nelsoncontempart-blog

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Hilary Harnischfeger

Australian born and Houston raised sculptor, Hilary Harnischfeger

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Andy Collins

Andy Collins is a painter born in Atlanta, GA in 1971 and is now based in New York, NY. In 1994, Collins studied at Atlanta College of Art in 1994 and earned his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1999. 

What caught my eye with Collins’ paintings was the muted colors combined with simple, but bold, line work. The abstracted human body shapes are slightly humorous but still remain sensual. Personally, I can’t decide if I find them uncomfortable to stare at. He paints his organic and distorted shapes with a slight glow, which I believe adds to the sensuality of his paintings but an innocence as well considering the cartoon-like touch. 

1. Untitled 2005 Oil and Alkyd on Canvas 183 x 162.5cm

2. Untitled 2005 Oil and Alkyd on Canvas 137 x 129cm

3. Untitled 2003 Oil and Alkyd on Canvas 122 x 129.5cm

4. Untitled 2005 Oil and Alkyd on Canvas 150 x 137cm

5. Untitled 2002 Oil and Alkyd on Canvas 175 x 165cm

Sources:

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/andy_collins.htm

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Bart Exposito

Bart Exposito is a LA based artist who was born in Amarillo, Texas. He received his BFA from the University of Texas, Austin and completed his MFA at California Institute of the Arts. 

As a graphic designer who enjoys clean linework and enjoys the vectorized, minimal design aesthetic.. I found Exposito’s paintings very pleasing. They appear to be very flat, but his use of color and line direction does a wonderful job at creating depth. 

In an interview with Elephant Magazine, Exposito talks about how during his mid-twenties his friend and artist, Todd Ledford, had really brought forth his interest in the art world. Exposito goes on to discuss how the desert and nature have played a strong influence in his paintings.

The following four paintings are all untitled but a part of his Strange Alphabet collection done in 2015, all acrylic on canvas. 

The next few paintings stand alone and create a slightly different feeling, from my perspective. Clearly done by the same artist, and maintain Exposito’s touch, the colors create more a pop and a thicker line comes into play. 

Bubble & Scrape, 2005

Acrylic and marker on canvas

Untitled, 2009

Acrylic on canvas

Slanted/Enchanted, 2005

Acrylic on canvas

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Ivan Navarro

Ivan Navarro was born in Santiago, Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. It was this regime that influenced the path of art he followed. He is a conceptual sculptor and works with electricity, neons, mirrors, and optical illusions. Electricity played a large role when it came to torture and power under the Pinochet dictatorship. Navarro created politically driven work by utilizing electricity to criticize the Chilean dictatorship. 

Bomb, 2016

Drum, LED lights, mirror, one-way mirror and electric energy

Navarro received his BFA from the University of Chile in 1995. He has lived and worked in New York since 1997. Until his move to New York City, he was unaware of the abuse of human rights that his country was enduring. Although most of his work is in response to the Chilean government, some of his sculptures are critical of capital punishment here in the United States. 

Blue Electric Chair, 2004

Blue fluorescent light bulbs, painted aluminum and electrical fixtures

Much of Navarro’s work and the viewer’s body placement go hand in hand, which is what attracted me to his work in the first place. I enjoy when an artwork is dependent upon where the viewer stands, because it involves movement and forces the viewer to see a piece from multiple perspectives. I believe this movement also brings upon more conversation than with a piece that requires less or no movement. 

Scream, 2012

Twin Towers, 2011

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04style-matter-t.html

http://www.paulkasmingallery.com/artists/ivn-navarro

http://danieltemplon.com/new/artist.php?la=en&artist_id=77

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1. Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi), 2000

2. Overview, 1998

3. Ohne Titel (6.4.91), 1991

4. Paper Fuji, October 23, 1996

5. Ohne Titel (22.2.94), 1994

I followed up my first post by exploring one of Polke’s fellow artists, Gerhard Richter. I found his use of color and texture very pleasing. I tend to struggle with use of color and am always intrigued by artists who makes incredible uses of color with texture. I also really enjoy photography and when artists take their photographs a step further by utilizing another medium. 

Richter was an important and influential post-war painter. He was born in Dresden, Germany in 1932 and later studied in West Germany at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. As demonstrated in the first image, Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi), he used the blur effect to “make everything equally important and equally unimportant.”

He uses newspaper and photos from his own family albums, along with projection onto canvas to explore the idea that an image can have it’s own life. His paintings are created by abstract strokes and layers of color. I found the last two images, Paper Fuji and Ohne Titel, particularly interesting due to the depth captured between the paint and canvas. I want to describe Ohne Titel as an abstract version of Claude Monet’s 1916 Water Lilies painting. 

Sources:

http://www.artnet.com/artists/gerhard-richter/3

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-richter-gerhard.htm

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What originally drew me into Sigmar Polke’s work was his use of the halftone texture over his paintings. I am very influenced by the graphic designer David Carson and the use of halftone textures/patterns over images makes me think of the grunge elements Carson would sometimes use in his work. 

The last three images, both Untitled (Lens Paintings), were done in 2007 and are a part of a 40 painting series that Polke did after being inspired by the book Oculus artificialis teledioptricus, sive telescopium (The Teledioptric Artificial Eye, or Telescope) written by Johann Zahn in 1685. 

Polke was born in Poland, but him and his family settled in Dusseldorf, West Germany. He studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy and eventually became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. He studied under Karl Otto Goetz and Gerhard Hoehme. In 1963, together with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, they founded the painting movement “Kapitalistischen Realismus,” or “Capitalist Realism.” This movement was viewed as a critique to Pop Art. 

Polke is an artist of multiple mediums. He is a painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, as well as a performance and conceptual artist. With the “Lens Painting” series, Polke had introduced a new surface for painting. In an article written by Jason Foemburg, this surface is described as “a transparent, resin-based corrugated ‘screen’ that supports imagery both above and below, creating layers in flat relief. The technique is based on a lenticular optical device that allows still images to appear animated if either the image or the viewer changes position.”

Sources:

http://www.artnet.com/galleries/michael-werner-gallery/artist-sigmar-polke/

http://www.jasonfoumberg.com/writing/reviews/2009/598/

http://www.artnet.com/galleries/michael-werner-gallery/sigmar-polke-lens-paintings/

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jun/14/sigmar-polke-obituary