Installation progress picture of ‘Personal effects’ as part of the Wicklow Arts Festival Lost Property project.
Installation progress picture of ‘Personal effects’ as part of the Wicklow Arts Festival Lost Property project.
Nicola Samori (b. 1977). Italian.
Neo-Baroque??
Nicola Samori is fucking incredible. He works out of Italy, and he’s managed to nail the style of the Old Masters: his exhibitions contain everything from beautiful Baroque saints to Flemish still lifes — all painted now, in the modern era, in his studio. And that would be amazing in and of itself, but his work is so much more than simple reproduction. See, once he’s finished with a painting, or once he’s adapted one that’s been previously created, he takes a scalpel to it, a spatula, or a square of sandpaper, and begins to peel it apart. He flays painted skin right off his subjects’ bones.
Sometimes the “destruction” of the images asks the audience to think about what, exactly, the painting communicates when it’s whole. Other times it adds a strange level of corporeality to religious works, or gives portraits a darkly spiritual dimention they never had before.
He’s said in interviews that he views the layers of paint on the canvas as analogous to the muscle and tissue of the human body, and that by wearing it away, he changes the identity of the paintings themselves.
Dark and sometimes chilling as it is, I think his work is genuinely brilliant, and he’s one of my favorite living artists.
(Long story short, here’s his website, go check it out!)
reblogging these again because yes
(via nerdkind)
I went to the MCA in Chicago yesterday with my family and my brothers matched these paintings and then this happened.
Accidental performance art: priceless
(Source: pine-cypress, via brightasasunflower)
We are moving in
Blog for the upcoming Lost Property project as part of the Wicklow Arts festival.
“A series of hollowed-out television sets frame beguiling scenes imagined in Xiangxi’s works, begun while studying sculpture at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art.
Situated in a small creative community in Hei Qiao Cun on the northeastern edge of the city, his studio is littered with second-hand appliances like washing machines, which become the sites of miniature worlds inspired by locations such as his old workspace in Guangzhou, the workers’ dormitory he once lived in, his parent’s sitting room, the interior of a train carriage—even his dream home. They are replicas rendered faithfully, but playfully, often using the cement, brick, glass, stone or paper materials found in their life-sized equivalents.”
(via funismajin)
Joel-Peter Witkin, The Kiss, 1982
‘Strawberry (1) and (2)’
Painting practice based on images from an atlas of common newborn skin conditions.
acrylic on cardboard and canvas.
Bruce Conner - Child (1959-60)
(Source: brotherjake, via sclez)
Richard Prince, Pamela Anderson, 1999-2000
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Like Warhol in the 1960s, Prince is perfectly attuned to the foibles and vanities of his time, especially the dominant role that celebrity and spectacle plays in every aspect of our culture. He has cultivated the shadowy, anti-heroic persona of his spiritual forefather, that of the elusive trickster who purloins and recycles seductive or explosive imagery (even occasionally working under pseudonyms). In his most recent Publicity series, the artist created Duchampian “assisted readymades” by obsessively collecting 8 x 10-inch glossy promotional photographs of show business personalities. Interspersing “authentic” autographs from celebrities (or usually their assistants) with those forged by the artist himself, Prince makes explicit the issues of authorship and appropriation, which he has explored throughout his career, by demonstrating that the meanings of images are determined primarily by the unruly desires of the viewer.
Low quality webcam experiments. Obliterating the body. creating:absence/emptiness/removing features X creating:newform/entity/presence
