swimming freestyle

Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilhelm Sasnal is a modern Polish painter with an new exhibition of his works in London.  That prompted an article in today's Guardian.

Suicide bombers, mosh pits, anti-folk hero Daniel Johnston and communist propaganda: the paintings of Wilhelm Sasnal draw on many influences. His subject matter comes from the mass media, in particular music (his first love), but politics is never far behind.

Born in Poland in 1972, Sasnal paints in a variety of traditions, darting between pop art and photorealism, cubism and comics so variously that you could be forgiven for thinking they were by different people. Yet all of them focus on the artist's attempts to release, or even democratise, familiar images.

When critics wrote of the jazz great Miles Davis they often noted the economy of his music; that Davis could express so much emotion and passion with so little content.  For me, that same kind of spareness is present in Wilhelm Sasnal's work.

Michelangelo's self portrait

The restoration of Michelangelo's final work, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel, began in 2004.  As work progressed, scholars began wondering who was portrayed in the upper left hand corner of the fresco.  After analyzing portraits of the artist, these scholars now believe it represents Michelangelo's only self portrait.

"What has emerged is a later Michelangelo work seen in a new light, a work which marked the end of his painting, as he dedicated himself to sculpture and architecture," said Mr De Luca. He said that after months' of research and discussion with some of the world's leading art experts he was convinced the artist had painted his life-like image on the fresco, which he created between 1545 and 1550. (Link)

Here's an enlarged version of the fresco showing the self portrait:

The gruesome beauty of James Ensor

Belgian avant-garde painter, James Ensor, is considered one of the great innovators in 19th century and influenced big time 20th century artists like Paul Klee and Felix Nussbaum.  His work is currently being exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art. 

Today's NY Times article attempts to describe Ensor's work:

He’s hard to pin down. Gothic fantasist, political satirist, religious visionary: one minute he’s doing biblical scenes, the next the equivalent of biker tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and dainty.

He will certainly never be popular. He’s as much a visionary as van Gogh and a far more imaginative neurotic than Edvard Munch. But he was inconsistent in matters of style and polish. And he didn’t paint a “Starry Night” or a “Scream.” What he did paint — basically a medieval dance of death choreographed in personal, topical modern terms — most of us don’t relate to or want to hear about, though I suspect some artists do.

A couple samples of Ensor's work after the jump:

Venice Biennale

This year marks the 53rd Venice Biennale.  The world's largest contemporary art exhibition, with 77 nations showing artworks, is hosted every other year in Venice, Italy.  It opened yesterday and runs through the 22nd of November.  From the Times:

It’s a party, it’s a conference, it’s a vast media scrimmage, but most of all the Biennale is a manifestation of something that its founders might have hoped for but could scarcely have guessed at: that contemporary art is now a global phenomenon. Indeed — good, bad and indifferent — it is one of the few endeavors that truly bind the contemporary world together.

The Washington Post is featuring a series of articles on this years Venice Bienale.  The first article profiles American artist Bruce Nauman.  Mr. Nauman is the subject of this years American pavilion at the Bienale.

Nauman's tremendous success, however, also has its peculiar side. Nauman, at 67, is only a household name in households that already care about contemporary art. Especially in his own country -- Nauman was born in Indiana but now works from a ranch in New Mexico -- the general public has yet to catch on to him.

Nauman's more disruptive tendencies -- as well as their ancient pedigree -- are on best display in his two off-site shows, hosted by Venetian universities in rooms not custom-made for art. Two new pieces are English and Italian versions of a single conceit: Fourteen flat-panel speakers hang from the ceiling at about ear-height, in two rows of seven, with room to walk between them. In the English version, each facing pair of speakers features a different person's voice, reading the days of the week in variously disrupted orders. The effect is somewhere between polyphony and cacophony.

Here are some samples of Bruce Nauman's art:

The restoration of Punta della Dogana in time lapse photography

Ugo De Berti has made a film, comprised of time lapse photography and a souped up version of Pachelbel's Canon in D, chronicling the restoration of Punta della Dogana, the old customs house in Venice.  The project utilized some 120 workers and took over 300,000 hours to complete. 

The restored Punta della Dogana is scheduled to open to the public this weekend.

Francis Bacon centennial

Today's Daily Beast features an article on Irish painter Francis Bacon and an upcoming show celebrating the artists centennial at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.  About Bacon:

Bacon's artwork is known for its bold, austere, homoerotic and often violent or nightmarish imagery, which typically shows room-bound masculine figures isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon had begun painting by his early 20s. He painted sporadically and without commitment during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he worked as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. He later admitted that his career was delayed because he had spent so long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest.

Since his death, Bacon's reputation has steadily grown. He still draws admiration and disgust in equal measures... (Wikipedia)

And from the Daily Beast article:

The ’60s and ’70s are arguably Bacon’s best years. He enlisted Vogue photographer John Deakin to photograph his coarse, creative group of friends, preferring to paint them from pictures, as he saw fit, in the solitude of his messy studio. Bacon crumpled and folded the photos to get new, distorted perspectives on the models’ faces, perhaps seeing them in their drunken states at the bar.

Bacon rivals Picasso in the way he represents the body, particularly the face. He defines the model’s nature, which is most often dark, through a combination of elegant marks. Everything is in motion,

Examples from the Bacon centennial exhibition:

 

Study for a Portrait, 1953
photo by © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London

 

Head VI, 1949
photo by © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London

 

Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966
photo by © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London

Fun with money

A year and a half or so I had a post about Sleeveface, a site where folks send in photos of album covers obscuring a part of their body, thereby creating an illusion. 

In a similar vein comes some photos of folks playing with currency...

 

(h/t Boing Boing)

Hockney's computer artwork

Influential English artist, David Hockney, has a new exposition of works composed using a computer, Photoshop, Graphics Tablet, and an inkjet printer. 

"It is only in the last year that computer software has advanced enough to keep up with the artist's hand and allow sufficient sensitivity of colour'

From the exposition:

Graffiti as art

Smashing has a collection of very cool graffiti images they've collected.  The article doesn't identify where the art is, but there's some really beautiful, some very funny, and some very abstract work going on in the streets.

 

Explaining the unexplainable

Wired takes a stab at explaining ten stories that made absolutely no sense.  A few favorities:

  -  "Blade Runner":  Deckard is a replicant but doesn't know it. Gaff knows but doesn't retire Deckard. Even fake memories make us human.

  -  "Like A Prayer": White dudes attack woman. Black man jailed. Witness Madonna prays to black Jesus and dreams he lives. She snitches. Prisoner freed.

  -  "Ziggy Stardust":  Earth will be destroyed in five years. Ziggy is a Martian rock star who sings the news. He prophesizes the coming of a starman. Starman bad.

  -  "Ulysses": Two drunkards meander around Dublin like Odysseus in the Aegean. Bloom's wife is cheating on him. Everyone poops.