Karel Teige (13 December 1900- 1 October 1951) was a Czech modernist avant-garde artist, writer, critic and one of the most important figures of the 1920s and 1930s movement. He was a member of the Devětsil (Butterbur) movement in the 1920s and also worked as an editor and graphic designer for Devětsil’s monthly magazine ReD (Revue Devětsilu). One of his major works on architecture theory is The Minimum Dwelling (1932).
-wikipedia, Karel Teige
The late Martin Kippenberger and his complex, intertwined oeuvre and work has been widely discussed, in attempts to reconcile his mythic persona with his multi-faceted and highly prolific artistic output, which moved between painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Kippenberger blurred the lines between the artist and their art, between ordinary life and art performance, between the banal and the substantial, between the vernacular and the formal, between high and low culture. He was highly prolific and left a trail of confounded critics and controversial readings of his pursuits. Continue reading MARTIN KIPPENBERGER – A COLLAGED PORTRAIT: “My style is where you see the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history.”
Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, Germany, in 1943, and adopted as an infant, with his twin brother, Michael, by foster parents named Heisterkamp. He adopted his outlandish name in 1964, during his studies with Bruno Goller and Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1962 and 1967. The name refers to Frank “Blinky” Palermo, an American Mafioso and boxing promoter who managed Sonny Liston. Continue reading BLINKY PALERMO
![Untitled [Fragment 7/5] 1965 Bridget Riley born 1931 Purchased 1970 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P07110](https://i0.wp.com/theincubator.live/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/tumblr_o9amed1rlg1t6vefuo1_1280.jpg?w=186&h=93&ssl=1 "Untitled [Fragment 7/5] 1965 by Bridget Riley born 1931")
Bridget Riley is an abstract painter who came to prominence in the American Op Art movement of the 1960s, after her inclusion in the 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at The Museum of Modern Art. There, her black-and-white paintings—which created illusions of movement—were shown alongside works by Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, among others. In the late ’60s, she introduced color into her work and went on to win the Prize for Painting at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Since then her work has unfolded through numerous groups and series that engage the viewers’ perception to induce simultaneously shifting patterns of forms and changing, optical mixtures of colors. Over the past decade, she has also made large, black-and-white murals that shape and articulate the environments they occupy. Her work is ultimately inspired by nature—“although in completely different terms,” she says, adding, “For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces—an event rather than an appearance.”
British, b. 1931, Norwood, London, United Kingdom, based in London, United Kingdom – Artsy.net
In 1933 photographer Andre Kertész was commissioned for the series, Distortion, about 200 photographs of Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kasine, two models portrayed nude and in various poses, with their reflections caught in a combination of distortion mirrors, similar to a carnival’s house of mirrors. In some photographs, only certain limbs or features were visible in the reflection. Some images also appeared in the 2 March issue of the “girly magazine” Le Sourire and in the 15 September 1933 issue of Arts et métiers graphiques. Later that year, Kertész published the book Distortions, a collection of the work. -wikipedia, Andre Kertesz
After Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart retired from music in the 80s, he concentrated on his newfound career as an internationally recognized abstract painter and gradually became more and more reclusive. One of the few glimpses of Van Vliet during the ’90s is in Anton Corbijn’s 13 minute poetic 1993 documentary, Some Yo Yo Stuff, which features features him talking about life, philosophy, music and art. Van Vliet’s mother and David Lynch make appearances in the film as well. Continue reading SOME YO YO STUFF : An observation of the observations of Don Van Vliet by Anton Corbijn 1993 approx 13 min.
“THE EROTIC, UNNERVING IMAGES OF HIGH HEELED SHOES WALKING, DISCONNECTED FROM THE BODY, ALONG BEACHES OR ACROSS INDUSTRIAL WASTELAND ARE IN CONTRAST TO OTHER SEXUALLY CHARGED PHOTOGRAPHS FOR FRENCH VOGUE”
– SUZY MENKES, VOGUE
Guy Bourdin, born in Paris in 1928, was the pioneering fashion photographer whose arresting photographs filled the pages of French Vogue for three decades from the 1950s through to the 80s. He is notorious for breaking the boundaries of traditional commercial photography and reshaping the classic fashion picture, using a daring narrative and vibrant colour palette. Vogue’s editor introduced Bourdin to the shoe designer Charles Jourdan, for whom he became the brand’s official advertising photographer, producing some of his best images during this period. The beauty in many of his pictures is that you can see small imperfections and fine details such as the models’ pores. In this respect they hold an integrity that is rarely seen today.
In 1950, Guy Bourdin met Man Ray and became his protégé. The spirit of the Surrealists is ever-present in Bourdin’s work: we see this in the dream-like quality of his pictures and the artist’s use of uncanny juxtapositions. Taking photography as his medium of choice, Bourdin explored the provocative and the sublime with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humour. He captured the imagination of a generation, and yet his images have a timeless quality, so much so that they continue to influence the worlds of fashion and advertising today, twenty years since his death.
To coincide with the UK’s largest ever exhibition of the influential and enigmatic fashion photographer Guy Bourdin at Somerset House, the Michael Hoppen Gallery is delighted to exhibit a wonderful group of images ‘Walking Legs’. Officially being unveiled alongside Somerset House’s show ‘Image-Maker’, ‘Walking Legs’, is one of Bourdin’s most loved Charles Jourdan campaign series. ‘Walking legs’ was shot in 1979 by the French designer and photographer using quintessentially English landscapes as the backdrop to this high-end campaign. Photographed at locations on a road trip taken in a Cadillac from London to Brighton, many of the city and seaside scenes remain the same today and include familiar sights such as the London bus stop and the classic park bench. As with much of Bourdin’s work, the model is mysteriously absent – all that is seen is a pair of mannequin legs, adorned with Charles Jourdan’s creations.
-Guy Bourdin, Walking Legs, Michael Hoppen Gallery, http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/exhibitions/8/overview/#/image_standalone/14
Walead Beshty‘s Travel Pictures lay bare the politics of travel in a post-9/11 world. His abstract photogram-like color fields are created by running large format negatives through the x-ray machines at various airports throughout the course of his travels. The machines irradiate the negative and in some literally expose the film. However, the exposures are uncontrollable and unpredictable; color and composition are not in the hands of Beshty, but rather in no hands at all. Instead, the penetrating invisible forces of the technology used to scan, investigate and examine our bodies and luggage from the inside out become the creators. Beshty’s interaction (and dare say, collaboration) with the x-ray machines inspired a closer look at the effects of exchange: of goods, of hands, of space, and of import.~1 Continue reading WALEAD BESHTY :: TRAVEL PICTURES
Raghu Rai was born in the small village of Jhhang, now part of Pakistan. He took up photography in 1965, and the following year joined “The Statesman” newspaper as its chief photographer. Impressed by an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1971, Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated Rai to join Magnum Photos in 1977. Continue reading RAGHU RAI, Magnum photojournalist
Immediately after Hurricane Katrina wreaked its havoc upon New Orleans, photographer Robert Polidori returned to the city he had inhabited long before, to bear photographic witness to its devastation for The New Yorker. He ended up staying much longer than he had originally planned, and returned many times to continue capturing images of the city’s abandoned desolation. One of the world’s premier architectural photographers, Polidori considered the wrecked rooms, collapsed houses, and ravaged neighborhoods on view in After the Flood as metaphors for human fragility. He navigated through the wrecked streets and collapsed, electricity-less, molding houses of the city toting his large-format camera. By virtue of long-exposures under natural light, Polidori produced hundreds of images.
“In each image, the artist seems to have captured the very air of New Orleans, weighted heavily with mold, humidity, and history.”-New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori, The Met, April 2006
“All artists, as best they can, make sense of a world that is often senseless. Mr. Polidori’s work, from Chernobyl to Havana — in sometimes dangerous, topsy-turvy, out-of-time places — generally bears witness to profound neglect. A photojournalist’s compulsion and problem is always to contrive beauty from misery, and it is only human to feel uneasy about admiring pictures like these from New Orleans, whose sumptuousness can be disorienting. But the works also express an archaeologist’s aspiration to document plain-spoken truth, and they are without most of the tricks of the trade that photographers exploit to turn victims into objects and pictures of pain into tributes to themselves.” -The New York Times, What’s Wrong With This Picture, Michael Kimmelman, Sept 22, 2006
“Robert Polidori is one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers of human habitats and environments. Creating meticulously detailed, large-format color film photographs, Polidori’s images record a visual citation of both past history and the present times within the confines of a single frame.
Born in Montreal, Polidori moved to the United States as a child. Polidori began his career in avant-garde film, assisting Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, an experience that critically shaped his approach to photography. While living in Paris in the early 1980s, he began documenting the restoration of Versailles, and has continued over a 30 year period to photograph the ongoing changes.
Polidori’s additional projects include Havana and the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown. His current work deals with population and urban growth through photographing “dendritic” cities around the world, including Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Amman.” – Robert Polidori.com
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