CONVERSE

 My new work: Converse

CHARLES THOMPSON

Charles Thompson is an editorial and art photographer whose work has appeared in L’Officiel, Vogue, Esquire, Elle Décor, Town & Country, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He began his career in photography at Colors Magazine, the influential anthropology and photography magazine published by Benetton, where he was executive editor. He lives between New York and Moscow with his wife Olya, a Russian native, and their four children. This is his first exhibit in Russia.

“The first time I read of the mythical half-bird/half-woman creatures, Sirin and Alconost, was in a book about pre-revolutionary Russian traditions and costumes. The author described magical beings with bird bodies and human heads that could metamorphose into human female forms at will. They had been popular motifs in peasant lace and embrodery designs, wood carving and 16th Century Lubok prints. Pagan mythology held that their song was so mezmerizing that men would follow the birds to the end of the earth only to succumb to utter exhaustion. Later, Orthodox tradition had dealt with the popular winged female figures by rebranding them as symbols of the Holy Spirit—the birds were from Paradise where their songs “delight the blest.” Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov painted Sirin and Alconost in his 1896 work, The Song of Joy and Sorrow, adding yet another layer of meaning to the magical beings. As the legend metamorphoses through history at the will of contemporary society, the mystical power to transfigure of the wondrous creatures remains.


To me the myth of Sirin and Alconost encapsulates the yearning to escape our human limitations and enter the realm of pure power, beauty and infinite possibility. While they are obviously also symbols of female power, beauty and intelligence, Sirin and Alconost stand for something more universal. This desire to metamorphosize and transform oneself into something extraordinary is perhaps shared by all humanity, but to me, in Russian culture, and especially in ballet, it is in a particularly raw form. The ballerinas featured in these images are captured at that very moment of transformation, where bird wings have yet to appear, yet the human body has already achieved flight. The images capture that crucial moment in between two worlds, the human and the super human, much like Eadweard Muybridge in 1877 captured the exact moment when a horse at full gallop is actually flying, with no hooves touching the ground. Pinned by the light like butterflies in a collection, the flying female figures twist and turn and burst with pure energy and infinite potential.”

BON NADAL

CLOE

MARINA GADONEIX

Marina Gadonneix, born in Paris in 1977, studied photography at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. In 2006 she was awarded with the ‚Prix HSBC pour la Photographie.’ She lives and works in Paris.




The work title, ›Playground Disorder‹, suggests a playful handling of places and describes an order, which, whatever order it may have been, is brought into disarray. And indeed the two work groups, ›The house that burns everyday‹ and ›Crime scenes‹, both shown in extracts, are a continuance of her work that becomes manifested in her worldwide shown series: The documentation of staged reality.



Contrary to familiar artistic practice the work's creation is not in the artist's hand but discovered and documented without any intervention. Each situation is based on an essential simulation. Although a clear, unaltered image is on display, it demands an explanation. Cleverly Gadonneix’s photographs play with the clash of document, simulation and fiction. Deserted places and interiors create a rather disturbing atmosphere in which the line between real objects and fictitious incidents becomes blurred.



Rooms, like a kitchen, living room and a home office blackened by soot appear to be black and white photographs contrasting with a bright red-orange burning bed. Seemingly well-defined pictures, that are neither real nor staged. We see neither living spaces nor furniture – what we see are learnt proportions, attached to hights, depths and design – an illusion of stainless steel and concrete of which grey values are no result of develop processes of photo material but of the prevailing soot. Other realistic arranged spaces guide our gaze from the furniture to yellow eye-catchers that make any functional meaning of the enviroment disappear and direct our concentration onto little details instead.

LAURA SPLAN

(Prozac, Thorazine, Zoloft is a group of large pillows crafted out of hand latch-hooked rugs, which have been sewn together and stuffed. These soft, oversized anti-psychotics and anti-depressants provide a different kind of comfort than their prescription counterparts. The time consuming nature of the latch-hook process provides a sufficiently mind-numbing effect. Latch hooking is a simple but tedious craft that has traditionally been used to depict idealized and romanticized images from domesticity and nature.)

HARLAND MILLER

Harland Miller is both a writer and an artist, practising both roles over a peripatetic career in both Europe and America.

After living and exhibiting in New York, Berlin and New Orleans during the 80s and 90s, Miller achieved critical acclaim with his debut novel, Slow down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, (2000), the story of a kid who travels around northern England with a David Bowie impersonator. In the same year he published a small novella, First I was Afraid, I was Petrified, based on the true story of a female relative with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, discovered when Miller came across a box full of Polaroid images she had taken of the knobs of a cooker. In 2001 Miller produced a series of paintings based of the dust jackets of Penguin books. By combining the motif inherent in the Penguin book, Miller found a way to marry aspects of Pop Art, abstraction and figurative painting at once, with his writer’s love of text. The ensuing images are humorous, sardonic and nostalgic at the same time, while the painting style hints at the dog-eared, scuffed covers of the Penguin classics themselves. Miller continues to create work in this vein, expanding the book covers to include his own phrases, some hilarious and absurd, others with a lush melancholy. Miller was the Writer in Residence at the ICA for 2002 and over the course of his residence he programmed a number of events drawing from his experience in literature and fine art, which included a season devoted to the ongoing influence and legacy of Edgar Allen Poe.

ANDY REYNOLDS

MAURA SULLIVAN

maura sullivan was born in 1971 in hartford, connecticut. she graduated from syracuse university b.f.a. in 1993 and has attended the international school of photography. she currently lives in brooklyn, new york. her work is part of the permanent collection of the museum of fine arts, houston and is widely exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in new york, connecticut, oregon, washington, texas, the netherlands, poland and turkey. her photographs have been published in shots magazine, antiques weekly, private international review of photographs and text, fotoritim, artist actual, rh+sanart (the art magazine of turkey), fotograf dergisi, hello magazine, the sun and new york magazine.

 

TOM SACHS

Born in New York City on July 26, 1966, Sachs grew up in Westport, Connecticut and attended Greens Farms Academy for high school. He attended Bennington College in Vermont. Following graduation, he studied architecture in London before deciding to return to the States, where he spent two years working in Frank Gehry's L.A. furniture shop. It is here that he began using the term knolling.

Sachs moved from L.A. to New York City around 1990 and found a studio in the disappearing machinery district downtown. His studio, Allied Cultural Prosthetics, took its name from the previous tenant -- Allied Machine Exchange -- implying that contemporary culture had become nothing but a prosthetic for real culture[1].



For a few years Sachs worked odd jobs, including lighting displays at Barneys New York. In 1994, he was invited to create a scene for their Christmas displays and titled it Hello Kitty Nativity, in which the Virgin Mary was replaced by Hello Kitty with an open Chanel bra, the three Kings were Bart Simpsons, and the stable was marked by a McDonald's logo. This contemporary revision of the nativity scene received great attention (not all of it positive[2]) and demonstrated Sachs' interest in the phenomena of consumerism, branding, and the cultural fetishization of products.

LUO DAN

Yoram Wolberger



 Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between Us and Them, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.




Wolberger (born 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute's (CA) New Genres Department. He has had solo exhibitions in New York

AI WEIWEI 100.000.000 sunflowers porcelain

To Ai Weiwei’s 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, we hardly knew you… Just a few days after it opened, officials at London’s Tate Modern made the difficult to close the vast installation by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. The work, simply titled “Sunflower Seeds“, encompassed 100 million sunflower seeds replica made from porcelain, is currently situated at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, where are encouraged to walk on the work of art as part of the experience. However, with such vast amount in an enclosed space, officials at Tate Modern begin to notice noxious ceramic dust, which forced the closure. Officials at Tate Modern also insisted that the closure was not due to political pressure from the Chinese government, who sees Ai Weiwei as an instigator and political dissident, but solely out of health concern for its visitors. No words on when the exhibition will open again.

GAUDÍ

MAURIZIO CATELLAN el Papa en Barcelona

BREAD GIACOMETTI

ANDY REYNOLDS

HOPKINS KYLESTAN

Nelly Ben Hayoun.

THE BLUE NOSES

DIEM CHAU

G

ANDY REYNOLDS

Tardor de l'Art 2010 - Ego Gallery

Marc Quinn

M

Bas Jan Ader

EUROPES

"Che"
Fin de la serie: "Che",
la serie se compone de 100 imágenes,
todas las he encontrado en internet,
son obras de artistas anónimos

y las he relacionado con obras

de artistas contemporáneos.

TARDOR DE L'ART 2010: "VINILS" del 7 al 30 d'Octubre

"TWINS, BESSONS", Victòria Campillo 2010

Phil Sims

Doug Aitken

Chris Hombecker

Kate Blomsbom

Chong Chun Zang

Ron Mueck

Robert Irving

Nguyen Quang Yin