An art and an artist I really appreciate

Kandinsky was a Russian painter (1866-1944), whose exploration of abstraction made him one of the most important innovators of modern art. Although Kandinsky was fascinated by colour when he was a child, he didn’t enrol at art school until he was 30 years old. In 1900, Kandinsky studied art in Munich in Germany.

At first his paintings were realistic but over the years his style of painting changed dramatically, as they became more colourful, bold and less realistic.As one of the first explorers of "pure“ abstraction, Kandinsky paved the way for abstract expressionism.

In 1911, along with Franz Marc and other German expressionists, Kandinsky formed a group called "The Blue Rider". He produced both abstract and figurative works during this period, all of which were characterized by brilliant colors and complex patterns.

Around 1913, he began working on paintings that came to be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to objects of the physical world and were inspired by music. The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms were equivalent to sounds and music, and sought to create color harmonies.

After World War I, Kandinsky's abstractions became increasingly geometric in form, as he abandoned his earlier fluid style in favor of sharply etched outlines and clear patterns. Many works were comprised solely of lines, circles, arcs, and other simple geometric shapes.

"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings" - Wassily Kandinsky

Sources:

- http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/

- http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kandinsk.htm

- http://www.artelino.com/articles/wassily_kandinsky.asp

- http://www.answers.com/topic/wassily-kandinsky

- http://www.artnet.com/artist/9211/wassily-kandinsky.html

Personal Perspective:

Kandinsky is well-known for his work with colours and geometric shapes, there is no doubt. This work does promise more freedom of expression, allowing a more expansive and intuitive play of creativity.

He saw art as a way to show and to evoke feelings and emotions.It is true that our emotions can "paint" the way we really see things around us. When we are sad, it seems as though the whole world is dark and gloomy. When we feel joy, the day can seem brighter and the colours of everything around us seem also more vivid. In fact, the geometrical elements such as triangles, circles, rectangles, half-circles and the warm and strong colours evoke unconscious emotions holding powerful and positive energy. It delivers a sense of life as an abstract, metaphysical idea in a beautiful world. Physical and material things doesn't matter at all.

It is almost like art therapy which pleases my eyes and relaxes me.

David Hockney

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire (1937), David Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art (1953-57) and the Royal College of Art (1959-62).

David Hockney has been engaged with portraiture since his teenage years when he painted "Portrait of my Father" (1955), and his self-portraits and depictions of family, lovers and friends.His portraits, self-portraits, still lifes and scenes of friends are characterized by his concern with light, bright colours, and frankly realism derived from Pop Art and photography.

During his time at the Royal College, Hockney won a gold medal and the Guinness Award for Etching in 1961. He was awarded a prize in the Junior Section of the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1961 and in the Graphics Section of the Paris Biennale in 1963. He exhibited as a Pop at the Kasmin Gallery in 1963. He was given a retrospective exhibition called “Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-1970” at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970.

Between 1963-1967, he lived in Los Angeles. Due to the mild californian atmospheres (the light, the gardens, the pools, the Beverly Hills architecture and the beaches), he changed substantially his paintings, using acrylic paint instead of oil paint. In 1964 he painted his first California pictures, including his first pool work. In the same year Hockney was invited to make a print at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which spearheaded the printmaking explosion in the United States. At Tamarind, Hockney met Ken Tyler, a trainee printer destined to found two world-famous workshops: Gemini in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics in New York. Hockney made several important portrait lithographs at Gemini in 1973.

In the 1970s, he achieved prominence as a set designer for the opera and ballet. He later experimented with photography and photocollage, and still later with computer technology and printers.He carried on with his work with book illustration based on the cavafy poems and the Brothers Grimm tales and fine portrait work.

Hockney has gained a reputation for his success in drawings, witty etchings, double portraits, inventive photo-collages, opera sets and for his paintings of Southern California.

Throughout his career, Hockney has explored and reveled in the variety of techniques and effects offered by printmaking processes. He has also studied the techniques used by Picasso and spent two years working with Picasso’s printer in Paris. Hockney has recently produced homemade prints on Canon and Kodak office copiers, transmitted huge murals to exhibitions by fax and made drawings on Computer Paintbox for the Television. Hockney continues to live and work in California using his immediate surroundings as subject matter for his work.

If you want to see some of his work, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxANi2OeW4w

Sources:
Clarke, David (1996): Art & Place - Essays on Art From Hong Kong Perspective. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Hoffmann, Frank (1990): Arts & Entertainments fads, Volume 1990, Parte 2. New York: The Haworth Press, Inc.
Melia, Paul (1995): David Hockney. UK: Manchester University Press.
Osterwold, Tilman (2003): Pop Art. Köln: Taschen.

Damien Hirst

Born in Bristol, in 1965, Damien Hirst studied at Godsmith's College, University of London, 1986-1989.

While still a student, he organized a collective exposition called "Freeze", which included works of his colleagues and his. This exposition turned him famous.

Damien Hirst’s best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces, Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies.His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings.

His work is often challenging in subject matter and difficult to live with. Hirst's subjects include animal corpses, skulls, flies, maggots and religious iconography. His work consistly revolves around the intertwined topics of science and religion, questioning the transition of society from a belief in God to a belief in drugs and science.

Sources:

http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/18231

http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/museum_in_london/london_exhibition_archive/statuephilia/damien_hirst.aspx
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/damien-hirst/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/damienhirst
http://www.eyestorm.com/artists/profile/Damien_Hirst.html

Personal reflection:

Damien Hirst work is definitely a mixture of science and religion, an art with a new perspective about life and death, repulsion and beauty. It is somehow connected to human life. 

But his work can provoque strong reactions. It challenges us to reflect about the human condition, to explore the questions "what is death?", "what is life?", "why do we exist?". If we think about this for a moment, well, his work seems to have a great purpose. But when I see all these real animal corpses preserved in tanks, "macabre", death, repulsion are the words that comes instinctively to my mind. Why? I really can't  explain.

Nevertheless, I appreciate indeed the statue "Virgin Mother", a reflection about the beginning of life, birth, and the sculpture "For the Love of God", not because of the skull but due to its originatlity, hard work of encrusting the diamonds and its beauty ("The diamonds are the girls best friend").

Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, Sigmund Freud's grandson, was born in Berlin in 1922. In 1933 he emigrated with his family to England, where he acquired British nationality in 1939.

His earliest love was drawing, and he began to work full time as an artist after being invalided out of the Merchant Navy in 1942.

In 1951 his Interior at Paddington (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) won a prize at the Festival of Britain, and since then he has built up a formidable reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary figurative painters.

Portraits and nudes are his specialities, often observed in arresting close-up.

His early work was meticulously painted, so he has sometimes been described as a `Realist', but the subjectivity and intensity of his work has always set him apart from the sober tradition characteristic of most British figurative art since the Second World War.

In his later work (from the late 1950s) his handling became much broader.

His portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping from1995 was sold for $33,6, one of the most expensive work sold at this point.

"Many of the figures are asleep, exposed, vulnerable. You can't help feeling that they have in some way become Freud's victims. The painter is a voyeur and he transfers this sensation to the viewer of the paintings. There is a slight sense of guilt in viewing Freud's work, as if you are an intruder in a private space. In one portrait of a nude woman sleeping, there is the shadow of a head on the floor. It is surely meant to be Freud's. But it also become the viewer." (Cockburn:2004:181)

Sources:

- Cockburn, Alexandre: Serpents in the garden: liaisons with culture & sex. 2004. California: CounterPunch

- Los Angeles Magazine, April 2003

- Stremmel, Kerstin: Realism. 2004. Köln: Taschen.

My point of view:

In fact, when I see his naked portraits, I don't feel repugnance. I am seeing people in a very pure essence and reality, in a state of calm, purity and simplicity, with body details and expressions. Lucian Freud's work is very detailed, nothing is missing. And, yes, I feel more like an intruder, a voyeur than a simple viewer. It's almost as I am invading the space in the portrait.

I am not a fan of his work but I admire it because it is a way of drifting apart from the real and superficial beauty. It is another perception of real life, real people.

Francis Bacon's art

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 1909. He left home at the age of sixteen and spent two years in Berlin, Germany, and Paris, France.

In Paris he saw an art exhibit by the painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Though he had never taken an art class, Bacon began painting with watercolors. He then settled in London, England, with the intention of establishing himself as an interior decorator and furniture designer. However, he soon turned to painting exclusively.

Bacon began oil painting in 1929. The few early paintings that survive (he destroyed most of them) show that he began as a late cubist (a twentieth-century movement that used geometric shapes). By 1932 he turned to a form of surrealism (using fantastic imagery of the subconscious) based partly on Pablo Picasso's works from about 1925 to 1928. Bacon began to draw attention in 1933 with his work Crucifixion, and the same year he took part in exhibitions in London.

Bacon exhibited very rarely until 1945. It was only after World War II that his paintings became known outside his circle of friends. At this time he also began to paint the human figure. The pictures that made his reputation are of such subjects as a melting head in front of a curtain and a screaming figure crouching under an umbrella.

«What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potencial violence, a violence of reaction and expression.»[1]

From the 1950s through the end of Bacon's painting career and life in the early 1990s, the consistent theme of his work was the isolation and pain of the individual, with a single figure (usually male) seated or standing in a small, windowless interior, as if confined in a private hell. His subjects were artists, friends, lovers, and even himself. His painting technique consisted of using rags, his hands, and dust along with paint and brush.

The artist died April 28, 1992, in Madrid.

[1] Deleuze, Gilles: Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. 1981. France: Éditions de la Différence. English Translations by Continuum 2003.(Page xii)

Sources:
- Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. 1981. France: Éditions de la Différence. English Translations by Continuum 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.
- Ficacci, Luigi: Francis Bacon 1909-1992. 2003. Köln: Taschen GmbH.
- Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood. Art in Theory-1900-2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 1992. UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
- Wegner, Nicholas and Philip James. Francis bacon Seminar. A Discussion of the Artist. 2004. London, Cv Publications.

PERSONAL REFLECTION ABOUT FRANCIS BACON'S ART:

We are accustomed to appreciate the beauty and the logical in life. And I think every artist work diserves to be seen even if not admired. Those works give us a new (bad or good) perception of things, people and life.
I am an abstract art admirer but Francis Bacon's art appears quite disturbing. He treated the human face and body in a style of extreme distortion and contortion. His paintings expressed images of anger, isolation, horror and degradation with powerful colors and geometric constructions. I like these powerful colors and geometric construtions, but I dislike the contents which reflects violence, sadness, horror, feelings that the human being rejects.
Could it be the expression of his own personal state of mind or the reflection of all the memories left by  the War?

Personal reflection about Gilbert & George's work

I don't appreciate Gilbert & George's art. It is shocking, although radical and challenging.

They expose a portrait of people's life, especially their own, accepting the good and the bad in themselves and everybody else.

They manage to push all kind of bounderies through their work. And their purposal intends to provoke people's reaction. Well, they have been succeeded along the years!

The use of depiction of bodily fluids and excrements, naked bodies of themselves, even the simple use of photo montage, isn't at all my idea of art.

There is  one aspect that might be relevante to talk about, the only one that requires my attention: the fact that they decided to leave their private life behind for the good of their art. Well, I suppose it is a very hard decision to make, but surely not the one I would choose!

Gilbert & George

Gilbert Proesch (born in 1943 in Italy) and George Passmore (born in 1942 in England), known simply as Gilbert & George, met on 1967 while studying sculpture at St. Martins School of Art in London.

In 1969, while still students they made The Singing Sculpture, for which they covered themselves with bronze powder, stoddo on a table on a gallery space, and mimed to a recording of Flanagan and Allen's song Underneath the Arches, sometimes for hours at a time. For this performance and others, they were dressed in matching business suits, which they refered to as "their responsibility suits of their art". If they moved at all it was in a mechanical manner. They were "living sculptures".

The decision to perform live required the two artists to travel around for their work to be on display. Furthermore, they needed to work collectively and collaboratively. So, as a result, they sacrificed their own individual private lives for the sake of their art. Also, by creating the name "Gilbert & George" they made very clear that responsibility for the work needed to be shared by the both of them at the same level.

Gilbert & George changed radically the concept of sculpture, leading the traditional definition into a generic term in wide use in contemporary days.They turned life into art. Their purpose consisted in breaking social and ethical taboos and in dissolving the boundary between the private and the public sphere. In doing so, they focused on themes such as alcoholism, unemployment, violence, nudity, depictions of sexual acts, racial tension, homosexuality, AIDS and bodily fluids (faeces, urine and semen).

Over the years, Gilbert & George have expressed themselves through a variety of mediums: books, drawing, mail art, video, painting and photographic montages among others.

From 1969 to 1975, they completed a number of "postal sculptures" cards containing images and messages sent out in editions to friends and colleagues

They also made a series of charcoal-on-paper sculptures featuring natural designs that covered entire walls.

Until 1974, they made a lot of black-and-white photographs.

During the last 1980s and the 1990s, Gilbert & George produced numerous series of exuberant, large-scale montages of photographs.

Their peaces of art can value 60.000 to 300.000 euros.Very expensive although their interest is not to sale, but to confront people with their art work.

Online gallery and exhibitions:

http://www.mam.org/gandg/gallery.htm

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1163&page=1

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/7529/gilbert-george-jack-freak-pictures-exhibition.html

Sources:

Ruhrberg, Karl. Art of the 20th Cebtury, parte 1. 2000. Köln: Taschen GmbH. (page 726).

Schmid, Hans. Concepts of Sharedness: Essays on Collective Intentionality. 2008. Germany: Outos Verlag. (pages 25 and 26).

Taylor, Brandon: Sculpture and Psychanalysis, Volume 5. 2006. USA: Ashgate Publishing Limited (pages 139 to 157).

Warren, Lynne: Encyclopedia of 20th Century Photography. 2006. Great Britain: Taylor and Francis Group LLC (page 611).