Flirting with death (Damien Hirst)

He is an artist, entrepreneur and art collector. A member of the Young British Artists(a group who dominated the british art scene during the 90’s) and the richest British living artist. Today the Angel Orensanz Foundation blog is talking about Damien Hisrt. Born on June of 1965 in Bristol, he got his BA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College in 1989. While in university, he did his first called “Freeze” mixing his works and pieces from fellow students at Goldsmiths. That first display got the public’s attention.

It has been more than 25 years since then and the British artist has become one of the most prominent figures in the art world of his generation. His most known work , which became the symbol of British art worldwide, is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a “aquarium”.

The name of the art installation has a lot of meaning, since Damien Hirst has flair with death. The interest comes from his teenage years, when he would go to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School in order to make life drawings of what he saw. But as much as he explores the theme, he tries to run from it in real life. And that is one of the reasons he likes to do his works in series. In his words: “If you say something twice, it’s pretty convincing. It’s more convincing than if you say it once.(…)I think it’s also an implication of endlessness, which kind of theoretically helps you avoid death.”

Damien Hirst works in various platforms as he explores the boundaries between life, death, reason, faith, desire and fear. All of that in a path that flirts with the science world.

 “Art is always very simple, or good art is always very simple. I took science in the way that Picasso took the bike seat and the handlebars and made the bull’s head. I mean, there’s nothing complicated about it. Science seemed to be getting people’s attention and art didn’t, so I hitched a ride on that. “

sources: wikipedia, damienhirst

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Duos and 3Ds (Street Art)

We already shared with you that we love running into art, and we are guessing you do too. So, here are more suggestions from the Angel Orensanz Foundation blog for you to enjoy your walks a little more.

If you happen to be in Mannheim, Germany, you will be lucky enough to see the street art of the duo Zebrating that is based in the city. Their name comes from the artistic style loosely translated as “making the zebra”, which involves using a striping technique (isn’t that what a Zebra reminds you of?) . Usually the style doesn’t incorporate colors, but the duo, who is now exploring other cities in Germany, decided to add this nice touch.

Another street artist that likes to use color in his street art, is Julian Beever. The English artist is internationally known for the pavement drawings and the 3D illusions he creates. He has been drawing with chalk on the streets since the mid-90s and using a technique called anamorphosis to create his three dimensional fantasies. The thing is, though, you need to find the right angle, or else his creations make not sense to our eyes! His drawings don’t last long, but they are all over the place, like Times Square, Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Istanbul and much more.

“I got started when I was in a pedestrian street in Brussels where an old garden had been removed. This left an unusual rectangle of paving slabs, which gave me the idea to convert this into a drawn swimming pool in the middle of the high street! It worked so well I tried other variations such as a well with people falling in. I soon realized that if you could make things appear to go into the pavement you could equally make them appear to stand out of it.”  Julian Beever.

On the other side of the equator, the Brazilian duo Os Gemeos reside in São Paulo, but this time they have decided to take a trip to Boston. In their first major U.S. solo show, the identical twins Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who often combine elements of fantasy and play with political and social themes, show their work inside the Institute of Contemporary Art, as well as in Dewey Square, in Boston’s financial district.

“We don’t really want to explain the meaning of this,” he said. “We let people imagine things.” – Gustavo Pandolfo

Now their signature yellow-skinned cartoon characters have placed them among the top-10 most celebrated street artists in the world.

sources: thephoenix , moilusions, twisted, artinfo

Hierarchy is alienating ( artist of the week: Jeff Koons)

Last Wednesday the Angel Orensanz Foundation blog talked about the hour master Christian Marclay, this time, we are showcasing another acclaimed American artist, the master of kitsch.

Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania and New York-based Jeff Koons is America’s most famous living artist. The so-called “master of kitsch” is an ambitious perfectionist, he transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, experiments with digital technologies, produces photos in the manner of baroque paintings, and all his finish products have an exquisite appearance.

As he blends concepts of Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Appropriation Art with popular culture, he blurs the lines of “good taste” and makes his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. More than that, his works explore the contemporary obsessions of sex, desire, race, gender, celebrities, media, commerce and fame, as he frames questions about taste and pleasure and shifts the scale of banal items. With that Jeff Koons puts kitsch in the same level as classical art.

“The hierarchy of things is a kind of defense mechanism that just alienates”. – Jeff Koon

His appropriations of our consumerist world and American culture remind us of Marcel Duchamp’s “Readymades” and Andy Warhol (who would complete 84 years this Monday, if he was still alive). His icons are stunning and spectacular and they speak to the society based on the tripod: sex, art and money.

In fact, Jeff Koons wants his art to communicate to everyone, the broader the audience the better, after all for him: “Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is.”

This year, you can see a big part of his collection in the Beyer Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, where an extensive exhibition documents his artistic development over the past thirty years of practice through the lenses of three milestone series: ‘the new’, which showcases Koons’s earliest work, a series of readymade-like appliances and sculptures; ‘banality’, which includes sculptures in porcelain and wood, that take as their subject pop culture icons and Koons‘s most ambitious series to date ‘celebration’, a collection of hyper realistic large-scale stainless steel sculptures.

Also this year Jeff Koons appeared at the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series The Colbert Report for an interview with Stephen Colbert, the host, writer and executive producer of the show. Colbert synthesizes the American artist, or as he calls him: “The world’s most expensive birthday clown.” popularity very well: “A lot of them (pieces) are shiny, so when I look at them, I can see me, and then I’m interested in it.” Koons replies that they’re shiny for affirmation, to create an experience.

sources: designboom, economist, huffingtonpost, gagosian, pbs

The hour master

Last Friday we told you about how you shouldn’t miss The Clock, which was showing in the Lincoln Center. Today, the Angel Orensanz Foundation blog will enter in detail about the creator of the masterpiece everybody can’t stop talking about.

You must’ve heard his name already, right? Christian Marclay is no stranger to the art and music world. In fact, he has been appointed by the Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2012. The reason? The film we told you about. The Clock, his most recent piece, is a mesmerizing and hypnotic experience that everyone loves and critics can’t help but praise. This piece is a 24-hour journey thourgh time in cinema and TV. Marclay joined together clips from these two medias that show time (think clocks, time conversations, minutes ticking) to create a whole day, counting minutes, counting hours. On the screening last weekend in Lincoln Center, people could compare their watches and the screen and see the same time marked. Now, how many times do you have that experience in life?

But, the Swiss-American artist has much more to show. Born in 1955, in San Rafael, California, he was raised in Geneva, but came back to the States to study on the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston. There, he became acquitted with the underground scene and punk music. The groundbreaking bands he saw made him ask himself: “Why wasn’t music considered art?”

Drawn by the energy of punk music, he began performing. He didn’t have an instrument, so he sang in his duo with Kurt Henry. They didn’t have a drummer, so rhythms of a skiping LP record as a percussion instrument. They also used film loops from cartoons and sex films as audio-visual rhythm tracks. It wasn’t just music, it was performance art.

Marclay filled up a gap, the one between art and music. And that is what is known for, transforming sound into visual and physical forms performance, collage, sculpture, large-scale installations, photography, and video.  Always exploring the question that started it all: Why is music not art? By exploring the space between what we see and hear, the swiss-american artist created a remarkable body of work (The Clock was the icing on the already delicious cake), that involves distorted musical instruments, collages and much more.

“While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art – and it is art, make no mistake – writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up of vinyl records and pasting them together with parts from other vinyl records, they never seem to mention that these sound collages of his are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious.” – Thom Jurek, staff writer of All Music-Guide

 

sources: hammer, paulacoopergallery, furious, wikipedia, artbeast