken into close consideration; his prominent use of ink in his drawings on canvas helps to reinforce the fluidity and movement of the human body.Tackling themes of mortality, our environment and the transience of human existence, Lejeune is creating some of most exciting work of our time.

Stephane Lejeune’s paintings are deeply representative of the movement and fluidity of the human body. He utilizes blurred paint and swift brushstrokes in his latest series Bodies to illustrate the human body in various forms.

The bodies are barely recognizable; the viewers can only identify the positions they are in. Yet it is the unidentifiable quality that emphasizes Lejeune’s talent of combining realism and abstraction in these figures. The contrast between the dark, murky colors and the bright whites and yellows highlight the contours of the body. Some paintings within the series forego the prominence of the figure and display the fusion of the body and the canvas. Fluidity and movement of the human body is reinforced with the distinct use of ink in his paintings. With this expansive range of tools, Lejeune is able to express a dynamic, exciting range of figurative abstraction.

RH: What is your biggest source of inspiration?

SL: I was really impressed by Caravaggio’s paintings I saw in Italy. It really inspired me for my work about bodies (colors, “claire-obscure”, movement). My first cities were made from Transsiberian’s pictures, Russian plains.

The wandering. I was also impressed by Anselm Kieffer’s paintings. I’m working a lot with living models. It’s really an interesting experience. They’re also artists with a great knowledge of the body. It’s a continuous exchange.

Lejeune asks questions and allow the readers to form their own opinions and views of his works. For him, his art does not fit into one mold but rather is an open-ended question that inquires into the unknown.

RH: Your work lies somewhere in between realism and abstraction, do you think your work slots into any particular genre?

SL: This thin border between realism and abstract is really important to me. I want to give people the possibility to construct their own story from their own experience.

Instead of giving the keys to my paintings directly, I want to provoke people to question it. So I give my paintings the same titles: Cities, Body, Nude. It’s difficult for me to put a label on my work. And it is not really important to me.

RH: Do you have any upcoming projects you are working on at the minute?

SL: I’ve begun a series with a model. I want to try new ways to work about the human body. I also want to experiment with the evolution of my vision about the same body for months. I’d like to continue this work for a year.

Lejeune’s works are creative figurative abstraction. He is able to depict the human body and its many forms and at the same time, portray the exquisite relationship of the figures to the canvas. Ultimately, freedom is conveyed through the movement and fluidity of the body; freedom from the temporal, physical world.In a magnificent and masterful way, Lejeune asks questions that delve into the nature of humans and civilization through his pieces. stephane-lejeune.be

I recently had a chance to interview Stephane Lejeune about his artwork: RH: From looking at your CV I can see you’ve been exhibiting work for roughly 15 years. Do you have an educational background in art? What made you decide to start working as a professional artist?

SL: I’m a graduate in graphic arts, specifically in advertising. But my first job was as a computer programmer for a social organization. Ten years later, I missed painting and I began to draw and paint again. I also had the chance to find a wonderful workshop with really interesting painters and sculptors who made and still make some amazing art.

I’ve realized that even if I work again partially as programmer, painting is always going to be a bigger part of my life.

RH: Is there an important message that you are trying to convey through your art?

SL: I’m asking the question of what will remain when humans disappear and working on the relationship between the human being (with his body or city) and his environment. In the cities theme, a few geometrics forms (nearly abstract) remain in human civilization. The empty cities disappear in the tempest. Nature erases civilization. White tempest erases my painting. With the Bodies theme, human beings are taken away in a falling fire like in Pompeii or Icarus mythology.

My works on paper is more of stylistic.They are works about movement and principal lines of the bodies. They are mainly still-lives of models of acrobats or dancers.

When discussing his method of producing, he says nothing is more important than creating that special bond with the canvas and eventually with the art as he paints.

RH: A lot of your work is ink based works highlight the fluidity and movement of the bodies you are drawing, is this something you were trying to get across? How important are your materials?

SL: Inks allow a spontaneous yet intense work. They permit luminous and transparent colors. The mixture between colors is often surprising and allows for an interesting materiality. I’m often working without brushes in order to have real contact with the canvas, paper and inks.

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All images courtesy of the artist.

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

Manga, Kandinsky, Encased: Lichtenstein’s Play

By Sonia Coman

The most obvious remark about Jessica Lichtenstein’s work would be that it is patently “Japanese.”

This same remark proves to be the most problematic. Lichtenstein is an American artist based in New York, who dedicated herself to her practice after quitting her job as a lawyer a few years ago.

Interested in collecting manga figurines in Japan, she developed the idea of recontextualizing and assembling them into works of art. Her second solo show at Gallery Nine5, “Play,” initially planned for winter, 2011, was extended into January, 2012.

The exhibition reunites three types of objects: cases with staged manga figurines, period chairs upholstered with fabric of Lichtenstein’s design, and three-dimensional letters featuring images and constructing words such as “PLAY,” “Bloom,” and “LUST.” Hung on the wall, these heavy wordobjects read as hyperbolized labels for the main themes of the show: women’s sexuality and the appropriation of and commentary upon Japanese contemporary culture.

Assembled in museum-like display cases, the manga figurines are inserted in narratives centered on luxury-brand shopping, an indulging day

in the life of a woman, and the fantasies behind routine activities, among others. All of the pieces showcase the sexuality of women, going from the generic (the mass-produced manga figurines) to the particular (the individuating accessories that the artist attaches to them) and back to the generic (the sexual references and fantasies speak a language for everyone to understand).

Lichtenstein’s appropriation of Japanese things as well as her critique of this appropriation comes full circle in her chair pieces. With their printed upholstery reminiscent of Boucher’s and Fragonard’s designs, the Rococo allure of the chairs reminds us that the fascination of Japanese objects goes back to 18th century japonisme. From Marie Antoinette’s collection of Japanese lacquer to the influence of ukiyo-e prints on Impressionist painting a century later, japonisme is an overly charged term, bearing the weight of history. Lichtenstein wittingly avoids that the negative connotations of the term be attached to her work, because her pieces are strongly self-critical.

Lichtenstein places her work into a continuum of art history, which she studied at Yale. In an in-

terview for Gallery Nine5, the artist mentioned the influence of Takashi Murakami, among others. Repurposed as art objects for display, Lichtenstein’s manga or hentai characters call to mind Murakami’s human scale sculptural pieces Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy, with their provoking sexuality. Lichtenstein’s figurines wink at us when references to the history of Western art and of collecting appear in the environment of their vitrines. For example, in a case titled Naughty by Nature, in the second scene on the second row, two appropriately luscious figurines pose on a bench in front of a miniaturized Mannerist painting: it is Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. The juxtaposition of the contemporary Japanese figurine with the Old Master Italian painting undoes the spell of both images, offered to the viewer for cold scrutiny.

In the word-objects YUM or PLAY, the UV resin layer between the hentai-inspired images and the viewer functions as a buffer. It signals that the work takes a critical distance from its own imagery and that the viewer is expected to do the same. This UV buffer is similar to Louise Lawl-

er’s crystal paperweights placed over her photographs of other artists’ work in public and private spaces of art display and reception. A hentai image or a photograph by Lawler is no longer itself when a thick stratum of translucent medium adds quotations marks around it. This layer equips the viewer with new glasses through which to look at the work. It also points the viewer to the work as what there is to be looked at. The voyeuristic dimension is therefore another common point between Lawler’s and Lichtenstein’s works.

Play is a tour de force: intelligent, multi-layered, even humorous, and, above all, daring. Lichtenstein’s approach is unconventional with respect to women’s sexuality. It is also daring in the ways in which the artist acknowledges and nuances her engagement with contemporary Japanese culture. With long and blue twin tails, the heroine encased in On the Tip of Your Tongue sits on a lips chair. A miniature Kandinsky painting is hung on a miniature wall. She sits back, pensively and comfortably. 

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Davor Vukovic’s Grand Entrance

By Abraham Lubelski

Davor Vukovic, a self-educated painter and poet, is one of the most prominent artists in contemporary Croatian modern abstract landscape painting. Vukovic possesses originality mixed with an innate talent for spontaneous expression. Although his poems are more subtle and introspective, his paintings are passionate and exciting—he engages himself both physically and emotionally. Expressing himself in a range of colors that reflect both his inner self and his outer interactions with nature, Vukovic infuses modernity and impressionism into energetic paintings that soothe the mind. His work, through its evocative use of color, movement, texture, and shape, display a state of mind rather than a tangible landscape. This October, Vukovic will be highlighted in a major solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery, NYC. Vukovic’s paintings, reminiscent of Van Gogh or Whistler, are composed of different reflections and interactions with his creativity and his sea, something he feels is an expansion of his soul. He takes landscapes as an inspiration for expressing his emotional state of mind, creating personal visions without a need for narration or description. Vukovic’s portrayal of the vibrations of the sun, moon, and stars on an inexhaustible sea is felt in Dense Transparency. In Dragon’s Tail, Floating Indigo, and Autumn, Vukovic depicts the archipelago from his perspective. He always uses the contrast of dark and bright bold colors along with pastels to create a balance of the darkness and silence that exists on the islands of the Croatian Adriatic Sea, as well as the vibrant, vital energy that lives within modern cities. In correspondence to this contrast, he also writes a collection of poetry titled, “I Lean On The Silence,” to express the vital, vibrant, and lively energy by which he is surrounded.

His poetry, on the other hand, illuminates a “ray of light” Vukovic believes is common to everything. In his poems he writes about merging with God, a moment that often emanate his art and his poems. Vukovic’s religion strongly influences his way of life, mindset and artwork—the holy component of his pieces that also serve as their cornerstone. His poetry is self-healing but his paintings are a way of self-expression.

I recently had a chance to interview Davor Vukovic about both his poetry and artworks: A16

AL: Does your poetry interlink into your artworks or are they two disparate forms of expression?

DV: Poetry is like a tapestry. One thread linking the others in associative and intuitive understanding, and penetrating me into the most profound state of peace.

Poetry is subtler, more introspective. It helps me in the self-healing process and calms me. On the other hand, expression through painting is more prominent. In painting, I have been engaged emotionally, mentally, and physically. It is mostly represented as a catharsis.

When asked to see where his art would be heading to in the future, and whether his techniques and stylistic approaches would change, Vukovic describes his artistic expression to be as spontaneous and transient as his paintings depict landscape to be.

AL: Where do you see your art going in the future? Do you see yourself veering away from your original approach and techniques to painting?

DV: I cannot predict which direction my work is going to develop in the future. As my artistic expression constantly explores the inner and outer world honestly, I do not know where it will take me. But I have confidence that inspiration will lead me in the right way. It is the process of evolution that is important to me.

This fearless sense of experimentation mixed with a belief in intuition is the mark of a true artist. He believes that the journey is more important than the outcome. It is the transformation he undergoes with each artwork that he looks forward to.

Furthermore, Vukovic knows he is a modern example of contemporary Croatian art and he has the innate talent and originality to lead this movement of Croatian art that is emanating through New York.

However, New York has not only been a gift, but also his greatest artistic challenge. His solo exhibition made him feel great responsibility towards both his own legacy and the international public—specifically the Croatian public. Despite the onerous pressures of the art world, Vukovic manages to find inspiration with this new opportunity and creates new ways of expression for his paintings.

All of the twenty pieces that he prepared for the Autumn exhibition at

All images courtesy of the artist.

Art Fairs International Newspaper 2012

the Broadway Gallery had positive feedback both from the Croatian media and the New York media.

When asked about his inspiration for his New York exhibit, Vukovic depicts a scene for us. In his latest cycle of artworks, Urban Archipelago, Vukovic recalls the brilliant lights lit all over New York City as he flew over the JFK airport. Jazz, is actually influenced by both the scenery and Mondrian’s work—it is dedicated “to a charismatic megalopolis that never sleeps.” Vukovic believes his colors reflect the splendor and glory of the colors he sees in nature. He, therefore, cannot imagine his paintings to be in black and white.

AL: You said in a previous interview that colors reflect the state of joy in your being. Would you ever try painting in black and white?

DV: I cannot imagine my paintings in black and white. But if there can be no pronounced colors in my paintings, there must be a colored sea. I

am inextricably connected with the sea. Since I was a four-year-old boy, the sea has been an expansion of my soul—my true home. My paintings are dominated by blue and white. Sometimes it is enough to only use these two colors to show my relationship with the sea.

AL: What do you think you are contributing to today's art world?

DV: Judging by many New York agencies, international galleries, and art critics who evaluate my work as something that, until now, was not seen in modern paintings, I believe that these new pieces are my greatest contribution to contemporary abstract paintings in today’s art world.

My artworks are new and energetic paintings.

The healing energy that is contained in most of my paintings, is confirmed by the growing number of collectors who invest substantial funds in buying them. Besides the undeniable artistic val-

ues, their experiences suggest that after a long and stressful workday, they can completely relax with my paintings.

Secondly, I have a technique that has occurred to me through an error. And it is, I believe, one of the expressions of His grace. It opened a new space for my creativity.I devote a large portion of my time to preparing the canvas for the final painting. The canvas depicts a brush first and then I throw paint on canvas. Finally, using different colors, I find the landscape hidden in the canvas.

Through a technique where he heroically throws paint onto the canvas, he then finds the landscape hidden in the canvas by using different colors. Vukovic discovers a landscape within the painting rather than finding the painting within the landscape. In other words, rather than outlining the landscape in front of him, it is as if Vukovic invents, discovers, and unearths

the islands within himself—he converses with his soul.

Vukovic creates irreplaceable modern paintings through the subtle outline of the shape of each landscape and the vibrant colors that express an emotional communication with each of his landscapes. He imbues a kind of joy that celebrates transformation and life not only in his paintings, but also in his poems, which he utilizes to illuminate his own state of mind. Perhaps the reason his paintings move something deeply and intensely in us is because he is laying out his soul onto these paintings for us to see. His state of mind is not of learned expressionism or of objective views, but of lively emotional perspective, which transforms his paintings and poems to reveal the grace and beauty of nature. Vukovic is not only portraying his reflections, memories, and thoughts, but also the essence of life. 

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