Contemporary art 1

"If you like something..." Picabia

Sean Cheetham teaches at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and studied with Mike Hussar at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. His classical but edgy paintings of the figure is attracting attention as new important figure painter to watch. He teaches workshops at the LAAFA that are very much in demand but you can watch a speed painting video of a portrait painting he made at a workshop that I’m posting below. I often find demo portrait videos rather boring but this one was fascinating, the end of the video has a slide show of his other paintings worth the watch as well.

Dan Witz

It's just after noon on a recent Wednesday in San Francisco, and Dan Witz is driving a rental car on Highway 101 north, approaching the Vermont Street exit that leads to Potrero Hill. Just before the turnoff, he suddenly pulls over to the right-side embankment. Minutes later, he has walked to his trunk and put on a blue hard hat and green reflector vest, which gives him the appearance of an official Caltrans worker. The disguise is perfect.

Witz is a Brooklyn street artist, and after spraying the back of a painting with silicone glue, he walks south along the embankment as a California Highway Patrol car approaches in the slow lane and keeps on going. Two minutes later, Witz has secured his artwork — a hooded woman with bad teeth staring out from behind a grate — on the base of a freeway foundation. As he takes photographs of his latest illegal posting, two San Francisco police officers on motorcycles speed by and continue through the Vermont Street turnoff. Three minutes later, Witz is back in his car and heading toward downtown. "You become invisible — you become part of the landscape," he says of his freeway worker outfit. "Everyone thinks you're not up to anything. In the light of day, they don't suspect."

Witz is the latest major street artist to come through San Francisco, and like Banksy — the British stealth painter who left his mark here last April — he risks doing his work at public intersections in the middle of the day. Unlike Banksy, though, Witz has bona fide credentials: a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts; and a bachelor of fine arts from New York's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His age (53) and longevity in public spaces (three decades and counting) make him one of the longest-working street artists in America — a kind of godfather figure to a younger generation of devotees.

Tanguy Samzun T101

Culture arte is proud to present artist Tanguy Samzun T101 at the MIA | MI CIELO 2010 Fine Art Exposition in concurrence with Art Basel | Miami Beach. T101 will feature a retrospective selection of art works, sign copies of his limited edition book “Piranese” and carry out some of his clandestine artistic illegality on the highways.

More than just a documentation of Tanguy Samzun T101's public artworks, “Out View ” is a diary of three decades of thoughtful and emotional engagement with the ever evolving surfaces of European City. Embracing a meticulously disciplined aesthetic inspired by the old masters, Tanguy Samzun has spent the last decades making easel paintings as well as rebel art, leaving various love letters in plain view on the doorstep of his beloved Paris, London or Berlin. Tanguy Samzun is in conversation with both the conventional and street worlds of art. His work is inclusive; It is obsessive. It is acknowledged as an original voice, an inspiration and a catalyst.

Besides obvious craftsmanship, the artwork of Tanguy Samzun evinces a rigorous conceptual framework.
"He his instructor in bab art school

"Waldenophobie"

"OZ" By Tanguy Samzun T101

"Piranese" by Tanguy Samzun T101

Ben Quilty

Ben Quilty is an Australian artist. He lives and works in Robertson, New South Wales. A graduate of the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, he has had 15 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 70 group exhibitions since 2000.

Quilty has been awarded numerous prizes and awards including the 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize,[1] the 2007 National Self Portrait Prize, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, the 2004 Kings School Art Prize, Sydney, the 2004 Metro 5 Art Prize,[2] Melbourne and the 2002 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

As lead singer of legendary Aussie rock band Cold Chisel and an equally successful solo artist, Jimmy Barnes is one of the best-selling Australian musicians of all time. A reformed drug user, he is now an outspoken pro-family, anti-drug advocate. Though Barnes abstains these days, Quilty asked him to act as if though he were inebriated, head lolling back, eyes rolling in their sockets. He built up the image in his signature impasto style and then literally squashed the heavily laden surface against another blank canvas creating a perfect geometric copy – a Rorschach. Quilty imitates the ink-blot tests created by Hermann Rorschach, an early 20th century psychoanalyst. “Rorschach ink blot tests are used as a tool by psychoanalysts to test personality characteristics and the emotional functioning of their patients” says Quilty regarding his use of this technique. “I wanted it to appear as though Jimmy’s head had been peeled back, his skin left behind.” The original painting was destroyed in the creation of the geometrically perfect Rorschach copy. Finally the copy was scraped off to reveal the ghost-like stain upon the surface of the linen underneath.

Shaun Barber

A very skilled oil painter and illustrator, Shawn Barber has taught at many universities, illustrated for everything from The Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal, and he's shown his paintings in galleries around the world. This extremely motivated talent, that's pushing a somewhat yet undefined movement (low brow?), is also a somewhat recent tattoo artist as well. He's had multiple books come out featuring his work. He's also one hell of a nice guy who answers some of your questions involving schooling, technique, to his daily regiment. We also stopped through his studio for a video interview which you'll find towards the bottom of the page. Say hi to this beloved San Francisco based artist.

"In 1995, at twenty-five years old, I finally got off my ass, went back to school and started to take responsibility for my actions, my future and myself. It didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen in two years. Change comes from the willingness to allow new ideas, different opinions and maintaining an open mind to the infinite possibilities there are when one is willing to take chances. Believing in what you do and DOING what YOU want to do, creates opportunity and builds an empowering state of mind."

David Spriggs

The work of David Spriggs lies in a space between the 2 and 3 dimensions. His installations use multiple painted layered images in space to create unique ephemeral like forms. Spriggs explores the representation and strategies of power, the notions of movement, and the thresholds of form and perception. The subjects depicted in his work specifically relate to the breakdown and recreation of form and volume - as seen through his interest in cyclones, explosions, and forces.
David Spriggs currently is based in Montreal, Canada. Spriggs recently participated in the Sharjah Biennal 9 in the UAE. His work can be found in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Quebec. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver.

ROBERT LONGO

Robert Longo has had retrospective exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunstverein and Deichtorhallen; the Menil Collection in Houston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Hartford Athenaeum and the Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo. Group exhibitions include Documenta (1987 and 1982); the Whitney Biennial (2004 and 1983); and the Venice Biennale (1997.) His work is represented in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Albertina in Vienna; and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Robert Longo was the recipient of the Goslar Kaiserring in 2005. Robert Longo is represented by Metro Pictures in New York City and Galerie Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is a co-founder and member of the band X PATSYS (with Barbara Sukowa, Jon Kessler, Anthony Coleman, Anton Fier and Sean Conly).

Robert Longo lives with his wife, Barbara Sukowa, and their three sons in New York.

robertlongo.com

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. In 1990, midway through her BA course at the Glasgow School of Art, Jenny Saville exhibited in Contemporary '90 at the Royal College of Art. In 1992 she completed her degree as well as showing in Edinburgh and in Critics Choice at the Cooling Gallery, London. Following the success of her show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994, which generated a great deal of publicity for her work (the images were ubiquitous that year), Saville went on to take part in the exhibition American Passion, which toured from the McLellan Gallery, Glasgow, to the Royal College of Art and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

By 1994 many people were familiar with Saville's massive paintings, such as Plan, in which a naked woman is seen from below, her body filling the canvas through a combination of physical bulk and extreme foreshortening. Contour lines, as would demarcate the changes in altitude of land masses on a map, are drawn across the surface of the woman's skin.

Her work has been included in exhibitions worldwide including "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection", Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York 1998-99); "The Nude In 20th Century Art," Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2002, traveled to Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen in 2003); "Painting," Museo Correr, 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); and "Paint Made Flesh," Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville (2009, traveled to the Philips Collections, Washington D.C. and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY in 2010). In 2005, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome.

She currently lives and works in Oxford, England.

JENNY SAVILLE

Rosetta 2, 2005-2006

Representations: Jenny Saville the fleshy female

Once on a roll inertia takes care of the rest... there are so many great practitioners with skin-related offerings that I just can't wait to present here!

Jenny Saville is one such artist. Skin in these works is expansive and sensual; imprinted with a visceral vitality as it envelopes the folds and fleshy forms of female body, it is caught in moments of vulnerability, ponderousness, and in pain after brutal interventions. The sheer size of these canvasses is astounding, viewers are overwhelmed by walls of skin in all its confronting glory.

An English painter and one of those Young British Artists, Saville's entire senior show was notably purchased by leading British art collector Charles Saatchi, who then commissioned works for the next two years. Impressive, no? Best known for her monumental women, usually self portraits, Saville spent substantial time observing plastic surgery operations in New York and draws on these experiences as subject matter for her traditional figurative oil paintings.

Surgeries, liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients feature heavily in images that are highly emotive and strongly pigmented. In the Closed Contact series, Saville collaborated with fashion photographer Glenn Luchford to capture the full range of color, tonality, and topography of live flesh through her own body. Flesh is manipulated and animated by gripping hands as the contorted body is pressed against glass sheets. Exploring the violence and anesthetized pain of observed surgeries, Saville's distorted bodies range from the grotesque to great, ponderous beauty.

On a secondary note, I find it particularly interesting that Saville's subjects roughly fall into two categories: bodies are either curiously disembodied and exposed to the intense scrutiny of observers, or the subjects gaze past the viewer, inviting entry into that moment of experience. Whether these vacant stares are out of numbness or obliviousness is ambiguous, but it would be interesting to spend a bit of time on a feminist analysis of her work, especially in comparison to other forms of female carnal art (Orlan being the main culprit).