To Create energetic Ridges And Furrows Of Pigment That Can Be Read As Extreme Close-ups Of A Painterly
to create energetic ridges and furrows of pigment that can be read as extreme close-ups of a painterly brushstroke, drawing attention to the action and materiality of painting itself. His works are structurally varied, ranging from a thin glaze through which the metal ground gleams to sculptural reliefs with overlapping ridges and furrows. In the context of Martin's notion that landscape painting and abstraction are intertwined, his work becomes an imaginary space, a mental landscape, an abstracted and mesmeric focal point for contemplation.
Works on paper allow the artist to experiment with movement and colour before turning to larger-scale formats in oil. The fluidity of the cold process dye he employs enables him to explore the interaction between pigments, as he lets himself be guided by the merging tints of emerald green and ultramarine blue, yellow and ruby red.
More Posts from Skipieohhhhh and Others
Kathy Prendergast
Intimate in tone and subject matter, Kathy Prendergast’s practice combines drawing, sculpture and installation. What might appear minimal or elusive at first glance can encompass a complex web of emotional, personal and political resonances. Proximate to the body and connecting subjective reflections on the world, her work explores a potent cluster of issues including power, identity, landscape, memory, geography, and family. A connection between the body and landscape, often manifested through mapping, can be traced back to the beginning of her practice. Often using redaction or removal as a device, creating negative space through black ink, coloured paint or white paper, the artist erases or overwrites geographic expressions of power. Prendergast points out the subjectivity of maps, their inherent colonialism, and the ultimate fragility of borders and territories over time. Though delicate, fragile and usually on a human scale, her works also point towards the infinite – suggesting the vastness of space or the constellations of the sky. Prendergast’s work is methodical – the product of slow, repetitive processes requiring patience, precision and devotion. Faithful to mark-making, drawing and hand-crafting as well as the revelatory potential of sparking unfamiliar connections with everyday objects, her work is enigmatic, eerily beautiful and emotionally resonant.
Throughout her career Kathy Prendergast has received international critical acclaim for her work with cartography
Kathy Prendergast’s Black Map series, from which these works are selected, are produced using printed motorist maps almost entirely obscured with ink. Tiny white spots that represent towns, villages, and cities pinpoint places of habitation and, up close, the place names, road numbers, and contour lines peer through the surface. From afar the ink appears opaque and the effect is that of a night sky dappled with strange and unfamiliar constellations.
Everyone loves a map, everyone loves a globe
Generative Art
"Generative art is art made using a predetermined system that often includes an element of chance – is usually applied to computer based art"
The practice has its roots in dada, yet it was the pioneering artist Harold Cohen who was considered one of the first practitioners of generative art when he used computer-controlled robots to generate paintings in the late 1960s. More recently the Turner Prize winner Keith Tysonbuilt an ArtMachine, a complex recursive system that generated detailed propositions for artworks for Tyson to make.
The term generative art is predominantly used in reference to a certain kind of art made on the net, particularly because artists devise programs that can be accessed and controlled by the public. Generative art is also associated with process art
Hughie O'Donoghue
Born in Manchester, Hughie O’Donoghue now lives and works in rural Ireland. O’Donoghue has internationally since 1982 and is considered one of the leading painters of his generation. His work is represented in public collections, including the National Gallery, London, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Arts Council of England. The solo exhibition ‘Hughie O’Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Works from the American Ireland Fund Donation’ was held at IMMA in 2009
Laocoon, 2003
Medium: Oil on linen canvas in 3 panels
Dimensions: Unframed, 305 x 468 cm
O’Donoghue uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, and experience; and draws on history, mythology, and personal records to create works that resonate with emotional intensity.
Fallen Elm (Kilfane) Oil on board, 71 x 122cm (28 x 48") Signed, inscribed and dated 2007/'8 verso
Evening Kilfane, Co. Kilkenny Oil on canvas, 68 x 104cm (26¾ x 41") Signed; signed inscribed and dated 2007 verso
His work is abstract in style, presenting the human body as distorted and blurred forms, drawn in thick and heavy brushstrokes. He often applies numerous layers of paint, or includes photographs or documentary sources within the canvas, covered in more paint.
The surfaces of his canvas are full of texture, in which the material takes paramount importance
This process of layering reflects O'Donoghue's interest in engaging with historical narratives, often personal in nature, so that he can express the serial form of experience and memory.
"painting is archaeology in reverse"
“The colours in my paintings are also intense, but in my work there’s never only one reason for why something is the way it is. I suppose I deliberately court the intensity of colour to mirror the intensity of feeling that comes with memory.
fascinated by the passing of time
For him, painting is a form of both archaeology and remembrance
Alice Baber
YOURS, JUST THE WORD AND I WILL BE THERE.
1. letters to felice, frank kafka | 2. strangers, ethel cain | 3. overture (1992), helen frankenthaler | 4. desperation sits heavy on my tongue, a.m | 5. against the loveless world: a novel, susan abulhawa | 6. a green thought in a green scale (1981), helen frankenthaler | 7. wife, mitski | 8. ruth 1:16 | 9. lush spring (1975), helen frankenthaler | 10. no exit, jean-paul sartre
Buckling of paper
Watercolour paper warping occurs when the fibres in the paper absorb moisture unevenly, causing it to expand and contract in different places. The flat surface becomes warped and it dries stuck in this position
Let’s imagine that when you paint on your paper, you’re adding water to the top of it. Those fibres will expand, yet the underneath of the paper will be dry. This causes the top of the paper to lift up as it grows, while the bottom pulls under, creating an arch.
And if you create puddles of really wet patches when you paint, the surface will be wetter and drier in different areas, creating uneven warping.
As the paper dries, the fibres will decrease in size again, but the paper may remain a little warped.
Bonus: How to stretch your watercolour paper
Prep your paper by thoroughly wetting both sides in a layer of clean water. Lay out on a flat surface like a wooden board and pull and stretch the paper tight. Tape down the edges with strong painters tape, or staple it down. Allow to dry completely before painting on it.
Some artists swear by stretching their papers, but I find it difficult and fiddly to lift them off the board. You’d probably have to just cut the edges off next to the tape because it won’t peel, and this is too faffy for my impatient brain. But if stretching works for you, go for it and enjoy warp-free painting!
Gerhard Richter, Clouds, 1978
The Lavit Gallery
exhibition report
Annual Members exhibition
27 February- 22 March
this exhibition is of artwork by the Lavit Gallery artist members.
It includes work with; print, painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics and textiles.
it has a wide range of artists from amateur to professionals
out of the 134 artists only 69 are exhibiting.
there is not distinct theme in this exhibition
Curator: unknown
location: Wandesford Quay, Clarke's Bridge, Cork
Installation and display: the installation was very traditional, large open space with white walls and everything was hung our put on a plint. the Lavit Gallery is a commercial galllery aswell so I imagine that the works where hung in a way to not only displayed but also sold.
some artists in the show are: pauline Angew, Jo Ashby, Patty Atkinson, Patricia Beran, Toni Boris.
Exhibition 2
The gallery has a number of exhibitions, but I mainly focused on the Amie Siegel exhibition and the exhibition from Christopher Mahon.
By Christopher Mahon.
VISUAL is pleased to present Sincere, or what you will, a solo exhibition by Irish artist Christopher Mahon.
Mahon works across a range of media including sculpture, painting, photography, installation and performance, and his practice is notable for the variety of disciplines and materials used. He has worked with actors and dancers to create site-responsive environments that combine the mundane and theatrical, and often incorporates found objects in the finished piece.
For several years Mahon has maintained a studio in Cairo, Egypt, basing much of his sculptural production on the techniques and capabilities of the small industrial workshops – the foundries, metal-, stone- and wood-working studios – that dot the city’s backstreets.
Mahon’s sculptures occupy the unstable space between lyricism and materiality, the concrete and ineffable. His materials reference the form and patina of everyday objects and their archaeological forebears. Figurative and decorative elements – carved stone arms, cast brass urns, found textiles – speak to both the historical context and daily domesticity. His material language embraces the mechanical detritus of the modern metropolis. Once functional objects now beyond repair, furniture so broken that no one will give it houseroom. The twisted fragments, nuts, bolts, cogs, pipes, of an obsolete infrastructure are repurposed or recreated so they can play their part as elements in a newly finished work.
Take BAI GAMAYKA, a key work in Sincere, or what you will. The seemingly meaningless set of brass sans-serif letters mounted on the wall reproduces the sign that hangs above one of Cairo’s few remaining downtown bars. The cursive flourish of the r fell off long ago and there is no soft g in colloquial Egyptian pronunciation. Bar Jamaica/BAI GAMAYKA hangs opposite The Sky so Blue, a scrawled handwritten phrase that has been recreated in outsized aluminium letters that hang floating in space; half-baked poetry facing off against a hard-bitten bar.
The exhibition’s title Sincere, or what you will foregrounds the artist’s interest in the ambiguous, the porous, the making things whole anew, if only temporarily. While it is now widely accepted that sincere derives from the Latin sincerus meaning clean, pure, sound, a common folk etymology has it that sincere is derived from the Latin sine, without, and cera, wax. The phrase was used to describe a perfect marble sculpture with no cracks needing to be filled with wax to trick unwary buyers. “or what you will” is drawn from the full title of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a romantic comedy replete with love triangles and protagonists in disguise. The play was written to be performed on the twelfth night of Christmas or the feast of the Ephiphany, a holiday that shifts around the calendar depending on the Eastern or Western Christan tradition, and which now marks the boundary between an extended holiday period and the imminent return to work.
This exhibition, too, exists on the boundary between places and times both real and reimagined, where memories and materials can appear and dissolve and reappear anew.
Sincere, or what you will is co-curated by Benjamin Stafford (VISUAL) and Rachael Gilbourne (IMMA, RGKSKSRG). A text by Gilbourne, An Ode to Spring, from the End of Winter, to the Start of Summer, accompanies the exhibition and is available here and at the gallery.
Christopher Mahon is an Irish artist and the work for VISUAL was produced in his studio in Cairo. He attended the École Jacques Lecoq Movement Research Laboratory, Paris, holds an MA in Art and Research Collaboration from IADT and was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam 2018–2019. Mahon has exhibited in Ireland and internationally. Projects include Paris Art Book Fair, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024), Aswan International Sculpture Symposium (2021), Rijksakademie Open Studios, Amsterdam (2019), Le Menagerie de Verre, Paris (2019), Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2019), RGKSKSRG Cribs, Dublin (2019), Double Negative, ARKO Art Centre, Seoul (2018) and Active Archive, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2018). Mahon’s work is held in private and public collections in Ireland, Europe and North America.
By Amie Siegel
VISUAL is pleased to present Asterisms, a solo exhibition by Amie Siegel. Siegel is an American artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works across film, video, photography, sculpture, painting and installation.
Asterisms is both a moving-image work and a sculptural installation, its uniquely star-shaped wall of overlapping images built to a scale the artist proposed in response to the architecture of VISUAL’s Main Gallery. An asterism is a loose collection of stars that form a pattern, similar to but smaller than a constellation. This notion of disparate elements combining to form a complete image is key to both Asterisms itself, and to Siegel’s practice in general, in which deep research produces artworks that address cultural, political and social questions.
The setting and context of Asterisms is the United Arab Emirates, a place that has modernized at a rapid pace, built on wealth originally derived from ownership of natural resources. Throughout Siegel’s cinematic work the viewer encounters images of factories, labour, commerce, leisure, technology, humans, and animals. These elements are interwoven in the artist’s careful montage and in the various cinematically-scaled geometries that build and layer over time, both in their accumulation of meaning but also as the images dynamically overlap and connect on the star-shaped wall. Horses play a role in the work, and are seen stabled in luxurious accommodation, in sharp contrast with the conditions in which migrant labourers live and work. Horse’s flanks echo the shape of sand dunes and seem to merge with the landscape. The material of that same desert landscape – sand – is everywhere; kicked up into dust by hooves, encroaching on buildings, filling the doorways and windows and almost totally burying houses. Sand is dumped onto artificial islands, to arrest their rapid erosion back into the sea.
These artificial islands comprise a development designed to mimic a map of the world when viewed from above. Despite having once been a flagship project of the Emirate of Dubai, they are no longer promoted by the government. They hide in plain sight, simultaneously visible and invisible. In one of the later shots in Asterisms, the camera zooms out from a party on one of the islands, where a crowd drinks and dances by a swimming pool. As the partygoers recede into the distance, the lights of the sole inhabited island in a sea of dark ones makes them appear as distant and alone as a star hanging in a night sky.
-
On show in VISUAL’s Digital Gallery is Siegel’s RM, a series of photographs of radioactive minerals. This group of works allude to Asterisms both in their constellation-like display, individually illuminated in a darkened space, and their own almost astral representations, glowing gently in dark matter. Many of the minerals Siegel photographed are pseudomorphs, or “false forms”, an occurrence where one mineral’s substance is entirely replaced by another while retaining its outward physical appearance. In each of these differently scaled works, the inherent danger of the radioactive material contrasts with their jewel-like colours and forms, their true nature disguised.
Alongside these works Siegel presents Listening to the Universe (2014), a work-on-paper and act of montage derived from the artist's collection of science and space museum postcards, presenting the vacuum of sound that is outer space, and our continual efforts to listen, or know, our sphere and beyond.
Asterisms is a commission of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and VIA Art Fund. Additional support by KTLO, Los Angeles.
-
Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) is a visual artist working variously with film, video, photography, sound, performance and installation. She is known for her layered, meticulously constructed works that trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, cultural ownership and image-making.
Recent solo exhibitions include Panorama, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2023); Bloodlines, Scottish National Museum Gallery of Modern Art (2022); The Silence, ArkDes, Stockholm (2022); Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); In Focus: Amie Siegel – Provenance, Tate St. Ives (2018); Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017); Strata, South London Gallery (2017); Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016) and Imitation of Life, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2016). She has participated in the 34th São Paulo Bienal; 12th Gwangju Biennial; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Glasgow International, Scotland; 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; and the Whitney Biennial, among numerous other group exhibitions.
Siegel’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; MAK-Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Her films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulton Fellow at The Film Study Center at Harvard University and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow. Siegel has received numerous grants and awards including from the Sundance Institute, Princess Grace Foundation, ICA Boston (Foster Prize), Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2023 she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
-
caitlin-mcc03 liked this · 9 months ago -
cheezbot liked this · 9 months ago -
skipieohhhhh reblogged this · 9 months ago
