I love this scratchboard rooster by my friend Michael Donnelly. Just look at the expression on his face.
White Horse, Black Horse by Eric Ulrich
White Horse, Black Horse - 20" x 10"
Mixed Media, Acrylic, Pen and Ink, Photographs
Marilyn Minter's Heavy Metal Paintings
Now this sounds like fun. Marylin Minter's new finger-printed enamel-on-metal paintings like Heavy Metal and Cheshire were produced in collaboration with Wangechi Mutu, who was asked to don red and Yves Klein blue lipstick and regurgitate gold-flecked paint or splash around in puddles filled with a case of vodka and $500 of silver cake powder. (Currently on view at Salon 94 Bowery)
Norway Sketches by Laura Murphy Frankstone
Norway is a place near the very center of my heart. I think Laura Frankstone's sketches successfully stir the feelings of anyone who has been there because they hint towards aspects of natural beauty and unique light rather than attempt to capture the whole story.
Ink Bubble Drawings by Roland Flexner
The intricate ink bubble drawings by Roland Flexner are created by modifying a Japanese decorative art technique called suminagashi where paper is laid on top of ink floating on water. Flexner takes it one step further by blowing on or tilting the image right before the ink sets into the paper. His intended result is a nod to the seventeenth-century practice of collecting stones, polishing the cross-sections and then interpreting the emerging abstractions as landscapes. Some of the drawings from his series certianly accomplish that, but I enjoy the ones that lean more towards either the microbiological or galactic.
Take a look at all of his ink bubble drawings while listening to this track by Björk and you'll agree.
Men In The Cities series by Robert Longo, 1979
An old favorite popped into my head this morning as I walked to work. I first saw the Men In The Cities series by Robert Longo in a magazine in 1986 and am pretty sure that was the exact moment I began to think about art as work rather than decoration. Thanks Randolph Elementary School Reading Loft.
"Never Let Me Go" Exhibition at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery
"Art, artifice, and artificial life form the primary lines of inquiry stitched together in the exhibition “Never Let Me Go,” curated by Terry R. Myers. Borrowing its title from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed Dickensian science fiction novel from 2005, the show tracks the ways in which these three phenomena overlap; in so doing, it provokes questions that cut to the very core of art’s broader significance to society. In the case of Ishiguro’s novel, art is used as a type of “evidence” that cloned (or artificial) children may have souls. Myers’s exhibition alternately deals implicitly and explicitly with the themes of natural and artificial life found in the book.
Among the works included here, Rona Pondick’s Fukien Tea, 2003, hews close to the theme of cloning, with its miniature polished bronze heads growing from a bonsai-esque tree––a form of organ(ic) farming that alludes to the commodification of human subjectivity. Other standout pieces in the exhibition include Folkert de Jong’s The Sleeper, the Talker, and the Dancer, 2007. The sculpture, a nearly fourteen-foot-high multicolored Styrofoam birch tree, is littered with quotidian items and ghostly visages. To an extent, the work recalls the final denouement of the novel, in which the story’s narrator, Kathy, imagines a detritus-strewn landscape as a repository for the memories of her childhood. As with much of de Jong’s output, the tree skews what is represented through its material manifestation and is, by turns, creepy and fantastic due to its seemingly jubilant celebration of artificial nature. In André Butzer’s exuberant abstract painting of a spider, Nicht Fürchten! (2) (Don’t Be Scared! [2]), 2010, we are reminded that while art may reveal the soul, as Ishiguro suggests, it is also a zone where we can give form to our nightmares, which would otherwise remain repressed and unheeded."
Fluid Abstract Works by I Wayan Sudarsana Yansen
The fluid, organic oil paintings of I Wayan Sudarsana Yansen seem to be slowly changing right in front of your eyes. Look closer and you can just as easily get lost in examining the process. While I hate superficial comparison, these do stir up a nice reminder of the experimental paintings my old friend Josh Becker was creating back in the day.
Found via FFFFound.com
No Lifeguard on Duty - Photographs by J. Bennet Fitts
When you truly love swimming pools you are also obliged to mourn their death. It's difficult to not drift into the dangerous deep end of sentimentality with J. Bennett Fitts' images of abandoned swimming pools, but I think he maintains an even subjectivity by showing the equally abandoned setting. The pools themselves begin to come across more as a casualty of the situation rather than a singular clichéd symbol of decay.
found via Holly Wales