Author Archives: jolanta

Always a connoisseur of forbidden ventures, my ears perked up upon hearing that Marina Abramovic plans to masturbate at the Guggenheim Museum this fall. Marina Abramovic Plays With Herself: Re-Performing Others, Engaging the Audience Theresa Smalec Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972. Photodocumentation: black and white photographs and text in 4 panels: 3 Photo/text panels: 10 1/2 […]

Pain and anguish find their way into the playful abstractions of D. Dominick Lombardi. Pulling from the vast history of newsprint caricatures and the iconography of tattoos,�Lombardi presents an array of�abstract, moody forms. Dominick Lombardi: "The Post Apocalyptic Tattoo" Jill Conner D. Dominick Lombardi, Twister (Bust), 2002. Mixed-media wall sculpture, 29x14x6in. Pain and anguish find […]

The odd title, "Fish Thoughts," comes from Patrick Corillon’s analogy of the behavior of human thoughts to that of fish breaking the surface of the water and disappearing again. It signals the off-beat Romanticism in his work, which affectionately and only partly ironically imputes mystery and profundity to the most ordinary things. ‘Fish Thoughts’ Patrick […]

fm3, a most intriguing duet, have produced the most inovative concept to come out of the minuscule Chinese abstract-electronic music scene. The two lap-toppers–Christiaan Virant, an American expat who has lived in China for 17 years, and Zhang Jian, a Sichuan-born man who looks as though a manga artist created him–talk about their music in […]

Shuzo Takiguchi, who was born in 1903 and died in 1979 at the age of seventy-five, was a poet and art critic as well as a visual artist. During this multifaceted career Takiguchi, closely attuned as he was to the latest trends in avant-garde art overseas, left an indelible stamp on the development of modern […]

For their tenth anniversary, the Weston Art Gallery’s "Ideas into Objects," features just under 80 artists who were asked to create a new work based on one of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches. The results are somewhat mixed, however, there are some stellar standouts. Decoding da Vinci "Ideas into Objects: Reinterpreting the Notebooks of Leonardo da […]

Swedish legends weave haunting tales of H�lsingland, the land of myths and stories. The j�ttar, powerful giants, used their strength to transform the landscape. As a boy, Olle Jonsson was entranced by this folklore. As an adult, Jonsson has called upon the heroes of such legends as inspiration for his paintings, drawings, collages and enormous […]

Raw, the dictionary tells us, is a state of purity; the unblended, undiluted and unprocessed. Raw is also an art festival, where unframed paintings are simply blue-tacked to the Gallery walls. "Many artists, including myself, did not put prices up and did not really care for selling their work," says Piers Midwinter, organizer and founder […]

The 21st Century revival of Manhattan’s time-honored public hanging tradition comes to us from an unlikely source. Born out of the Austrian artist collective, Assocreation, this latest incarnation favors metaphor over morbidity. "A public hanging is literally what we are doing. A Public Hanging for the Faint of Heart Wiley Norvell Scenes from Assocreation’s A […]

I wonder if Japanese contemporary art has an identity in any true sense of the word. Having largely exhausted their ability to present unconventional artistic ideas, most Japanese artists are now waiting for new developments. Koichi Hiraki at Gallery Tubaki, Ginza, Tokyo Hideharu Ogawa Translated by Masato Fujii courtesy of the artist I wonder if […]