Friday, February 12, 2010

Bruce Nauman






Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is a contemporary Americanartist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance.

Much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself in a playful, mischievous manner. For example, the neon Run From Fear- Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail, which literalizes the title phrase and shows the artist's arms tied behind his back. There are however, very serious concerns at the heart of Nauman's practice. He seems to be fascinated by the nature of communication and language's inherent problems, as well as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Louise Bourgeois






Louise Bourgeois is an artist and sculptor. Her most famous works are possibly the spider structures, titled Maman, from the last dozen years.
She is best known for her Cells, Spiders, and various drawings, books and sculptures. Her works are sometimes abstract and she speaks of them in symbolic terms with the main focus being "relationships" - considering an entity in relation to its surroundings. Louise Bourgeois finds inspiration for her works from her childhood: her adulterous father, who had an affair with her governess (who resided in the home), and her mother, who refused to acknowledge it. She claims that she has been the "striking-image" of her father since birth. Bourgeois conveys feelings of anger, betrayal and jealousy, but with playfulness. In her sculpture, she has worked in many different mediums, including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and appropriately for someone who came from a family of tapestry makers, fabric. Her pieces consist of erotic and sexual images and also forms found in nature, such as her sculpture, Cumuls (referring to clouds in the sky) and Nature Study.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Richard Serra






Richard Serra (born November 2, 1939) is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.
Serra's earliest work was abstract and process-based made from molten lead hurled in large splashes against the wall of a studio or exhibition space. Still, he is better known for his minimalist constructions from large rolls and sheets of metal (COR-TEN-Steel). Many of these pieces are self-supporting and emphasize the weight and nature of the materials. Rolls of lead are designed to sag over time. His exterior steel sculptures go through an initial oxidation process, but after 8–10 years, the patina of the steel settles to one color that will remain relatively stable over the piece's life. Serra often constructs site-specific installations, frequently on a scale that dwarfs the observer.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Donald Judd





Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 - February 12, 1994) was a minimalist artist (a term he stridently disavowed).[1] In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent structure without the rigor associated with minimalism proper.


Sunday, February 7, 2010

Ed Kienholz





Edward Kienholz
(October 23, 1927 – June 10, 1994) was an American installation artist whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. He often collaborated with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, from 1972 until his death. Collectively, they are referred to as "Kienholz".

Despite his lack of formal artistic training, Kienholz began to employ his mechanical and carpentry skills in making collage paintings and reliefs assembled from materials salvaged from the alleys and sidewalks of the city. In 1960 he withdrew from the Ferus Gallery to concentrate on his art, creating free-standing, large-scale environmental tableaux. Kienholz's assemblages of found objects—the detritus of modern existence, often including figures cast from life—are at times vulgar, brutal, and gruesome, confronting the viewer with questions about human existence and the inhumanity of twentieth-century society.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Richard Prince




Richard Prince, (born 1949 in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of Republic of Panama) is an American painter and photographer. His works have often been the subject of debates within the art world. Trained as a figure painter, Prince began creating collages containing photographs in 1975. His image, ‘Untitled (Cowboy), a rephotograph constructed from cigarette advertisements, was the first ‘photograph’ to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005, despite violating numerous copyright laws.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Alberto Korda




Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez
, better known as Alberto Korda or simply Korda (September 14, 1928 in Havana, Cuba – May 25, 2001 in Paris, France) was a Cuban photographer, remembered for his image Guerrillero Heroico of Argentinian Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
He was a photographer for the Cuban newspaper Revolución in 1960 when he produced on March 5, 1960 the iconic image of Che Guevara, that became a worldwide symbol of revolution and rebellion. He never received any royalties for the image, because Castro did not recognize the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. In 2000, he sued Smirnoff over the use of the image in advertisement.