Jawad Ibrahime or, Remember to Use Color (Sometimes)

Brokenness in Mosaic, Mario Bionda

More info here.

Violence and Delicacy Insieme, Rana Bishara

An Emotional Klimt

Mixed Media Construction by Anselm Keifer

Anselm Keifer, Grosse Eisenfaust Deutschland kleine Panzerfaust D, mixed media

Marlene Dumas, Bodies as Black and White

A Sort of Silence in Things, Latifa Echakhch

More info here.

Nida Sinnokrot, "Rubber-Coated Rocks"

Stripped of Their Identity and Driven from Their Land

More information here.

The Burn Paintings of Cai Guo-Qiang

More information here.

Hair Like Smoke, or "Sans Souci #3" by Isabelle Cornaro

Type of mosaic/collage of hair and paper.
More info here.

Roccia sulla Carta, o Un Bozzetto di Jean-Christophe Lanquetin

More information here.

Scratchy Wire, Information by Laurie Palmer

More information here.

Kind of Painting by Sophie Bueno-Boutellier

More information and images here.

Cecily Brown, or Sex is Like Paint and Everything is Motion

Scipione, or Rome is Hell

More information here.

Flatness and Dimensionality

Intermingling of two- and three-dimensionality.

Longer series of images here.

Masked Man

Best gift ever

The man in the second image feels to me like some character in a novel - perfect slim-cut suit, head cocked to the side.

Floating in a Sea of Teal

The strangeness of that arm jutting out over the surface of the water.

Gymnastics

The starkness of the black and white, the focus that they have in their faces, these odd uniforms. What are they doing? (Found on a trip to Prague)

Walt, Art, Bob, Bill, and Jim (three weeks after heart attack)

Titled on the back, "Walt, Art, Bob, Bill, and Jim (three weeks after heart attack)."

Fashion as Art, Woman as Insect

Went back and looked at some of the previous Alexander McQueen shows, after seeing his recent art-inspired collection, and came across the 2010 Spring/Summer collection. It's stunning - not because I would want to wear it, although I might, but because he actually transcends the idea of fashion as clothing, and deals head-on with fashion as a sort of second-skin. He manages to make these models a sort of hybrid between humans and butterflies, playing with the softness of the fabric or the rigidness of structure in a way that constructs new "natural" silhouettes. 

Full collection here.

A web, a tunnel

Came across the work of Chiharu Shiota recently, and was blown away by the power of what she's doing. By positioning everyday objects within a dense web of black threads, she somehow captures the enormity of emotional significance, even pain, that these objects can take on in our lives, and the way that sometimes even the smallest forward motions can become incredibly difficult - creating a tension between the desire to reach the object, and the physical/phsychological difficulty of getting there.

Also interesting, from a recent Guardian article on her:

"When Shiota was nine years old her neighbour's house burned down; the following day the artist saw a charred piano amongst the ruins. This instrument that lost its sound has haunted the artist and inspired various works in which she sets alight to a grand piano, then displays the remains within an installation of black thread."

Simply stunning

The red of the dress of the woman in the background, the brilliance of the tulips. Just breathtaking.

Icebergs in Berlin

Perhaps the greatest discovery of my time in Berlin was the sound of an iceberg. A series of sounds, really: the soft tap of two sheets colliding; the scrape as they part again; the long, slow creak when one iceberg becomes two, or when two that had collided and collapsed upon one another finally separate once more.



































Just at the bridge that connected Kreuzberg (where we were staying), to the long, barren stretch of land that flanks the Berlin wall, a riverbed of icebergs - a broken veneer, black veins between the white ice. And as we watched, a recognition of the sound of ice, its whispers, its moans.

Here, some stills; I wish I had had a way to record the sound.

streetlamps in the markets of berlin

Pietr Uklanski - Abstract Mosaic of a Sort

I just came across the artist Pietr Uklanski yesterday, these beautiful mixed-media works created from pencil shavings. I don't know if he considers these works mosaic, but they have so many of the fundamental elements: the act of destruction (the breaking of glass or stone or, here, the shaving of the pencil) enabling the act of creation, the smaller pieces coming together to form a whole. I love how delicate the whole thing is. See more of his work at Gallerie Perrotin.

"Well, old girl, I wish I was with you tonight, for I never felt half so lonely before."

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe

This is where the hundreds of fish came to the top for food.

As the title says, inscribed on the back in blue-black pen: "This is where the hundreds of fish came to the top for food. Sept '53, VT."

Without that caption, a picture of waves, an expanse of water like any other. With the caption, the place where something happened.

I also love that you can't quite make out any fish in the image, but also that there's some discoloration towards the bottom that could be one, or some....