Author Archives: jolanta
Viva l’Italia
In tempo di crisi le gallerie più intraprendenti si impegnano nella ricerca. È così che nasce Astuni Public Studio, un progetto col quale la Galleria Enrico Astuni a partire da ottobre 2009, nel suo nuovo spazio inaugurato lo scorso gennaio a Bologna, presenta una serie di iniziative nell’ambito dell’arte contemporanea curate da alcuni dei migliori […]
Logical Perspectives
There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes […]
Flowering Femininity
Haizan Shaw’s Red Flower Girl is composed of large, stiff, ellipses of crimson gather round each other, colonizing into bunches, pointing in, at other times proudly growing outwards. Caught in these different stages, these ranging moments of the flowers give the piece a still movement. These crowding clusters of petals orchestrate the photo’s atmosphere, providing […]
The Status of Greatness
Blame Nandos, but South African TV has a new hero. Call him the “yapping, benign, and slightly ridiculous dictator,” or Idi Incarnate. And like his namesake, he’s everywhere. “We’ve been Having It?” Boy have we ever! So much so that if a buffoon break-dancing to “Brrrrrrrrrr,” leaves you cold in the light of the Zimbabwe […]
The Ghosts of Future Past—The Work of Rowan Smith
With one small step from Mr. Neil Armstrong we reached a world that had seemed to reside outside of the reach of human experience. Yet, almost half a century later, the romantic longing for large-scale space travel, residence and communication with some yet unknown extraterrestrial force remains. This desire, a continual and unfocused looking outwards, […]
Zhang Yu-Tai
Speckled textures of different paints grace the canvases of Zhang’s works. All carrying a heaviness in their surface and texture, these paintings place a strong emphasis on the materiality of the medium. Ornamented with swift, clean strokes as well as their thick leftovers, Zhang’s paintings’ have a varied application, arbitrary in nature, giving his pieces […]
Convergent Constructs
Illustrating what he calls the “cultural contrast,” Hu Zhi-Ying brings together traditional Chinese art with the eclectic styles of the West. He combines traditional Chinese symbolism and landscape with the elements of the various styles of Western art all coming together to create something more than art—something equal to the real world. Using Chinese varnish, […]
The Wizard of Clay
Filling Chace Center to the brim, the largest gallery at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum of Art in the City of Providence, Inner City comprised an astonishing array of architectural-scale models and tiny figurines fashioned entirely out of clay. All the little male people—the sculptor’s version of Everyman—strikingly similar in their facial and […]
Meeting Marina
Within the cavernous, pristine interior of the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art, one witnesses an act of both extreme simplicity and unrelenting fervor. Marina Abramović sits at a long wooden table, donning a gown of thick midnight blue fabric; her countenance bears signs of intensity and sheer exhaustion, dually wavering between moments of […]
Man If Est O
Art should be in the streets surprising people, not necessarily in galleries or museums. Art should be part of everyone’s daily journey into work. Art should make us laugh and catch people unaware. Art should show us something that we can all understand. Art should make us think effortlessly. Art should question its own what-ness. […]
