VISUAL ARTS - COLLAGE By Jorge Chamorro

ILLUSTRATION - Lee's pen art

Korean born, Brooklyn based Il Lee is best known for his ballpoint pen abstract artworks which he has been doing for more than 30 years. It is stunning to think about the labor that goes into each of these works, and not to mention how many pens it must takes to do the larger pieces, as big as 8′ x 12′ feet. I especially love the blue works featured here.

ART - Jean Wells

 

Coke and Hamburger.
2 feet tall x 0.5 foot diameter and 1.5 feet tall x 1 foot , 2010.

 

American artist Jean Wells began sculpting in the late 1980's using a beguiling array of materials and objects, large and small. Playful, paradoxical and full of technical finesse, Wells offers not only visual pleasures, but stimulating food for thought with her Pop icons of ice cream, soda and pin up queens.

 

Fitting neatly into an art historical discourse that revolves around the loaded topic of consumerism, a conversation that includes such twentieth century stalwarts as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons, among others, Wells also invokes more rarefied luminaries such as Nikki de Saint Phalle, Wayne Thiebaud and Takashi Murakami. Like many postmodern artists working with a blend of pop culture iconography and autobiography, Wells' work is charming and nostalgic, yet packs a punch with its satisfying bite of underlying poignancy, offering an authentic and personal undercurrent that balances the lyrical. 

 

Wells is deeply inspired by her sumptuous materials, and works with an exquisite palette of beautifully colored glass that she has custom created for her sculptures. These unique glass creations provide her with an incredibly wide selection of tones, qualities of reflection and color gradations, allowing her to shade forms, variegate and layer colors with great precision and nuance. Wells hand cuts the glass, and keeps a reserve of tiny scrap pieces that allow her to add details and touches of color that keep the surfaces lively and variable. Like many artists, she relies upon her personal history, imagination and even her dream life to arrive at the ideas she will pursue as actual objects.

 

Raised in the wholesome landscape of the evergreen Pacific Northwest, Wells was born into a large artistic family with a strong traditional skill set grounded in such old world techniques such as fresco secco, realism and mosaics. At an early age the young artist apprenticed with her father, mosaic artist Thomas Wells, and learned the painstaking craft and iconography of classical Byzantine-style mosaics as he completed a large commission for the prestigious and architecturally celebrated St. Demetrios Greek Church in Seattle. Having worked for a number of years in paintings and ceramics, Wells has recently rediscovered her love of mosaics and in keeping with her playful, trickster nature, she prefers to turn the traditional uses of this medium on their head and make sculpture instead of murals.

ART - JOHN VON BERGEN

John von Bergen is a US born artist who has been based in Berlin for the last eight years. His studio, a large space in Wedding, is a true working space – John works primarily with sculpture and installation, and his material experiments, works-in-progress, and many completed works are installed around the walls.

 

Everything is installed in such a way that it was virtually impossible to tell where the wall ended and the sculpture began. Protruding out, the work appears as a fantastical extension of the wall reaching out into the room. For his show at the project space Smack Mellon last year, John took this strategy to an extreme – creating a 45 foot (15 meter) large-scale, site-specific work that appeared to emerge from the walls of the gallery itself. The piece, Whip Lash, appeared to involve a large metallic pillar (cast from an actual pillar in the gallery) being supported mid-air by two huge wall ‘protrusions.’ The usually neutral and austere white wall of the space was transformed into an almost antagonistic force – one defying physics, logic and reality.

 

EXHIBITION - Anish Kapoor at Le Grand Palais

"Monumenta"

is an exhibit happening once a year at the Grand Palais. Every year one artist is invited to create one unique grand piece. Following Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, and Christian Boltanski, for its fourth year Monumenta brings us Anish Kapoor. The British artist of Indian origin has conceived a colossal inflatable structure that weighs 12 tons. It can receive 271 people at a time.

The piece, named "Leviathan", is inspired by the biblical marine monster of the same name. It's 13,500 square metres specially produced by Kapoor for the Nave of the Grand Palais prove more than ever his mastery of monumental work in contemporary sculpture, making litterally spectacular and explorable volumes.

Anish Kapoor has dedicated Leviathan to Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset

Michael Elmgreen (born 1961; Denmark ) and Ingar Dragset (born 1968; Norway ) are a collaborative duo of visual art.They live and work together in Berlin. They are known for work which has wit and subversive humour, and which looks at serious cultural concerns. Elmgreen and Dragset met in 1995 and moved to Berlin in 1997, where they converted a large 100m² into a 13th Street Subway Station in 2004.They are remember for siting a Prada boutique in the middle the Texan desert in 2005, and their The Welfare Show in 2006 at Serpentine gallery, London.

Michael Elmgree e Ingar Dragset costituiscono un duo collaborativo nel campo della visual art. Vivono e lavorano insieme a Berlino. Sono conosciuti per lavori dal carattere suvversivo e di sottile intelligenza, e  raccontano di seri riscontri culturali. Si incontrano nel 1995 e si trasferiscono a Berlino nel 1997, dove riconvertono un capanone di 100m2  nella 13 strada della stazione metropolitana di New york. Vengono ricordati per aver costruito una botique prada nal mezzo del deserto del texas nel 2005, che fu addirittura svaligiata! o nel  The welfre Show nel 2006  alla Sepentine gallery a Londra.