Senaste inläggen

Av Lars Vilks - 18 oktober 2009 21:17

  

Gino De Dominicis, was an Italian artist, born in 1947 in Ancona, died at the age of 51, on Nov. 29, 1998 at his home in Rome. De Dominicis was a controversial and mystifying figure in Italian art. Even the news of his death was suspect, for years earlier he had reported his own demise in the mock conclusion to a biographical essay.


Gino De Dominicis’ career is one of the most enigmatic of any late twentieth-century artist. Since his first exhibition in the mid-‘60s he actively tried to dissociate himself from Conceptualism, Arte Povera, and other concurrent art movements. His small but remarkable body of works includes several installations and number of drawings and paintings.


For De Dominicis, dematerialisation and its logical conclusion, invisibility, were integral parts of his artistic aesthetic as, he believed, they held the key to a hidden world of timeless beauty and of immortality. Rejecting conventional linear interpretations of time, De Dominicis maintained that true reality existed as an "eternal present". Responding to the Metaphysical tradition in Italian art, he understood the world of objective reality to be merely an artifice. Objects such as "a glass, a man, a hen... are not really a glass, a man, a hen," he once explained, " but only verifications of the possibility of existence... To truly exist, things would have to exist eternally, immortally. Only then would they be not only verifications of certain possibilities, but truly things."


De Dominicis participated in several of the Venice Biennials 1972-2009. He was also in Documenta, Kassel in 1972 but neglected the invitation for Documenta 1982.


His work in the biennial: Attempt to Fly (remake of the original from 1969, short version).

Av Lars Vilks - 16 oktober 2009 15:18

  

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Chen Zhen grew up during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in the late 1970’s. With this transition, Chen became interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy (forbidden under Maoist rule) and Western practices as an alternative to the government’s official cultural ideology. After immigrating to Paris in 1986 to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, he abandoned his early work in painting in favor of mixed media installation. 

A central theme in Chen’s work is creating harmony through difference. Using the human body, illness, and medicine as metaphors, Chen explores the intricate, and often paradoxical, relationship between the material and the spiritual, community and individual, and interior and exterior. Using his concept of the organic whole, derived from Chinese medical theory, Chen constructs complete entities from disparate components, referencing the human body or an architectural model.


Chen's intellectual and artistic approach breathes great poetic and conceptual power and a fundamentally individual, independent attitude - every work being a reflection of his

biography, a site of analogy where the individual, social, cultural and material bodies are fused in one organic landscape. Experiencing the body as landscape calls for a special sensitivity for processes, forms, and materials. Accordingly, the exhibition follows neither a chronological nor thematic order but, in the first place, seeks a dialogue with its spatial environment. Informed by the transitory character of the works exhibited, the interplay of closeness and distance starts a dialogue which subtly expands and modifies the metaphorical statements made by the individual pieces.

Chen Zhen died of leukemia in December 2000: the understanding of his disease as an ineluctable part of his being influenced all his considerations as an artist. His perhaps most important -project- was his ambition to heal himself: -becoming a doctor- is to be understood both literally and as part of his artistic intentions. All his approaches, whether his specific handling of objects, his attitude towards migration and exile, and his far-reaching visions of intercultural dialogue, clearly document the unspeakable that translated spirituality and healing power into the materiality of sculptures.


Work in the biennial is a new and simplified version of  Jue Chang - Fifty Strokes to Each (1998).


Av Lars Vilks - 14 oktober 2009 12:25

  

The artist duo David Bestué and Marc Vives (Bestué/Vives) both live and work in Barcelona, Spain. Through their work in video, theatre, photography, installation, interventions, Bestué and Vives explore an absurdity in the ludicrous actions and objects of everyday life. Their work is in the dadaistic tradition and connected to conceptual art and Fluxus.


In the exhibition "Everstill" in Huerta de San Vicente, Casa-Museo Federico García Lorca, Granada (curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist) Bestué /Vives installed a tiny theatre of marionette insects beneath the bedsprings.The work is titled Historia del alacrán enamorado (Story of the Lovelorn Scorpion, 2007) and is a response to García Lorca's early 'insect comedy' El maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly's Evil Spell, 1920) – produced together with the composer Manuel de Falla for Lorca’s younger sister. David Bestué: "Under the bed is where the monsters live. If somebody could tell the story of this house, it would be the little critters that remained there."


Bestué/Vives have exhibited in Venice Biennial 2009.


Work in the biennial: Lorca in Stone


Av Lars Vilks - 12 oktober 2009 17:29

  

Tian Tian Wang, born 1980, China. She studied at Staatlichen Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main between 2001-06. She works with painting and her main theme is fire, burning houses, volcanoes, smoke... She exhibited in the Venice Biennial 2009.


Tian Tian Wang: "Volcanoes, mountains and clouds are my main metaphors for nature which is my biggest inspiration/topic. I choose them as symbols because they correspond to me and my feelings most. Since 2005 you find chimneys, burning houses and smoke, emerging from explosion. I also understand them as nature, they are still part of the materialistic world. In these series I would like to emphasize that beauty can also coexist with unpleasant situations, apart from distinction of the human mind."



Work in the biennial: Five Fires (installation) PICTURE

Av Lars Vilks - 10 oktober 2009 18:45

Alessandro Pessoli was born in Cervia, Italy, in 1963 and lives and works in Milan. Drawing is a daily event, a near obsessive activity that has formed and defined his art since the very beginning. But Pessoli approaches drawing with an open mind. For him, everything is possible.

He experiments with images and materials, freely exploiting each uncontrolled and unexpected effect. Using aquarelle, ink, tempera, oils and enamel paint, he depicts scenes from life and does not hesitate to expose himself in the process. At the same time he maintains a certain distance and builds resistance in order to dramatise and ridicule each image. Pessoli emphasises the influence comic strips have on his work: ''There is one aspect in particular of comic strips that interests me'', he says, ''that of humanizing any kind of image, of resisting deformation without losing credibility.'' Pessoli chronicles an emotionally deep and symbolic world, in which he and his characters continuously search for truth and the meaning of life, struggling with questions of identity and destiny.


His fluid and imaginative style was apparent in the animated short Caligola (Caligula, 2002), which transferred thousands of works on paper onto film. The work presaged Pessoli’s recent flamboyant reinter-pretations of the life of Italian fighter pilot and World War I hero Francesco Baracca.


Alessandro Pessoli has a wide experience of international exhibitions. He participated in Venice Biennial 2009.


Av Lars Vilks - 7 oktober 2009 00:12

  

Guyton\Walker (Picture: Walker left)

[Wade Guyton (Hammond, Indiana, USA, 1972); Kelley Walker (Columbus, Georgia, USA, 1969). They live and work in New York.]


Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker’s collaborative debut took place in New York in 2005. In their installations the artists incorporate an array of artistic mediums, including painting, sculpture, and print media; their works are often created through process-oriented appropriations and digital manipulations, and frequently deploy recycled everyday objects. Their work, which often draws on the legacy of Pop Art, at times combines conventions of art and design. Previously having referred to both Andy Warhol and Fischli & Weiss, the artists likewise draw sustenance from their individual practices. Their collaborative work is, however, markedly different what they create by themselves. In fact, “create” may not be the right term: their collaborative practice may better be described as being rooted in filtering rather than defining images and objects. Extending the notions informing their collaboration to the objects themselves, one can see each artwork self-reflexively questioning its own status as art. Their contribution to the Venice Biennale 2009 combines painterly and technologically mediated expressions and includes canvases, printed sheet rock, and other objects — hung on the walls and placed throughout the gallery–featuring images of bananas and coconuts. Both the nature of their collaborative practice and their output reveal a more intricate view of the role of the artist, as well as how the concepts of authorship, authenticity, and identity function within the systems their work addresses.


Work in the biennial Original Installation in Six Copies

Av Lars Vilks - 4 oktober 2009 23:35

  

Huang Yong Ping (born 1954) was born in China. In 1989 Mr. Huang was invited to Paris to participate in "Magicians of the Earth," an exhibition that famously broke ground in bringing Western and non-Western art together. While he was there, the killings at Tiananmen Square took place, and he decided to stay in France.  French visual artist of Chinese origin. Huang's work combines many media and cultural influence, but is particularly strongly influence by the intellectual abstraction of Dada and by Chinese numerology traditions. Founder of the Xiamen Dada group in China in the 1980s, Huang's installations have included unorthodox materials such as live snakes and scorpions. Many of Huang's sculptural works encompass a large scale, some tens of meters in dimension.


The transgression of the boundary between humankind and nature also puts Huang Yong Ping himself in a totally original position. He is now at once an artist, magician, fortune-teller, alchemist, healer, teacher, philosopher, and writer. The question of identity, as an individual and an “artist,” is now being seriously raised. As with Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy and Joseph Beuys and the shaman, Huang Yong Ping is creating a new role for himself as he continually oscillates between himself and the various extensions of his identity. This clearly defies the conventional status of the artist.


In 1996 Huang Yong Ping took part in Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, in 1997 Huang participated in “Skulptur Projekte” in Münster, Germany with his sculpture "100 Arms of Guan-yin". He has exhibitied in Yokohama Triennial 2001, São Paulo Biennial 2004, Istanbul Biennial 2007, Lyon Biennial and Moscow Biennial in 2009. In Venice Biennial 1999, 2003 and 2009.


Work in the biennial: Theater of the World Light (Just Lazy)


Av Lars Vilks - 3 oktober 2009 00:29

  

Georges Adéagbo was born in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa in 1942, where he still lives and works. The eldest of eleven children, he studied law in Paris. Shortly before getting his degree, in 1971, he returned to Cotonou due to the sudden death of his father. Unable to return to France, he began to create installations in his home and courtyard without exhibiting them for 23 years. Unfamiliar with contemporary art, he did not define his complex compositions as artworks and only accepted this definition bestowed by others later. Adéagbo began exhibiting his installations publicly in 1994 in Besancon, France (“La route de l’art sur la route de l’esclave - The Route of Art on the Route of Slavery.”) His work was subsequently included in “Big City” (Serpentine Gallery, London, 1995), “Die Anderen Modernen” (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 1997), The Second Johannesburg Biennial (1997), and the São Paulo Biennial in 1998.


An outdoor day-long installation at the Arsenale, “The Story of the Lion”, was an award winner at the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999. In 2000, he participated in “La Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire” at Villa Medici, Rome and a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Toyota Museum, Japan.

He participated in Documenta, Kassel, 2002 and in the Venice Biennial 2009.


Work in the biennial: La resurrection de Edith Piaf' (2000) – extended version.

Guest star: Angélique Kidjo, the world famous singer from Cotonou, Benin.

Ovido - Quiz & Flashcards