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Artist Daniel Hesidence Contemporary Art Work

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:35:43 +0000

Daniel Hesidence approaches his practice as a philosophical totality. Situating himself as the inventor of an ever-expanding universe, Hesidence’s individual pieces provide mere glimpses into a creative infinite. Composing his work in ‘volumes’, Hesidence’s paintings document a self-propelled evolution. Each canvas is distinct yet interconnected, holding its own place in his ‘cosmological’ timeline. Untitled is indicative of Hesidence’s stream of consciousness process. Emerging from the blank white canvas, impassioned smears of colour form a halo around a suggested figure. Rather than defining an image, Hesidence uses the malleable qualities of paint to portray an emotional and psychological state. Distant and dream-like, the intricacies of sentient gesture form a physical representation of the intangibility and impermanence of thought.

Embracing painting as an unlimited form of expression, Daniel Hesidence’s works describe a means of sub-language communication, something primal and emotive that exceeds linguistic structure. Hesidence’s style ranges from figuration to abstraction, but his subject matter is always what lies beyond the surface. Ranging from dense impasto to delicate washes, frenzied brushmarks and disquieting voids, Hesidence’s refined techniques transform reticent sentiment into tactile physicality. Mapping out the idyllic meanderings of cerebral terrain, Untitled’s colourful fantasia playfully conveys amorphous vitality with an aura of pastoral calm.

Read Entire Article about USA Artist Daniel Hesidence paintings and artwork at The Saatchi-Gallery Daniel Hesidence

Artist Dash Snow Contemporary Art Work

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:37:38 +0000

For Dash Snow photography becomes a way of engaging with environment and memory. Each snapshot captures a place, time, and emotion, freeze-framing the individual components of everyday experience, mapping out the compilation of an identity. Using a Polaroid camera for its instantaneous results and association as keep-sakes, the familiar format of Snow’s photos replicates the sentiments of his images: cheap, disposable, and plebian mementos become humble evidence of discarded beauty.

Documenting his life through a lens, Snow’s photographs explore personal existence as a periphery to globalised culture. Presenting an unabridged account of his marginalised lifestyle, Snow’s often uncomfortable images paint an intimate portrait where topical issues such as sex, drugs, poverty, and anti-social behaviour are confronted from a frank position of personal participation. Translated through the generic quality of his medium, Snow’s photos convey the disoriented fragments of memory as voyeuristic observation, conceiving the experience of ‘self’ as a bi-product of mass media dissociation.

Picturing the underbelly of contemporary culture, Snow distances his images with cinematic veritas. Graffiti, ironically broken signage, seedy hotel sex romps, and instances of human despair don’t evoke empathy, but rather suggest a poetic affirmation of humanity and against-the-odds survivalism.

Dash Snow’s Untitled (Thong) reworks imagery of porn, violence, and glamour into a totem of faded power. Recalling the optimistic ideology of Suprematist design, Snow’s collage presents a futuristic icon from degenerate emblems. Mounted on a mundane wall paper background, photocopied snippets of syringes, gems, rodents, machine parts and bottoms merge as an abstracted cyborg figure, an unsavoury goddess of underclass bravura. Read Entire Article of Dash Snow at the saatchi-gallery

Wang Guangyi Biography and His Art Work

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:35:00 +0000

Wang Guangyi was born on 1957 Born in Harbin, China. He lives and works in Beijing, China. The paintings of Wang Guangyi belong to the category of Chinese contemporary art termed Political Pop: work that appropriates the visual tropes of the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, reworking them in the flat, colorful style of American Pop.

To understand the works of artists engaged in this practice, it is important to recognize the significance and specificity of the images they are using to fashion their work. Without this knowledge, the work of artists like Wang Guangyi may be reduced to a mere aestheticization of the experiences of the Cultural Revolution, a view which threatens to limit the discussion of these works to their formal elements, foreclosing more important ideological and historical questions that must be raised.

It is perhaps equally essential, particularly for Western audiences, to keep in mind the dominance that the Maoist regime held over visual culture and artistic production in China from 1949 to 1976, a control that reached a near totality between 1966 and 1972, during the Gang of Four’s reign [i].

Wang Guangyi’s paintings combine the ideological power of communist propaganda with the seductive allure of advertising. Juxtaposing revolutionary images with consumer logos, Wang’s canvases provocate with their duplicitous message, highlighting the conflict between China’s political past and commercialised present. Stylistically merging the government enforced aesthetic of agitprop with the kitsch sensibility of American pop, Wang’s work adopts the cold-war language of the 60s to ironically examine the contemporary polemics of globalisation.

Through his critique, Wang’s paintings weave intricate narratives, implicating the role of the artist as an active participant (both as subjugator and subservient) in economic and social policy. Wang treads a very delicate line between moral dictum and capitalist endorsement; the interpretation of his paintings alternates with the subjectivity of context. Amalgamating, confusing, and blurring opposing ideological beliefs, Wang’s billboard sized canvases readily sell out national valour, while simultaneously devaluing status symbol luxury for the proletariat cause.

Certainly, the vast legacy of propaganda that resulted from this period will continue to impact artists interested in critically examining China’s recent visual history. After all, these images were more than simply popular; for a time, they were the only ones allowed.

Conclusions:

Wang Guangyi had already established his own style and the impact of the work had won him a strong reputation in Chinese art circles.

What to Do Next. . .

If you want any information about Wang Guangyi or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/wang_guangyi. htm

Li Songsong Biography and His Art Work

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:33:30 +0000

Li Songsong was born on 1973 in Beijing, China. He lives and works in Beijing, China. His painting was the kind of iron candy boxes he played with when he was small. Its title was “Beijing Candy. ” There was another one called “Digging,” which depicted some soldiers digging trenches. He painted above two paintings between 1997 and 1999. At that time, he just graduated from college and had not much to do at home so he painted those. This way of thinking was not especially active back then.

He made “Horse” in June 2001. He started to paint these paintings during that summer when he found some old photographs. Originally he wanted to paint something that had a certain distance from reality. He thought to construct a scene in painting, representing things or a certain sentiment from our real life, was not so interesting.

Li Songsong deliberately plays down the potential implication of the images he chooses for his pictures eliminating his personal feelings from these images by adopting an arms length procedure for his work. He breaks up his found images into segments and loosely regroups them through various shades and blocks of color in his painting. For National Geographic, Li downloaded more than a hundred small photographs of details of Taiwan Island from “Google Earth”, a satellite imagery-based mapping website, and reconstructed a collage of Taiwan by depicting each portion in thick and bold strokes of paint.

The painting of the soldiers digging the trench, for example, was a picture he saw by chance. He felt attracted to the process of looking at photographs. When he looks at pictures in a book, he usually turns them over when we understand the meaning in them. He painted this picture probably because He looked at it so closely. It was a very plain photograph: some people in uniform were digging into the earth on a wasteland. After he read the explanation, he realized that the people were voluntary soldiers digging a trench during the Korean War. If you look at an image long enough, you will discover other meanings in it. He had also painted images from TV, the portrait of the late Deng XiaoPing for example. At the time when he passed his portrait was on TV every day. I took a picture of his portrait and painted it. But he didn’t continue with this kind of topics, including the one of the candy box. Perhaps he wanted to paint some existing and ready-made things at that time. But he didn’t want to sketch a person in a conventional type of space. He wanted the original image to be something one dimensional.

Conclusions:

Li Songsong had already established his own style and the impact of the work had won him a strong reputation in Chinese art circles.

What to Do Next. . .

If you want any information about Li Songsong or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/li_songsong. htm

About Artist Stef Driesen Art Work and His Paintings at the Saatchi Gallery

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:35:37 +0000

Influenced by the works of Northern European Old Masters, Stef Driesen’s paintings often incorporate references to art history through their colours, compositions, and subject matter. Through this lineage, Driesen draws from his own personal experiences to create beautifully expressive canvases evoking both emotional and physical sensuality. Using his own sexual identity as a platform for investigation, Driesen’s work expands upon the theme of man and nature: each canvas conceals a human form within his abstracted landscapes, creating a symbiosis between the romantic sublime and mortal carnality.

Using a fleshy, earthy palette, Driesen’s canvases blur the bounds between tangible and psychological space. Watery grounds, delicate brushwork, and intensified tones lend a sense of dream-like terrain, translating materiality of paint into ephemeral fields redolent with contemplation, desire, and loss. In their poetic articulation, Driesen’s paintings convey the intimacy of the human condition, rendering it equally fragile and heroic. Watery mountain scapes and dramatic skies frame ambiguously figurative foreground elements. Soft pinks and flashes of azure punctuate dark canvases highlighting rivers through the picture plane and revealing landscapes beyond. Ultimately Stef Driesen’s compositions expand space, opening up an imaginary dimension into a world full of the theatrical and fantastic.

Stef Driesen draws inspiration from the compositions, colour palettes, and themes explored by these Old Masters, and is inspired by the way in which they used all of these elements to project a vision of life in their time, political, religious, romantic or otherwise. Watery mountain scapes and dramatic skies frame ambiguously figurative foreground elements. Soft pinks and flashes of azure punctuate dark canvases highlighting rivers through the picture plane and revealing landscapes beyond. Ultimately Stef Driesen’s compositions expand space, opening up an imaginary dimension into a world full of the theatrical and fantastic.

What to Do Next. . .

If you want any information about Stef Driesen or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/stef_driesen. htm

Artist Molly Larkey’s Art Work and Paintings at the Saatchi Gallery

admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:33:10 +0000

Molly Larkey’s The Revolutionary playfully incorporates elements of formalist abstraction with its symbolic subject matter. Constructed from a variety of materials, Larkey gives her sculpture a rainbow treatment of brightly coloured paint, each rough hewn component compiling as a topsy-turvy monument, inciting both Modernist art history and hippie psychedelia. With her theatrical assemblage, Larkey frames these disparate ideas as humorously dysfunctional; relating the dynamics of power with the festivity of grass roots endeavour.

BIOGRAPHY

1971

Born Los Angeles.

Lives and works in Brooklyn

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2007

Project Room, PS1 Contemporary Arts

Center, Long Island City

2004

Webspace @ Artists Space, New York

2003

The End of You Is The Beginning of The End of Me, PS122 Gallery, New York

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2007

M*A*S*H, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud & Amy

Smith-Stewart, New York

Tropical Punch, Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn

2005

LineAge, The Drawing Center, New York, NY

Off My Biscuit, Destroy Your District!, Samson Projects,

Boston

Atomica, Esso Gallery & Lombard-Fried Fine Arts, New

York

Désert de Retz, curated by David Hunt, Audiello Fine Art, New York

2004

Black Milk, Marvelli Gallery, New York

2003

Terrible Beauty, Satelliteâ (a division of Roebling Hall), New York

2001

An Exhibition of Works by Contemporary Women Artists:

Kiki Smith, Cecily Brown, Jane Hammond, Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Molly Larkey, Lisa Yuskavage, Marisol, Bobbie Greenfield Gallery,

Santa Monica

2000

New York Area MFA Exhibition, Hunter College, New York

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

1999

Size Matters, Gales Gates et al, Brooklyn, NY

Mirror, Mirror On the Screen, Momenta Art Gallery, Williamsburg

The Y2K Solution, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

1996

Incestuous, Threadwaxing Space, New York

Read Entire Article about Artist Molly Larkey paintings and artwork at The Saatchi-Gallery http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/molly_larkey. htm