Author Archives: jolanta

As I walk into the Joan Grona Gallery, the unusual setting chosen by the artist immediately captivates me. A material such as vinyl is not commonly seen as the backdrop of a photograph. This unorthodox display sets the viewer up for the contradictions witnessed in the work itself. These large vinyl sign banners depict photographs […]

Most of my recent pictures are the size of either a page or a person. This is partly a result of the work’s sources (digital or printed documents and photographs) and subjects (human figures). It is also—and perhaps more importantly—a consequence of my technique, and by extension, of certain ideas about figures and figuration that […]

Mieke Vanmechelen’s epic canvases portray atmospheric landscapes sometimes glimpsed beneath washes of hallucinogenic color, at other times through nets of thickly patterned marks. Driven by ideas and process simultaneously, her works are an exploration of materiality through a conceptual framework initially influenced by Modernist Reductionism and Expressionism. The Flanders-born artist approaches her medium in a […]

Based in Victoria, Australia, self-taught artist Helen Joynson has shown her paintings around the world, including the European Outsider Art Fair earlier this year. Shifting between two approaches—complete abstraction and naïve figuration—her oeuvre is compelling in its diversity. Her painterly approach revolves around the uncovering the spirit of each color. She paints intuitively, instinctually coloring […]

When I came home one morning, I found my best friend and her boyfriend conversing in bed. He was asking her many detailed questions about my boyfriend’s cock, as he had just found out that there was a new photograph of it on my Web site that she had seen. He wanted to know the […]

Our backgrounds are in poetry, music, and theater, and we generally think of our work as a kind of opera, whether it’s presented in a theater, gallery, or online. Recently, however, we’ve been thinking a lot about architecture, especially the relationships between physical structures, social institutions, and social power. This recent interest in architecture has […]

David Elshout: I missed the pulsating energy of New York City, coming back again felt familiar. Upon arrival, I found out the guys had prepared a cool basic graphic theme, with a strong industrial 1920s feel. All our social and artistic influences morphed into a giant piece made on site, which gradually evolved to the […]

After World War II, European and American contemporary art cast off its vanguard gloss as it went through the 1980s. As Achille Bonito Oliva said in Super Art (1988), the bureaucratic art system determined the admission of art’s value. Now, 20 years later, we can clearly tell that the key factor in such art systems […]

I went for a stroll with my camera earlier today, which is a usual activity for me. Walking aimlessly and looking for subjects to photograph, I came across an unusual mound of dirt that caught my attention. It was when I took a closer look that I discovered that this mound was in fact a […]

Hector Leonardi is the best-kept painting secret in New York. For 60 years, this student of Josef Albers at Yale has been exploring ways to create gorgeous textures on canvas. In that time, especially in the last decade, he has followed a relentlessly experimental path that has never surrendered the knowledge he has gained of […]