Pablo Picasso

On my research to be able to post something new every day on this blog I find that certain artists lead me to others and this a good example. Ksenia Simonova´s work led me to Picasso, perhaps Guernica was the first painting that came to my mind. Watching the process of this artwork gives you an extra view and maybe a better understanding of the creative process of an artist.
I guess that sometimes the artist plans ahead what to draw or paint or sculpt; but I think that starting from a blank canvas and leting the creativity flow has something more interesting to it. Seeing that process of decissions that end up having a final result full of expression is the richest bit.
Have a nice week end!

Ksenia Simonova

Tekkon Kinkreet - NEW TRAILER

Thanks to Michal, who sent me the link to this fantastic anime film.
"The story takes place in the fictional Treasure Town and centers on a pair of orphaned street kids: the tough, canny Black and the childish, innocent White, together known as the Cats, as they deal with yakuza attempting to take over the city of Treasure Town."(wikipedia)

Street Art interview with Matt Small (BBC Blast)

I got to see Mathew Small´s work at the Leonard Gallery in London in 2007. Here´s a nice video where you can get to know the artist a bit more. I also reccomend to check his website. The paintings and prints are worth seeing.

"I paint portraits of people that I meet and I see on the street so I suppose some people call me an urban artist; I just call myself an artist, that´s what I do."
"I am a painter and I paint, I wanna paint something truthfull."
"The city is my canvas as such but I just bring it into my studio. I wanna depict people as I see them and as I observe them. The face communicates so much about the person. That´s what my work is about; it´s about me looking at the individual and trying to communicate that that individual is worth something."
"My work is about not known people, about people that don´t offten get observed."
"The best way of doing art is to have fun, and to experiment and play, and just to have your own ideas, and to have your own reasn why you are doing it."
"Basically art doesn´t have any rules, and whatever anyone tells you you don´t have to listen to it. Technically you can just get on with it and do what´s in your heart, anmd do waht you feel is waht you wanna do." (Matt Small)

http://www.matt-small.com/

Brazilian Dreams of Os Gemeos

Welcome to the world of Os Gemeos!

"Brazil is famed for carrying a sense of the carnivalesque in everyday life. You can smell and taste it even if the festivities are a long way away.

The work of Os Gemeos ("The Twins") reflects this celebration as they offer audiences a vibrant taste of everyday life portrayed through a fantastic caste of characters, real and imagined.

Largely self-taught, the brothers started out by tagging the streets with the name "Os Gemeos" in their distinctive style. Later, they started to weave surreal narratives of Brazilian subconsciousness into their graffiti.

Over the years their street painting reached such high levels that officials invited them to paint Brazilian trains.

Now, they're equally at home on the street and in museum and galleries. While still tagging Os Gemeos, their work has been recognized by the Tate Modern in London, MAM in Sao Paulo, Museum Het Domein in The Netherlands and Deitch Projects in New York.
This summer Deitch Projects is showing the largest gallery exhibition of Os Gemeos to date. Called Too Far Too Close, the show fills the gallery with the dreams and fantasies of Brazil: street kids, family portraits with mermaids, bathing girls, street musicians, favelas, flying animals, clowns and the reoccurring theme of twinship.

The show invites viewers to visit the childhood of the Pandolfo brothers as well as revisit their own. "(Scribemedia Arts and Culture)

Pretty Cool People Interviews: Studio DDT

This is a nice video-interview that takes you to the studio of DDT, a Barcelona based company that produces state-of-the-art special effects.
Click here for full article.

Golden Shield by Actop / D-Fuse

Golden Shield from Alvaro Posadas on Vimeo.

"Film part of the Undercurrent instalation curated by D-Fuse. The project feeds from a pool of audio, video and photographic material collected by D-Fuse from cities in China and UK.This is being re-interpreted by dufferent artists in response to questions of urban architecture, economic and social change as well as our personal relations to the space that surrounds us.

The Golden Shield Project is a censorship project owned by Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China. It was formally known as the Great Firewall of China (in reference both to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China). A major part of the project includes the ability to block content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways." (http://www.reformcomm.org/about.php)

http://www.actop.net/
http://www.dfuse.com/

More works by Vhils

Scratching the Surface by Vhils

http://www.Vhils.com/

Gerhard Richter

"Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 to a middle class family. Like many Germans of his generation, his relatives were involved in the Nazi movement; his mother's brother, Uncle Rudi died a young Nazi officer, while Richter's mentally disabled aunt was imprisoned in a Hitler euthanasia camp. Rigorous ideology and death have haunted Richter since he was just a child, perhaps causing his strong dislike for ideology of any kind and underpinning the attraction that nature, as an indiscriminate force, holds for him."

"The 2001 Retrospective at MOMA displayed how diverse Richter's paintings are. His early work is of blurred figurative paintings, both with and without colour followed by seductive abstract paintings, with a colour palette that is either brilliant or subdued. His surprisingly diverse range of work has received prolonged discussion from critics, especially due to Richter's disregard for "traditional" stylistic progression and his use of photographs."

"Unlike American artists Richter wasn't interested in the purity of art. Idealism had disillusioned him from an early age. Instead he painted images without glory; images that rendered the ridiculous, ordinary; the tragic, ordinary; the beautiful, ordinary. Throughout his career Richter has shrunk from giving a psychological insight into his art, leaving his admirers and critics guessing and at times confused. According to him, his work forms from structures and ideas that surround him, nothing more profound than that." (full text at www.gerhard-richter.com)

Nina Gehl

This is some of Nina Gehls work. I met Nina a while ago and it was only a few months ago I knew she´s a great artist. This are her future shows:

-"Missing" at Blyth Gallery in London. 7 Oct 2009 to 6 Nov 2009.
-Trolley Gallery in London . 25th November- 9th January.

Nina will also be a contributing artist, along with Jake and Dinos Chapman,Tracey Emin, Patrick Hughes, Michael Landy, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Cornelia Parker, Marc Quinn, Jason Shulman and Rachel Whiteread: The Shoreditch Ball.

The website for that is www.shoreditchball.com

All the best Nina!

ABSTRACT AMERICA: NEW PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 29th May 2009 - 17th Jan 2010

These works are part of the exhibition "Abstract America: New painting and Sculpture" at Saatchi Gallery in London. In order of display Geidi Sibony and Marc Bradford. Opened untill 17th of January.

Eric Fischl sculptures

Eric Fischl

"Born in New York City in 1948, Eric Fischl grew up in the suburbs of Long Island , his parents having moved there shortly before his second year."Safer place to raise a family", they used to say. Against a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content, Fischl became focussed on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. Until the late 70's, suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. With his first New York show at the Edward Thorp Gallery, epithets like "psycho-sexual suburban dramas" became velcroed to his disturbing images of dyfunctional family life." (Ericfischl.com)

PETER DOIG

"Peter Doig paints white like it’s got every colour in it; he paints dark like it’s got every colour on it."(Saatchi Gallery)
Click here to read full article at Saatchi Gallery.

Article by Beatrix Ruf:

"Contrary to his hooded figure, Peter Doig does not sit in the landscape reconstructing the romantic image of the painter in nature. His own and other people's photographs, the sum total of the media image archives, the images of art history, the cinema, music, architecture, sports, landscapes -they are all realities in his studio that call forth but do not model his paintings. In his works, these realities overlap, generating the present as a juncture of places, times, ideas and styles. In the composition, all the methods of image generation from photography, film, and painting, as well as painterly reproduction techniques are used: the optical options of photography make use of perspectives, relations of size, and segmentation; his painterly technique uses all the artifice of art history: the specific styles of Segantini, van Gogh, Munch and Edward Hopper appear just as much as pointillist effects, impressionist traits, Pollockian all-over patterns, clumsily-naive illustrative techniques, or water colour effects painted in oil. In so doing, Doig's painting insists on the triviality of painting as such, allowing itself to become hypersensitive, or smudging its contours, or cancelling itself out."
Read the entire article Source: (www.postmedia.net)

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851)

" Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)

"Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires , natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea.

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand , but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena."(wikipedia)

George Grosz

Yoshitaka Kono

Yoshitaka Kono showed his work at the Hackney Wick Festival. This is his website:
http://www.rawstreetdown.com/

Luc Tuymans

Aly Helyer

Aly Helyer is one of many artists that have showed their work during the Hackney Wicked Art Festival II Edition in London.
http://www.alyhelyer.com/index.htm

"Ardiendo" 2005. Oil on canvas. Iker Garcia Barrenetxea

Hackney Wicked Art Festival 2009 finished yesterday. The second day was even better than saturday. Lots of people visited the open studios. The festival this year has been a lot better organized and the results have been great. Again I´d like to thank to those that came to my studio and specially to all the people that have organized and have helped in any way for this festival to happen.

To those that liked my work and would like to know about future shows or more open studio, wich I might do in a few months, please send me an e-mail to garcia.iker@gmail.com.
Also, recomendations of artists or things worth seeing will be very welcome as this blog aims to be interactive. So if there´s something you think it might be worth showing please send it to me to my mail.

"Diving Purple" by Iker Garcia Barrenetxea

Today is the last day of Hackney Wicked Art Festival II Edition in London. Yesterday a lot of people came to the open studios, it was great, even the weather was horrific. Today it seems that we are gonna be luckier, at least is not raining... I´d like to thank to all the people that made it to my studio yesterday.
Have a nice day!