Art News and Updates from Gallereo
All the latest news from the art world, as well as what's happening here at Gallereo. If you've built a gallery at Gallereo, let us know about your experience and you and your site could feature in our blog in the coming weeks.
Friday 18th July 2014Bill Watterson's Brief Return to Comics
Many of us had childhoods shaped by comics. Whether we appreciated the art, the escape from every day life, or in most cases both, comics provided many of us with our first personal experiences with artwork and gave many of us the dream of becoming cartoonists or illustrators. This is fairly amusing, since it's only recently that comics - thanks to the advent of the graphic novel, and the maturation of a generation raised on them - have started to be regarded as a serious artform with real narrative potentials.
Of course, this was always clear to those of us who appreciate comics, but it's largely due to the influence of the dedicated and skilled graphic artists that helped pave the way, and few were more dedicated, more beloved, and more sorely missed than Bill Watterson, the creator and brains behind Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson is a famously reclusive man, and once he retired from drawing Calvin and Hobbes (a dark, dark day for all those who eagerly awaited his material), he has barely granted a single interview or put himself in the public spotlight in any way, shape or form. Thus it was with unsurprisingly little fanfare (at least, initially) that he briefly came out of retirement for a guest appearance, drawing a comic strip called Pearls Before Swine.
As if that wasn't cool enough on its own, Watterson and Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, have decided to auction off the original artwork from the comics. While there were only three strips that Watterson agreed to guest draw, the original artwork is the only public work he's completed since his retirement from Calvin and Hobbes, nearly 20 years ago in 1995. The artwork will be sold by an auction house based in Dallas, Texas, with the proceeds to go towards a charity named Team Cul de Sac, which is a charity established on behalf of Richard Thompson, a cartoonist with Parkinson's disease. The funds will then be passed on to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. The auction house has estimated that each strip's original artwork will sell for upwards of $10,000 USD, which should bring in a nice chunk of change for the associated foundations.
Posted on July 18th 2014 on 11:11pm
0 Comments
Tuesday 15th July 2014Artist Spotlight: On Kawara, Retrospective
Typically, when we write these artist spotlight pieces, we're pointing out a new and exciting artist that it's well worth keeping an eye on, or someone whose career might not have caught your eye before now. In today's post, however, we're going to break from that tradition a little bit and take a look back at the life and times and work of On Kawara, who passed away recently, on July 10, 2014. It seems fitting, given that much of Kawara's work centered around themes of life, time, and mortality. Even the tweet shown above is a sample of that work, a Twitter bot which regularly posted the same message every day. Sadly, it now serves as an epitaph for the late artist, albeit a fitting one - after all, art is a creation that lives on past our own time of existence, and takes on a greater shape than we can hope to control.
Born in Kariya, Japan, in 1933, Kawara was a teenager when the atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ending World War II and scarring Japan and its citizens. This seemed to provide much of the impetus for his early work, which focused (as much of the Japanese art at the time did) on the impacts of those devastating events, incorporating horrendous imagery of disfiguration and dismemberment. Eventually, however, this would grow to change over time, another fitting development for an artist who grew to be fascinated by the march of time and how we interact with it.
Perhaps the series for which Kawara is most famous is the Today series, which is arguably a sample of conceptualist rigor that continued throughout his entire career. It simply consists of a painting created every day with the date, rendered in exquisitely hand-drawn letters and numbers in sans serif font, done in whatever format is appropriate for the location of the artist at the time of creation. However, Kawara had a great many shows, in both solo and group formats, at galleries around the world.
Eventually, Kawara took up residence in New York City, where he died on the 10th of July. It would have been interesting to see a version of the Today series painted while on a long-haul flight between New York City and Tokyo, as crossing the international dateline and the different date formats between the two nations would have uniquely highlighted the dichotomies inherent in this beguilingly simple series. Regardless, Kawara will be missed.
Posted on July 15th 2014 on 05:07pm
0 Comments
Friday 11th July 2014The Largest Outdoor Art Gallery
The World Cup truly is one of the most impressive spectacles on the planet, with hundreds of millions of fans glued to their TV sets and millions more flooding into whichever country is hosting the Cup, generating billions of dollars in revenue. But this year, now that the World Cup is over and life in Brazil is starting to get back to a more normal pace and tone, let's take a look at one of the most truly epic outdoor art galleries in the world, located just in the backyard of Belo Horizonte, the city that played host to 2014's World Cup.
Inhotim, as the 'gallery' is known, is about 500,000 acres of outdoor space dedicated to a huge variety of the arts. Yes, you read that right, 500,000 acres - that's nearly 500000 football fields. Truly, awesomely, staggeringly huge, and full of an incredibly eclectic selection of works from around the world. Technically, the art is spaced out throughout botanical gardens that take up a large part of the gallery's acreage, but the scale of the place is still beyond belief, and will take even the most dedicated gallery enthusiast more than a single day to venture through.
Officially known as the Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, it is the pet project of former mining magnate Bernardo Paz, who sold his mining company for over a billion dollars to Chinese investors and has devoted himself to the project. The entire space was designed by a long-time friend of Paz, Roberto Burle Marx, a much-celebrated landscape artist who recently passed away. When it finally opened it's "doors" in late 2006, visitors were stunned by the scope of the project, and by the interesting selection of artists represented. Anish Kapoor, Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson and Adriana Varejão are just a few of the recognizable names that can be found adorning exhibits throughout Inhotim. Arguably, the entire space itself is a monumental work by Roberto Marx, as many of the pavilions that dot the landscape are works of art in and of themselves.
Plans are underway to turn the gallery into a tourist destination, complete with luxury hotel and spa for those who hope to do some serious relaxing. The space itself is not even complete yet, with new pavilions being constructed all the time, and new exhibits to be added. If you find yourself in Brazil, it will be definitely worth the visit!
Posted on July 11th 2014 on 05:04pm
0 Comments
Wednesday 09th July 2014The Digital Transition
Working with physical media can be incredibly satisfying, as any tactile artist can tell you. There's something uniquely beautiful about working with your hands, and if that's your favourite thing to do, then by all means, keep it up. Many artists have recently decided to make the jump from physical to digital media, as computers grow more and more powerful and capable, and even less of a headache to use than the nightmares they were in the very early days of digital art. Making the transition from physical to digital can be quite daunting for the non-technical, but there are some major advantages to leaving the physical world behind.
First and foremost, there is the fact that if you follow proper backup procedures, it's virtually impossible to lose your work. The rule of thumb for digital media is that if it doesn't exist in AT LEAST two places, then it doesn't exist. Hard drive failures do occur, and if that was the only location you stored your artwork files, you're out of luck. Fires, theft, and other insurance nightmares plague the physical art in the same way, but if you keep a copy of your files on your computer, another copy on a USB key, and another copy on a digital storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive (both of which have free storage options), you'll never lose another piece of work.
Second, it's extremely easy to take your digital work and apply it to any number of different media. No hassle about digitizing offline work and trying to colour match and scan, you have a natively-created digital file. Making prints is easy as pie, although remember that the more prints you create of a piece, the lower the value of each print becomes. That's one area that physical media has an advantage over the digital - the original art piece is a one-of-a-kind artifact.
Finally, it's possible to create things digitally that are virtually impossible to do by hand. The same is true of physical media, of course, as sculpture and depth of media don't translate very well into the digital world of a flat screen, but that may inspire the third choice - instead of working either digitally or physically, blend both together to expand your horizons. Mixed-media pieces are very hot right now, and if you can figure out innovative ways to make the digital and the physical work together, you may help generate an entirely new style!
If you're really interested in making the transition to digital media for your artwork, check out our series of past posts about choosing a monitor, choosing mac or pc, and how to colour calibrate your monitor so that it displays accurate colours. But most of all - have fun with your art!
Posted on July 09th 2014 on 07:50pm
0 Comments
Thursday 03rd July 2014Are You ArtRank-ed?
Speculation in the art world has always been a bit of a gamble. Much like the great grand-daddy of speculation that is the stock market, huge sums of money are made and lost on a regular basis, as collectors vie with each other to discover the hottest young talent, and gamble on those artists who are currently in the midst of their careers. Some collectors have a knack for it, others are left in the financial dust. Recently, a new service has been shaking things up for collectors and artists alike, and there are those on both sides of the fence who see it as extremely problematic, and perhaps even downright unfair.
The service, which is known as ArtRank, is the brainchild of Argentina-born California gallery owner Carlos Rivera, who runs the Rivera and Rivera gallery in West Hollywood. Supposedly based on algorithms and software that was designed for world financial markets, ArtRank provides collectors with information about whether to buy or sell the work of particular artists at particular price points, much in the way that financial analysts recommend the purchase or sale of particular stocks.
Many in the art community originally took the website to be some sort of cruel joke at the expense of other artists, as the website was originally named sellyoulater.com, but Rivera assures potential clients that the service is entirely dedicated to provided the best possible speculative analysis for art collectors and investors. A paid section of the site is available to 10 subscribers, who pay $3,500 USD per quarter to get access to the latest data three weeks before the information is made publicly and freely available on the website.
Needless to say, this is likely to generate a great deal of ill will, and artificially modify the nature of the art market if it gets too widespread a hold. That may not inherently be a bad thing, but one must wonder as an artist if there is such a thing as treating the collecting world too coldly. Of course, for any artists who are ranked in the buy categories, it could be a huge boon to their careers, driving collectors to purchase, but there is the possibility that, as in the financial markets, artificially-generated booms and busts may be more than the art world can handle. There has already been a great deal of speculation that the art world is in something of a price bubble, but ArtRank may change all that in one fell swoop.
Take swing by ArtRank and check it out for yourself - have you been ArtRank-ed?
Posted on July 03rd 2014 on 07:46pm
0 Comments
Monday 30th June 2014Artist Spotlight: Catherine Yass
Catherine Yass has made some headlines recently thanks to a proposed (and quashed) performance art piece involving an apartment tower, a piano, and gravity, but she's been an accomplished artist for quite some time before these latest stories began to hit newsstands and the internet. Having received an MA from Goldsmiths College after initially studying at the Slade School of Art in London, she has had a fairly distinguished career, with an impressive list of gallery shows located all over the globe. In 2002, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, a prestigious award named after
J. M. W. Turner, which has become one of the most noted art awards in Britain, and is organized and awarded by the Tate Britain.
She is most noted for her work in film and photography, although apparently she seems to have presciently determined our advice from our previous post about the value of experimenting with other media, as was shown in the latest piece she wanted to perform, as we mentioned in the beginning of this post. The original plan was to take a grand piano to the top of the 27 story Balfron Tower and drop it off the roof, with the stated intent of being 'part of a community workshop looking at how sound travels' - an interesting take on the often problematic issues of noise pollution in urban areas, but perhaps a bit overdramatic. The Balfron, which is currently empty due to intricacies of reconstruction and urban improvements, is a Sixties era building that stands like a mute testament to poorly planned urban housing. Needless to say, the residents of the Tower and of the area at large were not particularly thrilled with the project, and went so far as to start a petition in order to have the piece removed from the workshop.
The piece was "intended as a swan song to the lost socialist ideals of modernist housing that Ernö Goldfinger, amongst others, brought to Tower Hamlets," according to the Alison Jacques Gallery, which represents Yass. They went on, "The residents of Balfron Tower have recently been decanted to make way for privatisation. I have total sympathy with their distress, and accordingly told them we would not go ahead without their consent.
"I had hoped that Piano Falling and the related community events and workshops we organised would address these issues and offer some real regeneration to an area which has been ignored until it is seen as valuable real estate."
While it could have been interesting, if you decide to explore new media in your own work, we don't recommend annoying an entire neighbourhood!
Posted on June 30th 2014 on 06:56pm
0 Comments
Friday 27th June 2014Going Beyond Your Medium
The search for fresh inspiration never ends. It's an inevitable and undeniably enjoyable part of living your life as an artist that the entire world can speak to you and inspire you to create. But as we all know, that doesn't make it true 100% of the time. We all have our little slow-downs, so we've explored various ways to fight the creative doldrums over the past few months, and many of these tactics can lift you back up out of a slump. What we're going to look at today, though, is more about how you think about yourself as an artist.
For many of us, we have specialized or gravitated towards a specific discipline, be it photography, sculpture, music, performance art, painting or whatever. But many - perhaps I should even say most - of us have become inadvertently locked into our chosen discipline, and that can sometimes make it extremely difficult to break free from creative slumps. We establish modes and patterns of thinking within our respective disciplines, and sometimes we can't see our own ways out as a result. But what happens when you put down the paintbrush and pick up a camera? Ditch the dance shoes for a collage construction? Wonderful and exciting things, if you go into it with the right attitude.
The key is to stop thinking of yourself as a painter, or a photographer, or whatever your discipline may be. Even if you'd only like to switch out your watercolours for acrylics or oils, even small changes in your habits can have huge impacts on the way you interact with your own work. Don't expect to produce masterpieces right away in a brand-new medium (although don't be too surprised if you do - art is full of happy accidents!), but try to understand the creative process from other perspectives and with other approaches.
Similar to the way that learning a new language or teaching yourself a musical instrument can keep your brain sharp and on its toes, the act of switching media can really break you out of an artistic slump and get your creative neurons firing at full capacity again. Who knows, you might even discover a passion for a style that you'd otherwise never have experimented with! Try to pick something that's always interested you but you've never experimented with before - this is your excuse (or kick in the behind!) to get out there creatively and let your passion through!
Posted on June 27th 2014 on 06:35pm
0 Comments
Wednesday 25th June 2014Art and Your Brain
Recently during my regularly-scheduled browse through the deep dark wonders of the world of internet-based news, I ran across an article that was entitled 'Our Brains Are Made for Enjoying Art'. Supposedly, something in the way our brains had evolved made us wired to appreciate art, and this had somehow been proven in a recent meta-study (for those of you unaware, a meta-study is a study that looks at the results of other studies - a study of studies, in other words). Intrigued, I clicked through, and discovered that what had actually happened was the laziest kind of art journalism.
Art and science fascinate the public, and rightly so - they are the pinnacles of the capacities of the human mind. The problem, of course, comes from the fact that those same people are so desensitised by the media that every headline has to be attention-grabbing in order to succeed, regardless of whether or not it actually deserves to. As a result, we wind up with journalism about art and science that is often written by people who don't understand either of these things, but rather focused on getting headlines.
It doesn't really take a genius to figure out that something fishy is going on with this story, however. Art is inherently an abstraction, after all - not capital-a Abstract, but rather inherently a representation of something else. Even the most perfectly accurate photo is, as Magritte taught us with his famous pipe, simply a representation of the thing photographed. Even as we have evolved to appreciate various elements of the world around us, and the concepts and symbolic ideas that can truly be said to be innately human creations, it should be no surprise that we react similarly to the representations of those things.
In other words, saying that our brains evolved to appreciate art is similarly inane to saying that we evolved to appreciate the world around us. Of course we did. The problem is one of causality, and that's something that lazy journalism often gets wrong, frustratingly more and more frequently in the age of viral memetics and rapid information sharing. The difference, of course, is that the world was here long before we were, whereas art is a creation of ours. We can't possibly have evolved to adapt to one of our own creations, as we haven't been making art long enough. Perhaps in a hundred thousand years…
Posted on June 25th 2014 on 05:38pm
0 Comments
Friday 20th June 2014Automatic Art Projects
Summer can be a great time for creative inspiration. Breaking out of your winter studio habits can have a huge impact on your mind and body, and we all know how useful change can be for getting us into new situations and experiences that spark new creative drives. We've even written a special post about summer inspiration recently! But sometimes, summer alone isn't enough to get the creative juices flowing. Creative blocks can happen to the best of us at almost any time, which is no fun, but a definite reality of living life as a creative individual.
Some of us remember the heady days of art school, when there was a constant source of projects and parameters to work in (and some of you will be thinking with relief that you're not going back to class until the autumn!). There is a kind of creative relief in having at least some of the parameters of a project provided for you. It seems almost paradoxical, but developing creative ways to operate within a framework can sometimes make it easier to generate ideas that simply staring at a blank canvas (which we've all done at one point or another).
Enter the wonderful world of Twitter bots. A Twitter bot is a piece of software that automatically generates tweets (posts on Twitter) from a set of input words, and as you might expect, it's not always 100% grammatically correct, but it almost never fails to be interesting. That's the premise behind @artassignbot, the digital brainchild of Jeff Thompson, an artist and programmer who grew tired of constantly recycled themes being used in art school assignments. So he gathered up a massive collection of assignments, and used software to recombine them in bizarre and sometimes appealing ways, and stuck a due date on the end. These due dates range in time from under a minute for quick flash projects to several days or more, giving you some time to think about what you're doing.
A new assignment is tweeted every hour, and there have been over 30,000 so far, so you're sure to find something that will spark a creative urge in you, even if it's just so you can say that you've collaborated with a piece of online software.
The best part of all, of course, is that you don't have to put up with the interminable critiques from classmates!
Posted on June 20th 2014 on 04:01pm
0 Comments
Wednesday 18th June 2014Artist Spotlight: Myeongbeom Kim
In this edition of the Artist Spotlight, we're going to take a look at Myeongbeom Kim, a sculptor trained on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Originally studying in Seoul, South Korea, and earning a Bachelor of Fine Art in Environmental Sculpture, he began to study and sculpt for his Master's Degree at the famous Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, he has been dividing his living and working time between Seoul and Chicago, and it seems like this duality may have created an interest in intersections of culture, as the theme of unexpected intersection seems to run throughout the majority of his work. The results are nothing short of zen surrealism, if such a thing can be said to exist at all (although this question itself might be said to be zen surrealism). .
Each piece has a stunning simplicity, but captures a haunting, surreal beauty and makes you do a double take. The intersection of man-made objects and the natural world is a frequent source of subject matter, but one of this writer's personal favourites is the one-legged chair being held up by a giant cluster of helium balloons.
Speaking to mymodernmet.com, Kim had this to say about his work: "I try to examine how my surroundings are perceived and remembered. To do this, I listen to a whisper from the objects within my surroundings. I attempt to have an intimate, private dialogue with the world, trying to concretely present the way things approach me, by using other mediums.
"To ask what an objects means to me is like asking what being I am. I have consistently experienced my surrounding objects from the perspective of life, growth, and decline, which lends vitality to my work."
Considering the importance of life, growth, and decline, it will be interesting to see how the young tree to which a wooden chair was affixed will grow around the sculpture. While I have a few reservations about using actual living plants in artistic works, I'm still curious to see how it will turn out both visually and conceptually. It's no wonder that Kim has been featured in galleries around the world, as well as received numerous awards and plaudits for his work.
To see his portfolio of work, visit his website
here (although it appears to be a bit buggy, which is disappointing - guess he should have used Gallereo!)
Posted on June 18th 2014 on 03:45pm
0 Comments
