one piece

Mats Gustafson’s Landscapes and Swans

 

Since the late 1970s, Mats Gustafson’s fashion illustrations have decorated the pages of magazines such as Interview, The New Yorker, and Vogue, among others. But by 1997, the artist began shifting his focus to the natural world, starting a series of pastel landscape studies. A couple of years later, Gustafson began drawing swans in the same minimalist style that had defined his work in the fashion industry. “It’d been an ongoing switch in my career—focusing on nature—but it was funny, because I picked the most fashionable parts of nature,” Gustafson said. “The swan is very much the supermodel among birds, and they’re very elegant. I was still looking for beautiful lines, but just in the natural world.”

The gallery John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, in New York City, is now showing “Mats Gustafson: Swan,” a collection of the illustrator’s early landscape and swan studies, as well as recent pieces and a digital wall installation. “I wanted to reduce, simplify, and get to the essence of things,” Gustafson said of the stark but romantic works. Herewith, some images from the exhibition, which is on display until January 23. 

via: Vanity Fair

 

"Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008"

Italian artists may be credited with such accomplishments as linear perspective (via Brunelleschi), chiaroscuro (via Caravaggio), and, pretty much every other formal tool comprising Western art. But their more recent creative triumphs have received notably less fanfare, so to speak—an oversight that Italian curator Francesco Bonami seeks to correct with his new exhibition, Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008.

Italics debuted this summer at the Venice Biennale to much criticism from the locals, and the show recently mounted its first and only U.S. stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it will remain on view through February 14, 2010.

via: The New Italian Renaissance -The Daily Beast

Toggle Up

 Cropped Toggle Coat by Boy by Band of Outsiders. 

So 80's

Neil Winokur: 1980's Portraits at:

Janet Borden

“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective”

 Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century.

This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape.

What’s surprising about the Philadelphia show, though, is how much it feels of a piece, even if it doesn’t look like it. Stylistically, eclecticism rules as you move from Gorky playing Cézanne, to Gorky doing Cubism, to Gorky the Surrealist. Constant throughout, though, is an impression, as strong and invisible as a force field, of physical and psychic concentration.

via: "From Mimic to Master of Invention" By Holland Cotter - The New York Times

Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799)

 The first comprehensive exhibition of Luo Ping’s paintings ever presented in America, Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) on view at Metropolitan Museum of Art, will bring together nearly 60 works, including many Chinese “National Treasures,” by one of the most celebrated painters in 18th-century China. Complemented by 27 pieces from American collections, this momentous international-loan exhibition will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist’s vision as well as his place among his peers. Highlights of the exhibition will include the sensational handscroll Ghost Amusements (ca. 1766)—one of the best known paintings in the late imperial China—depicting the world of ghosts that, he claimed, he had seen with his own eyes. The youngest of the so-called “Eight Eccentrics,” a group of highly individualistic artists active in the prosperous metropolis of Yanzhou, Luo Ping was an extraordinary artist, whose works influenced the course of later Chinese painting.

“Luo Ping was very much a man of his times,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, “And, being labeled an eccentric suggests that he exhibited the kind of individuality that we associate with western artists today. Luo faced issues of artistic integrity and patronage not so different from what contemporary artists must grapple with. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to get to know a Chinese artist in all his complexity.” 

via: The Beat

Cut Off

 Slash: Paper Under the Knife is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series,

 which examines the renaissance of traditional handicraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

"Czarist Russia's Fascination With Italian Textiles"

The centuries-long pursuit of the finest Italian silk weaves by the Russian court and church and the prodigious sums they spent on them have left Russia, despite losses during war and revolution, with an immense patrimony of rich and rare Italian textiles, only a fraction of which have ever been put on general public view.

Between them the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Kremlin Museum in Moscow have well over 5,000 examples of historic Italian textiles. 

These two institutions have joined forces with the Hermitage Italia Foundation and Prato’s Textile Museum to lay out some of these fabulous wares, and relate the story of how they found their way east to the centers of Russian political and ecclesiastical power, in “The Style of the Czar: Art and Fashion between Italy and Russia from the 14th to the 18th Century.”

via: The New York Times 

Irving Penn: 1917 – 2009

Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Mr. Penn’s talent for picturing his subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of readers of Vogue during his long association with the magazine, beginning in 1943. It also brought him recognition in the art world; his photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries and are prized by collectors.

Read more here.

 © Irving Penn "Irving Penn's Studio" in Paris, 1950.

"Fascist Fascination"

"Fashion at the Time of Fascism," out later this month from Damiani, struck me right away. Its pages are a collage of women framed in soft focus, elegantly attired and wistfully posed, all cigarettes and silhouettes. The refined furs and extravagant draperies are enough to make the glancing reader nostalgic for the reign of Mussolini. 

via: "The Book Bench" The New Yorker Magazine