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Bas Jan Adder

"I want to do a piece where I go to the Alps and talk to a mountain. The mountain will talk of things which are necessary and always true, and I shall talk of things which are sometimes, accidentally true."

Hernan Bas’s paintings explore the codes of dandyism and its subculture as a means to define sexual attraction. Bas’s paintings are small, frail and sensuously delightful; through their unassuming intimacy, they personify epic romance. Influence by historical painting, Hernan Bas’s images contemporaneity, their staginess and immediate familiarity suggest the melodramatic narratives of classic film.

Heavily influenced by The Decadence period of literature, Hernan Bas’s paintings are inspired by well-worn pages of Wilde and Huysmans. “Why does homosexuality seem to make you pre-disposed to liking these things?” Bas questions. “As a result this work is tainted with Saint Sebastian martyr types, dying dandies and peacock feathers, all the materials that dictate a certain queer vocabulary." Hernan Bas’s style of painting emulates linguistic flourish. Impassioned brushwork and pastel hues bloom with poetic description; environments are set with the divine ambience of transience. Confined by fanciful etiquette, Hernan Bas’s figures allude to darker sentiments. Their posed innocence is but a thin veil of gentlemanly decorum.

Hernan Bas’s paintings are tinged with a nihilist romanticism, born of literary intrigue and a passion for historical painting. Exploring the possibilities of dandyism in the modern world, Hernan Bas’s bitter-sweet subject matter ranges from Greek mythology to contemporary genre painting, always derived from his connoisseur’s predilection for the poetic and empyreal. Funerals and cemeteries appear often in Hernan Bas’s work, inspiring thoughts of Keats's gothic malaise and the tragedy of lost love condemned to an eternally angelic slumber.

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Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer’s artistic practice is founded on a consideration of the nature of substances, the act of making, and the unpredictable processes that can result from combining the two. With an extraordinarily wide range of materials—Styrofoam, clay, mirrors, fruit, wax, wood, glass, paint, sawdust, and silicone, to name a few—he resuscitates art historical genres such as still lifes, nudes, portraits, and landscapes in potent sculptures that reflect the complexity, wonder, and banality of everyday life. His works reverberate with material transformation and decay as well as with poetic internal collisions and contradictions that cause his sculptures to oscillate between seeming beautiful or ugly, elegant or awkward, graceful or burdened.

Jennifer Bornstein

Jennifer Bornstein: Greengrassi

Darren Almond

Darren Almond

Darren Almond’s diverse work, incorporating film, installation, sculpture and photography, deals with evocative meditations on time and duration as well as the themes of personal and historical memory.

Almond is interested in the notions of geographical limits and the means of getting there – in particular, culturally specific points of arrival and departure. Since 1998, Almond began his ongoing series of landscape photographs entitled Fifteen Minute Moons. Taken during a full moon with an exposure time of 15 minutes, these images of outstanding geographical beauty appear ghostly, bathed in an unexpectedly brilliant light where night seems to have been turned into day. In Schacta, Almond filmed the activities of a Russian tin mine and set them against a haunting soundtrack – made as a field recording – of a local female musician/shaman during her performance. Other works explore themes closer to home: Traction is an ambitious three-screen projection that draws a portrait of the artist’s father, laying bare external and internal scars, whilst revealing the artist’s preoccupation with time. A similar intimacy is evoked in If I Had You, a multi-screened film installation about the artist’s grandmother – a tender portrait of youthful reminiscence and the dignity of old age. In Terminus, Almond negotiated buying back the original bus shelters of the town of Oswiecim (formerly Auschwitz) to make a moving installation about historical loss.

Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, UK. He lives and works in London. He has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including ‘Sensation’ (1997-1999), Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), The Busan Biennale (2004) and The Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2005). Solo exhibitions include The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999), Kunsthalle Zürich (2001), Tate Britain (2001) and K21, Düsseldorf (2005).

Code Magazine, a contemporary art magazine published in Brussels, Belgium. Issues downloadable as PDFs. Issue 5 just released...

Vija Celmins

Interview: Vija Celmins Thinking Drawing By Simon Grant

Vija Celmins - Frieze Article

The best of Both worlds!

Paik and Boingo? How would've thunk it...

Wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Morning,_Mr._Orwell

Isa Genzken, ArtForum, Oct, 2000
The characterization of Isa Genzken as a traditional sculptor, along with the usual remarks concerning the heterogeneity of her method and the surprising breaks between her various bodies of work, belong firmly to the topoi of her reception. Genzken's approach, which includes recourse to photography, video, film, collages, and collage books, does, it's true, represent a continuous examination of the classic themes of sculpture: the ordering of masses and volumes; the relations between construction, surface design, and materials; the conception of and relation between objects, space, and the viewer. And regardless of the medium--from series executed in painted wood, plaster, and concrete to the more recent epoxy-resin hoods and lamps; assemblages of metal household utensils; and stelae--the artist questions the contemporary meaning of sculpture by taking up its vocabulary of forms, then expanding, discarding, and reinterpreting it.



interview from summer 07.