# data[].attributes.body
Inking an older drypoint

# data[].attributes.body
Something else too

# data[].attributes.body
Preferred it then

# data[].attributes.body
No idea of where I am going

# data[].attributes.body
5

# data[].attributes.body
4

# data[].attributes.body
3

# data[].attributes.body
2

# data[].attributes.body
Grey black composition 1

# data[].attributes.body
A new boy appears, but still cross with the girls faces

# data[].attributes.body
A few changes

# data[].attributes.body
Today’s work

# data[].attributes.body
Legs so wrong

# data[].attributes.body
Attempting a watercolour

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the eve of the painter's new retrospective in Edinburgh, here is a selection of his fascinating works from the past 20 years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Michaël Borremans is a contemporary Belgian artist whose photo-based paintings are characterized by their unsettlingly surreal imagery. His work has drawn comparisons to both Edouard Manet due to the artist's fluid brushwork and choice of unnerving subject matter. "I do not work thematically. But ultimately, works from a certain period have always an element that connects them together," he has explained. "For example there was a time when I painted sleeping girls, or girls who seemed to be dead. That's probably a way to express something that you're subconsciously dealing with." Born in 1963 in Gerardsbergen, Belgium, he received his MFA in 1996 from Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst in Ghent, and went on to work for several years as a teacher at the Secondary Municipal Art Institute of Ghent. In 2014, he was the subject of the mid-career retrospective "Michaël Borremans: As Sweet as it Gets" at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Borremans' paintings can be found in institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Michaël Borremans is a contemporary Belgian artist whose photo-based paintings are characterized by their unsettlingly surreal imagery. View Michaël Borremans's 141 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. See available paintings, prints and multiples, and works on paper for sale and learn about the artist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There is a painting in this show of the man who murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, shooting him repeatedly before slashing his throat. It is delicate and pale, materialising in beautiful veils. There is another of Osama bin Laden in the glowing stained-glass hues of a Rouault. Should they be quite so gorgeous, these canvases? Should these men get such lavish treatment? Who should appear in a painting?

The art of Marlene Dumas, born in South Africa in 1953, is painterly and provocative in about equal measure. You notice the method - fluent, sumptuous, the paint sinking into the canvas in translucent stains, the brush carrying its licks and swipes with gliding expertise - at exactly the same moment as the subject, which is always human, often vulnerable, violent, suffering or dead. That's the first disjuncture, a sort of double take that forces the viewer to think twice about why the subject has been painted in this way. The second question is more primitive: simply, who's in this painting and why?

The Painter, 1994. Photograph: The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Marlene Dumas

Dumas has been painting lone heads - and occasionally bodies, naked - for more than 30 years. The isolating focus gives a certain grandeur to each image. A damaged face floats in black watercolour on white paper, puckering the surface so that the pain seems redoubled. A heavy head thickens around the eyes, which hold a strange light, particularly in the self-portraits, so often her strongest works.

Her way of painting can appear rhetorical: those vague attenuations around the neck that make you wonder what happened to the rest of this poor person; those coloured auras that seem to emanate from certain faces; those seeping blurs that allow for extraordinary ambiguities in a face - seeing or sightless, unconscious or dead? Shapely masks - chalk white, pale blue, tinged with fading pink or magenta - are superimposed on heads for an immediate sense of misfit or detachment. Her people seem to wear their faces.

But that puts it too strongly. Dumas's people are not doing anything at all. Her paintings are representations of photographs, not of actual people. Photographs of victims, martyrs, madonnas and supermodels; of babies and soldiers, assassins and lovers, of dead Pasolini and his grieving mother, occasionally of people the painter knows. The subject is trapped in the frame; the image is fundamentally inert. But then Dumas remakes it in her own idiom. They look like pictures, she says, but they act like paintings.

The swither between the two is her special contribution to what is now a very old tradition of photo-based painting from Sickert to Richter onwards. You go back and forth between the image and the brushwork: how moribund is this opaque grey body (is it dead at all?), are we looking at coagulated blood or paint, why does this porn close-up have the same smooth to-and-fro lubricity as this corpse? To take it further, her paintings act like questions.

But Dumas has been painting the same way almost from the off. Her works are instantly recognisable, catnip to collectors and regularly on display in museums. It may be that this is the best way to see them too - come across one on its own and you are more likely to feel the raw force of it. For Dumas's paintings can have exceptional graphic register and tenacity. One of the best works here is The Painter, who turns out to be a toddler with a wary or defensive look, standing vulnerably naked. She is partly drawn - in the manner of Ingres, sinuous and precise - and partly painted, her face the white of greasepaint, her torso carrying a pale blue haze like a Degas pastel. The child's hands are thick with paint, one violet, the other blood-red as if caught in the act. Perhaps the punishment is to become both a painting herself, and its reluctant model. That The Painter is female and naked seems to be at least part of the point.

To see more than 100 paintings at once, however, is to see the idiom stretched too far. It never changes; it will do for schoolgirls, infants and terrorists. Dead Girl is a case in point. The girl is bleeding, the paint bleeds, it's a cancellation; the picture (and its subject) loses impact. Here are 22 Great Men, all gay, all painted in black ink that blossoms like a Rorschach blot. The singularity of each man is entirely lost in terms of images, and only just preserved in the written captions below. The paintings are inarticulate compared to the words.

Dead Girl, 2002. Photograph: Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Marlene Dumas

It is rare to find a show quite so dominated by an artist's personality; Dumas's writings are almost as much a presence at Tate Modern as her paintings. She has always been a writer's painter, admired by poets and novelists and fiercely eloquent herself. Early on, she speaks of being torn between clear definition and "a reasonless disappearance into formlessness", which perfectly puts across one effect of her work.

But she also talks impatiently about the crisis in representation, the way everyone is looking for "meaning" (this was the 80s, high times for theory; one of her paintings is even titled Death of the Author). Yet of course her own work courts meaning all the time - sex, death, politics, the violence of sexism, racism, apartheid, the decline of privacy, the complexities of representation - only to sidestep it. Why paint Theo van Gogh's murderer? You find the answers.

It is not quite true to say that the depiction is even-handed all the way through this show. The sloppy pastiche portraits - Diana, Naomi Campbell, Amy Winehouse - are awful by any standards, whatever they may communicate about icons of icons. Phil Spector twice over - with and without wig - is melodramatically creepy, though so are the courtroom shots on which the paintings were based. And towards the end the paintings just get bigger, not better; one mistrusts their slickness. Their chief characteristic - their chief aim, almost - is to resemble works by Marlene Dumas.

But to witness the strongest works in this show is to realise that though her source material is modern, Dumas is an old-fashioned expressionist. The Black Drawings from the 90s are as devastating as they should be: 112 heads, cropped at the neck, that look like thwarted portraits where the human being has been denied, all individuality blocked. Which is exactly what had happened to the original subjects, black Africans photographed by ethnographers. Dumas's paintings are alive with sympathy.

The best is in the opening gallery: the ongoing series of Rejects - a wall of botched and bockled faces in black and white paint, eyes skewed, noses bashed, heads broken and awkward. The features are out of register, out of whack, sometimes a replacement face has been added to the one below - the eyes and mouth cut out like a burn mask - to keep on trying for something better. The images are delicate yet damaged, by life, it seems, as much art.

It feels as if Dumas has changed her mind, changed their faces, understood these people differently as time passes. There is a sense of movement, of open-endedness and restless thinking that you don't see elsewhere. And it is here that these heads - these rejected individuals - are granted true personality. They are works in progress, like all of us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Marlene Dumas: The Image As Burden review - painterly and provocative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Marlene Dumas's sumptuous portraits prove questioning and elusive in Tate Modern's major retrospective

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alexander Varvaridze is visual artist best known for his paintings. His portraits show him as an emotional painter rather than a realist, which gives him a lot of room for interpretation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A SERIES OF ARRESTING PORTRAITS is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Single and double portraits are exhibited along with a painting of four black males standing together, seemingly in conversation. Lithe figures, all bare-chested wearing only dark pants, any number of narratives could be assigned to the image by British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

At the latest edition of the Carnegie International, a gallery illuminated with natural light is dedicated to Yiadom-Boakye. Her portraits are hung according to her specifications. The lighting and wall color are designed to complement the paintings which are displayed relatively low, at a height that directly engages the viewer. Void of time-bound details, her expressive portraits of compelling characters read both historic and contemporary.

The Carnegie International opened to much fanfare in October. Presented by the Carnegie Museum of Art every four to five years, this year's 57th edition is curated by Ingrid Schaffner, with associate curator Liz Park. The exhibition features 32 artists and collectives, local, national, and international figures, such as Kerry James Marshall, El Anatsui, Art Labor with Joan Jonas, Huma Bhabha, Mel Bochner, Tacita Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Leslie Hewitt, Zoe Leonard, Thaddeus Mosley, Tavares Strachan, and Yiadom-Boakye.

The opening festivities included a variety of programming-artist projects, performances, talks, screenings, and a celebratory gala on Oct. 12, where the Fine Prize was awarded to Postcommodity and Yiadom-Boakye received the Carnegie Prize.

Yiadom-Boakye's paintings earned her the International's top award. The Carnegie Prize includes $10,000 and the Medal of Honor, which is designed by Tiffany & Co., and was first issued to Winslow Homer at the inaugural International in 1896.

The museum describes the International prizes as "prestigious" and the winning artists as "exceptional," without further explanation about their candidacy. I wanted to better understand the criteria by which the artists were chosen and reached out to the museum to learn what about Yiadom-Boakye's work stood out among the other artists included in the exhibition.

To begin with, the artists featured in the International were selected by a nearly all-female team of curators and researchers assembled by Schaffner. The group included Magalí Arriola, Ruba Katrib, Carin Kuoni, and Bisi Silva, as well as, Doryun Chong. They traveled the globe in pairs visiting with artists and viewing their work.

The goal was explore what "'international' means at a moment when questions of nations, nationalism, boundaries, and border crossings are becoming ever more urgent" and, in this context, identify artists who best represented the "currents and concerns" of contemporary art.

Asked why Yiadom-Boakye was selected to participate in the International, through a museum spokesperson, Schaffner said the elements that drew her to the artist's work were pretty straightforward. She said, "Simple answer: the paintings, the brushwork, the personas, the intimacies, the owls, the staging, the drama."

The goal was to explore what "'international' means at a moment when questions of nations, nationalism, boundaries, and border crossings are becoming ever more urgent" and, in this context, identify artists who best represented the "currents and concerns" of contemporary art.

LONDON-BORN YIADOM-BOAKYE is of Ghanaian heritage. Recognized for her portraits of timeless subjects, she made 13 new ones for the Carnegie International. Her dreamy and dramatic portraits feature fictional figures, people she's imagined and realized on canvas. The characters might be mulling family matters or experiencing relationship challenges, immigration issues, grief, triumph, satisfaction or wanderlust. Perhaps they are weighing what to serve for tea. The specifics are left to interpretation.

A painter who also writes and has penned essays for the catalogs of fellow artists, Yiadom-Boakye gives her paintings poetic titles such as "A Whistle in a Wish," "Solar Wisdom," "The Black Watchful," and "No Need of Speech."

Her latest series depicts individual figures in contemplative poses. "Marvels for a Soothsayer" shows a male subject, rendered in profile, with his head cast slightly downward. He is wearing glasses with his dreaded or braided hair pulled back in a bun. The instance may be the first time such cultural details have been represented in her oeuvre.

Yiadom-Boakye's subjects often look away from the viewer and appear aloof or perhaps deep in thought. Even when there are two figures on a canvas, they usually don't appear emotionally connected with one another. In some of the new paintings, however, Yiadom-Boakye's characters are relatively animated and deeply engaged with each other-a new development. She depicts them facing one another, gesturing, smoking, and expressing emotion with wide eyes.

In some of the new paintings, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's characters are relatively animated and deeply engaged with each other-a new development. She depicts them facing one another, gesturing, smoking, and expressing emotion with wide eyes.

In The Guide published to document the International, Schaffner noted that when Yiadom-Boakye visited the museum about six months before the opening, the artist said, "Leave plenty of time for lighting."

The curator went on to describe how Yiadom-Boakye approaches installing a show. She wrote: "An artist who works intensely up to the last minute, she also gave fair warning that until the new paintings were installed, her plan for the International would remain open: Would the walls be painted a color? So deep red were the walls of one recent show, the paintings practically disappeared into them. How high would the paintings hang? As low as they can go has been her rule of thumb. How many paintings would there be? That depends on the drama! The gallery is staged to establish intervals, relationships, pacing, mood."

At the New Museum in New York last year, the walls for her solo exhibition "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher" were a deep red. She went the opposite route for the International. The walls are a bright vanilla and the paintings are low.

Curator Ingrid Schaffner said the elements that drew her to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's work were pretty straightforward. She said, "Simple answer: the paintings, the brushwork, the personas, the intimacies, the owls, the staging, the drama."

A seven-member jury selected the prize winners. The jurors included three of Schaffner's travel/research partners (Kuoni, Katrib, and Arriola), two representatives from the museum's advisory board, and two members of the Carnegie's curatorial staff-Catherine Evans, co-director and head curator, and Eric Crosby, curator of modern and contemporary art.

"Criteria for awarding the prizes are intentionally broad," Evans said. She continued in an email statement: "In selecting the winners this year, jurors started with their top five to ten artists, then after much discussion ranging from the impact of artworks to their resonance with the context of the exhibition to the relevance of their artistic practice in today's world, reached a final consensus."

Evans said the Carnegie Prize "is awarded to an artist for their outstanding contribution to the exhibition." Given this standard, beyond the allure of her paintings of fascinating characters, the jury appreciated Yiadom-Boakye's dedication to the opportunity to participate in the International.

"The jury felt strongly that Lynnette Yiadom-Boake's paintings demonstrated a compelling new development in her work and is a highlight in a rich and exhibition," Evans said. "In addition, the jury took into account that the artist had created these 13 paintings specifically for the Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018." CT

UPDATE (03/21/19): Correction made to account for the fact that the team of five curators Ingrid Schaffner worked and traveled with during the research stage of the Carnegie International was not entirely female. The group included curator Doryun Chong. He is deputy director and chief curator of the forthcoming M+ museum in Hong Kong; (11/19/18): Revised to clarify comment from Schaffner and add a brief excerpt about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's methods from The Guide published to accompany the International.
The 57th edition of the Carnegie International is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh from Oct. 13, 2018- March 25, 2019. TOP IMAGE: LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE, "Amaranthine," 2018 (oil on linen). | © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
BOOKSHELF
"Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher" documents her New Museum exhibition in New York. Published in 2014, "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye" surveyed her career to date. More recently, her first monograph, also titled, "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye" is rife with images of her captivating portraits. "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations" was published to coincide with her solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE, "The Black Watchful," 2018 (oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 59 1/16 inches). | © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Curators Explain Why British Painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Won the Carnegie International's Top Prize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A SERIES OF ARRESTING PORTRAITS is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Single and double portraits are exhibited along with a painting of four black males standing together, seemingly in conversation. Lithe figures, all bare-chested wearing only dark pants, any number of narratives could be assigned to the image by British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Through hazy lines and obscured faces, Joshua Flint ( previously) reflects on the blurriness of in-between states in his most recent paintings. "Big Earth" shows a group of kids reaching up toward red- and pink-hued orbs that are set on a shadowy backdrop, while "Memory of Nature I" features a portrait of a man with a nondescript face as an enlarged hummingbird flies so close that it appears to be drinking from the man's mouth.

The Portland, Oregon-based painter tells Colossal that much of his newer work is influenced by Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which inspired him to consider the link between the interiority and exteriority of human movement. "These paintings have a loose narrative of exploring this unknown territory, these liminal spaces, and the people who populate them," he says. "I continue to explore themes such as memory, ecological issues, pyscho-geography, identity, loss, and transformation." Flint says that each body of work elicits a new line of thought for the next project.

What I've noticed over the last few years is that I'm making a sort of alternate reality, a kind of parallel world or a world that exists under the surface, where the physical and the metaphysical blend in more obvious ways. This world also relates to literature, poetry, philosophy, science and nature writing rather than current events or the historical canon. Although, I think some of those latter themes inevitably find their way in.

Flint's upcoming plans include creating a companion to "The Exhibit," in addition to expanding the story around the subject in "The Messenger," which are included below. From March 6 to 28, he'll have a solo show at Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, South Carolina. Until then, follow more of his surreal work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Exploring the Liminal Spaces of Joshua Flint's Surreal Paintings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Through hazy lines and obscured faces, Joshua Flint (previously) reflects on the blurriness of in-between states in his most recent paintings. "Big Earth" shows a group of kids reaching up toward red- and pink-hued orbs that are set on a shadowy backdrop, while "Memory of Nature I" features a portra

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cecilia Edefalk - 12 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Cecilia Edefalk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Could not log in

This is due to one of the following reasons:

You don't have an account yet. Register a free account

Your email address has not been verified yet. Did you click on the link in the registration verification email?

You typed in an invalid email address. Maybe you used a different one?

The password was wrong. Check your keyboard's language settings and capitalization

You had too many failed login attempts, please contact our customer service

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is due to one of the following reasons: You don't have an account yet. Register a free account Your email address has not been verified yet. Did you click on the link in the registration verification email? You typed in an invalid email address. Maybe you used a different one?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New Year's resolution: own up to ignorance. I freely confess that I had never seen anything by Cecilia Edefalk or Gunnel Wåhlstrand until the first week of 2012. I would have been hard put to say what kind of work these Swedish artists even made. But if the show of their paintings at the Parasol Unit proves anything at all it is that there is still art out there that needs no introduction, no explanatory preamble or wall text or foreknowledge of any sort. This is art that speaks beautifully for itself.

Edefalk makes extremely concentrated paintings that hold the eye with their elusive imagery - a solitary woman, arms raised as if sleepwalking or possibly in levitation; a stone statue beneath a canopy of ivy and snow; a girl who appears to be protected by a golden wing, except that this wing turns out to be a haze of bees brushing softly around her. The elements may have their origins in photographs, but each painting overrides the documentary truth to present something far stranger, more like a vision or half-remembered dream.

What is singular, and striking, is the peculiar strength of these figures, which somehow hold their own in the suffused light of Edefalk's paintings. For her palette - white, grey, silvery blue and taupe with the occasional wash of yellow - is spectrally pale and tonal. On the other hand, there is scarcely any detail and no context to explain (and thus limit) what you see, so the subjects retain their mystery.

The paintings come in series, what is more, running from small to monumental as if created in editions. You are instinctively drawn to spot the differences. But again, this is not about simple details. As the pictures are put through their paces - paler, larger, more or less figurative, suspended upright or sideways - they appear to perform in relation to one another.

Cecilia Edefalk's Double White Venus, 2000. Photograph: Cartin Collection

The stone Venus registers firmly in one canvas, less resolutely in another and as little more than an empty silhouette in a third. It is as if the paintings are having trouble remembering her. In another sequence, a portrait of an alert and dark-eyed woman is reprised and distorted over and again, each image seeming to originate in the one before. The last is upside down and yet that dark-eyed stare remains legible, recognisable, the one fixed note. Echo is the collective title.

Viewers familiar with Edefalk's work may be aware that Echo is, in fact, a self-portrait, but it has none of the familiar eye-to-eye intensity of the genre. There is no sense of the artist wishing to communicate, to be known or understood. Quite the reverse; if the sequence expresses anything at all it is the mutability of the self, the difficulty of summing oneself up in a single, definitive image.

If you do want to know something about Cecilia Edefalk, you can probably deduce most of it from the show's sparse labels. Born in 1954, and one of Sweden's leading painters, she is either very slow or highly selective about what she makes as precious few paintings exist, almost all of them in public collections.

She took nearly a decade to produce the 12 Venus pictures, which all return to the same moment when she saw a flash of light illuminating a silhouette in a wintry London garden. So the statue was a shadow in the first place, just the recollection of a brief phenomenon.

Venus comes and goes, now curvaceous, now a stark white cutout. The canvases appear frost-blanched, faded, patinated, rubbed away. The paint describes: the paint erases; the analogy with memory is implicit. And each picture has a relationship with the next something like our own viewing of the world: attentive, fascinated, distracted, altered daily by experience, continuous and ever‑changing.

Upstairs at the Parasol Unit, and perfectly matched with Edefalk, is the monochrome art of Gunnel Wåhlstrand: immense images faithfully, painstakingly, based on old family photographs. A mother with a marcel wave, a daughter dressed in box pleats, a son in blazer and bow tie. It might be the 50s, and it might be any well-heeled family if the art did not declare it to be otherwise.

Two children by a window appear almost supernaturally bright, as if the daylight was glowing from somewhere inside them. An impeccably groomed schoolboy at a desk has all his attributes around him - the globe, the books, the model aeroplane taking off for ever on its stand. Our boy sits heroically still for the record. Even the animals on the waste bin look like mythical beasts. The moment is caught as it passes into history.

Wåhlstrand (b. 1974) paints in ink-wash on paper. Her vast transcriptions are a feat of exactitude and loving labour, admired in Sweden since her graduation show in 2003. The ink tinges the paper with a great range of nuances from silver and dark grey to something approaching sepia. It's the twilight of old films, catching the gleam of immaculately brushed hair, spangling teeth and spectacles, finding haloes in polished floors.

And the narrative develops: the same boy, the same girl, by now a little older, perfect teenagers in a silent apartment, the clock ticking, the ghostly reflection of someone holding up the flash, the melancholy overtones of Bergman.

The scale invites you to enter deeply into each scene, but the photographs put a limit to that search. All you can see is all that Wåhlstrand can show in these beautiful commemorations, as she pores over the minute details of the past but cannot make more of them than each photograph discloses.

Except, of course, that her own images form a story in themselves, a tale of perfection and froideur in which the boy appears isolated in every room of the house. The knowledge that Wåhlstrand's father took his own life when she was one might make the paintings more poignant to some, but I doubt it. They are profound remembrances of moments lost and lives past.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Time and Memory: Cecilia Edefalk and Gunnel Wåhlstrand - review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New Year's resolution: own up to ignorance. I freely confess that I had never seen anything by Cecilia Edefalk or Gunnel Wåhlstrand until the first week of 2012. I would have been hard put to say what kind of work these Swedish artists even made.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Paintings | Drawings | Collages - Lorna Simpson Studio

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Look for the plus icon next to videos throughout the site to add them here.

Save videos to watch later, or make a selection to play back-to-back using the autoplay feature.

{{watchlist.lookupAttr('progress', video)}} / {{watchlist.lookupAttr('runtime', video)}}

Watch again

{{watchlist.lookupAttr('runtime', video);}}

Elliott Hundley was born in 1975 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Hundley draws inspiration for his paintings from diverse sources, but especially from his Southern heritage, steeped in family history. Many of his works also contain references to Greek tragedy and classical mythology, and to Japanese woodblock prints. He also stages improvisational photo shoots to generate imagery for his multi-panel tableaus, casting friends and family in roles from antiquity and various other sources.

With these and other images anchored by thousands of pins to bulletin-board-like surfaces, his shallow reliefs form a palimpsest that teems with humble materials such as cut-up magazines, string, plastic, gold leaf, and other ephemera. He frequently recycles leftover scraps from one work to the next and uses images of completed paintings as substructures for new projects, creating continuity between old and new.

Elliot Hundley received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1997), an MFA from UCLA (2005), and has been awarded residencies at Fine Arts Work Center (2001), Vermont Studio Center (2002), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2002), and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2003). His work has appeared in major exhibitions at Nasher Sculpture Center (2012); Wexner Center for the Arts (2011); and the Hammer Museum (2006); and has been included in exhibitions at the ICP Triennial (2013); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); LACMA (2011); SFMOMA (2010); New Museum (2010); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2009); Las Vegas Art Museum (2009); Guggenheim Museum (2007); DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art (2007); Saatchi Gallery (2006); and ICA, Philadelphia (2003). Elliott Hundley lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

4:55

54:35

Artist at Work

24 Images

Artwork Survey: 2010s

28 Images

Artwork Survey: 2000s

12 Images

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
181 | Justin Mortimer - "Tomorrow"

Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade, and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.

In his recent solo show, his works create paradoxical beauty in the landscape of oppression and violence around the world. With the Covid-19 pandemic and the escalating racial conflict, Justin Mortimer's solo exhibition sets the stage for reflection on the 'tomorrow' of our society.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

Welcoming the idea of things breaking down

Feeling separated from society

Art being a survival technique

The human body as a fractured and dismorphed structure

Childhood experiences overflowing into Justin's artistic work

Justin's interest in the body

The concept of latex, and how it relates to the individual

The loss of imagination within art

Reimagining with digital artwork

Constant observation qualities within art

Retaining a mystery within the work you produce

Empathy and how it relates to Covid-19

Justin's recent solo show, "Tomorrow"

Technology and how it affects the way we deal with stress and anxiety

Inspiration

Portraits

Justin's Instagram

Posted 10.16.2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
181 | Justin Mortimer - "Tomorrow" Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Self Portrait 2015 12x12in oil on wood panel