Wednesday 17 November 2010

The Situationists...


Luis Dourado, "Untitled Map 3" 2010


Constant, "Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon" (Symbolic Representation of New Babylon), 1969

Moises Gonzáles

These photographs were done by  Moises Gonzáles for Ae magazine. 
I absolutely love Klimt, so it's interesting to see his work adapted in a contemporary way.
Some of the drawing within the photos are a bit shit though.








Lucas C. Simoes

Cut-outs by Brazilian artist Lucas Chimello Simões.

The cut-outs are made with layers of the same photo




 

 

Francis Bacon, "Self Portrait"

Johan Thörnqvist

Drawings by Swedish illustrator 
Johan Thörnqvist

I love works like these. Imagine seeing one in the street. It would probably make my day.


Luis Dourado | Visual Artist


Portuguese visual artist and illustrator Luis Dourado






"Kennedy Is Dreaming"







I'm obsessed with these...

Theo Altenberg | Abstract Art










Matthias Heiderich | ISO 3ERL1N

Matthias Heidrich's detail photography of Berlin. So simple, but so effective.







Tim Cheng

Photographs by Tim Cheng, Taiwan





Saturday 13 November 2010

Read this to make you smile!


A poor review of Frieze

Admittedly not very good, but my first review for Pi. They can only get better...




Visiting the Frieze Art Fair on a grey, post-Roxy Thursday morning was always going to be a risky gamble. Would the promise of a huge tent’s worth of contemporary art heal or deepen this art lover’s hangover? 
Realising it was a fifteen-pound entry for students on arrival wasn’t a great start, but was justified by the sheer volume of art to be seen, as well as current exhibition prices. However it was a clear reminder of the fact that this is what Frieze is about, art and money, and not necessarily in that order.
 Once inside, my first impression was that there was a lot of YBA work hanging around (and mostly in American Galleries). Wandering around the Fair, it’s easy to become overwhelmed - not only by the sheer quantity of work but mainly due to this year bright, bordering-on-garish colours of the work of which a lot seemed to be shamelessly referencing better known, successful pieces.
  This seemed to the general theme as a whole. Many of the galleries seemed to be playing it safe by offering up works by successful, well known names such as Emin, Warhol, Hodgkin and Hirst. The content hadn’t seemed to have changed too much since the Fair two years ago.
  To be fair, the most adventurous works would be found in the Galleries from Moscow and Berlin, where the work was more than the play-it-safe pieces which were shiny, but so depthless that you found yourself more captivated by your own reflection than the art.
   Wandering around, it seemed that everything (apart from the photography) was a bit… dry. All the art displayed seemed to be very similar, and in competition with each other. Maybe it can be blamed on the economic climate, but it was clear that galleries were hoping to make a sale through the bright, cheerful, tried and tested works. After all, if you’re going to spend money when it’s tight, you want your purchase to make you happy when you look at it.
   I was starting to lose hope, and feel very out of place. Frieze is as much a catwalk as it is a fair. It’s like shopping where all the cool kids hang out.
  Almost about to leave, and not feeling any less hungover, I came across the world of David Shrigley, where the artist himself was sitting, surrounded by his tongue in cheek illustrations, which were refreshingly different. The drawings made me chuckle, but it wasn’t anything new for Shrigley. Enjoyable nonetheless.
   Finally, Bharti Kher’s ‘Not All Who Wonder Are Lost’ caught my eye. An artist I’ve never come across before, he restored my waning faith in contemporary art, along with Jeppe Hein’s vibrating mirror, and I walked out with a smile on my face. There may have been wall upon wall of pretty, but average, work to look through, but finding that one piece that reminds you of the power of art is what it’s all about, and why this year’s Frieze may not have been outstanding, but it wasn’t a complete write-off.

Friday 12 November 2010

Hollis Brown Thornton

Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2010

First place
David Chancellor "Huntress with buck"



















Second place
Panayiotis Lamprou "Portrait of my British wife"






















Third place
Jeffrey Stockbridge "Tic Tac and Tootsie"













The work of this year's winners seem to have taken a rather drastic turn from last year's. The interest in solitary, predominantly female subjects has turned slightly voyeuristic and morbid...




An interesting article from The Guardian; 


Panayiotis Lamprou: the casual power of an intimate portrait

Lamprou's Portrait of My British Wife – on the shortlist for this year's Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize – is a private moment made public. But when does art become voyeurism?
Portrait of My British Wife by Panayiotis LamprouView larger picture
Portrait of My British Wife by Panayiotis Lamprou

Photographers have taken explicit photographs since the invention of the form. It is still a surprise, though, to see Panayiotis Lamprou's image, Portrait of My British Wife, on the shortlist of this year's Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize. It is, as the Guardian's arts correspondent, Mark Brown, put it (perhaps understating the case somewhat), "arresting because of its intimacy". It begs the vexed question, when does art become voyeurism or, indeed, pornography?
Lamprou photographed his wife sitting outside their summerhouse on the Aegean island of Schinousa. She has just finished eating an omelette and the dirty pan sits on table at her elbow. She is staring at the camera with a gaze that is difficult to read, wearing a short dress – or long T-shirt – and nothing underneath. Her legs are apart and her vagina is visible beneath the skirt. There is something both coy and provocative about the portrait, which, according to the photographer, was not originally intended for public display. (What changed his – and her – mind?) It will be interesting to see how the National Portrait Gallerydisplays the image when they exhibit it in a show of 60 of the submitted portraits in November.
EMBARGOED TIL 16/09/10 Jeffrey Stockbridge photograph for the Taylor Wessing photographic prizeDetail from Jeffrey Stockbridge's photograph of twins Tic Tac and Tootsie Photograph: National Portrait Gallery/PA
Undoubtedly many visitors to the gallery will find the image shocking, even offensive. Ironically, its tone of languor and intimacy sets it apart from the other three shortlisted portraits, all of which are provocative in different ways. Indeed, both Jeffrey Stockbridge's portrait of Tic Tac and Tootsie, twin sisters who have turned to prostitution on the streets of Philadelphia to fund their drug addictions, and Abbie Trayley-Smith's portrait of a young girl at a charity for obese children, could be considered more voyeuristic and exploitative.
Lamprou's portrait, though, cannot use the defence of social documentary or reportage. It is a private, intimate moment made public and, however consensual the contract between photographer and subject – and husband and wife - much of its arresting power lies in this uneasy dynamic. Do we, as viewers of what was originally an intensely private exchange, become voyeurs?
Lamprou's intimately explicit portrait is a very different kind of photograph than, say, the formally driven Teutonic female nudes ofHelmet Newton, the hardcore imagery of Robert Mapplethorpe or the garish art-porn of Araki. Neither does it fit into the fashion-porn genre indulged in by the likes of Terry Richardson. Again, it is the intimacy of the setting – and the fracturing of that intimacy – that sets it apart and may even, for some viewers, make it even more problematic.
In both its explicitness and its blurring of the boundary between the private and the public, Lamprou's portrait calls to mind the taboo-breaking work of the young American photographer, Leigh Ledare. His book, Pretend You're Actually Alive, is a visual and written portrait of his mother, an erstwhile exotic dancer, who is both a narcissist and an exhibitionist. Over the years, he has photographed her in various explicit poses, both alone and with a succession of younger lovers, and the titles alone - Mom Spread With Lamp (2000) – give some indication of the content.
When Nan Goldin included Ledare's work in her selection for the Rencontres d'Arles Festival, last year, it caused considerable debate among visitors, many of whom found it either offensive or disturbing. (Ledare, for the record, is a charming, well-balanced individual, and the book does work, in an albeit disturbing way, as a fractured chronicle of a thankfully singular strain family dysfunction.) It does beg the – now quaintly old-fashioned – question, are some things better left to the imagination than the camera? Or, more pertinently, the gallery wall?
Interestingly, too, it is nearly always women who are the object of the camera's gaze in these provocative photographs. (Mapplethorpe, a gay man, and Richardson, a self-confessed exhibitionist, both turned the camera on themselves, but they are the exceptions.) Would, one wonders, a full-frontal photograph of a relaxed, sun-dappled Lamprou taken by his wife be as arresting or provocative?
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize - David ChancellorA photograph by David Chancellor of a 14-year-old American girl hunting in South Africa. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery/PA
What strikes me most about Lamprou's portrait – apart, of course, from its explicitness – is its apparent casualness. It has none of the heightened formal power of David Chancellor's portrait of a 14-year-old girl astride her horse with a dead impala. Instead, it looks, at first glance, like a holiday snap – but that, too, is part of its odd, and confusing, power. The dirty pan, the cluttered table, and the blurred chair in the foreground are all familiar signifiers of that certain feeling of relaxed torpor that descends on us when we settle in to a holiday. It's just that the eye is drawn elsewhere; we are given licence to look, to linger, to transgress the boundary between the accepted and the forbidden – at a cost, perhaps, to all of us, the photographer, the subject and the viewer … and to our ever-shrinking imaginations.

Chewing Gum beauty

Look for one of these...