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Ax Xian - Grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Self-taught - no formal education. Work focuses on tradition, history/culture. Fled from China in 1990 - for political asylum in Australia. Was involved in the Tiananmen Square, 1989 - Peoples Liberation. Crushed the fledgling democracy movement.

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china ah terracotta warriors metaphysica xian metaphysica female shoes cartoon png chinese sculptures

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Focus of her work - the forces of nature - taking over. Nature is overpowering Humans - work represents cycles, balance, depletion, living and dying. Figures seem passive and complacent. Nature and Humans are intertwined. Work feels unsettling.

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I Lobo You | Boca do Lobo's inspirational world Exclusive Design

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Japenese artist Yui Ishibashi's contemporary art sculptures are both unsettling and serene. Fixated on a mythological depiction of nature, the artist sculpts feral children that appear to belong to another realm of reality.

We've been abusing nature and our planet for far too long. And it's not going to end well, according to artist Yui Ishibashi.

Pallid, hairless human bodies become fused with roots and vines, brought to life through a mixture of wood, resin, clay, wire and paint. Oftentimes, the figures appear imprisoned by the flora. In Then, It Returns Slowly, a pregnant woman's face erupts with flesh-colored growths that form a tree trunk.

Meet also Contemporary art by Beth Cavener HERE!
You might also like: Taiichiro Yoshida's Flowery Metal Sculptures
Using a variety of materials, such as wood, resin, cloth, clay, steel wire, and stone powder, she often depicts whose roots extend and project outward in many directions. These figures appear passive and complacent to these protruding branches, aware of the lack of control they have over this organic process. Some of these protrusions seem painful or unexpected, but ultimately inevitable.

Often her figures are off-white, while their protrusions are green or red-hued. These figures are human-like, but their soft, round and white bodies give the viewer a sense they are also of the earth, resembling a plant's bulb. Yui's work makes us deeply aware of how we are intertwined with the natural world, and the balance and cycle of nourish and depletion that living and dying requires.

These sculptures personify nature as a force that reclaims its power from its human occupants.

Did you like this article?

See also Kim Hyunsoo Hyper-realistic Sculpture HERE!

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Japenese artist Yui Ishibashi's contemporary art sculptures are both unsettling and serene. Fixated on a mythological depiction of nature, the artist sculpts feral children that appear to belong to another realm of reality. We've been abusing nature and our planet for far too long. And it's not going to end well, according to artist Yui Ishibashi.

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Perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso may be best known for pioneering Cubism and fracturing the two-dimensional picture plane in order to convey three-dimensional space. Inspired by African and Iberian art, he also contributed to the rise of Surrealism and Expressionism. Picasso's sizable oeuvre grew to include over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures,ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs. He painted his most famous work, Guernica (1937), in response to the Spanish Civil War; the totemic grisaille canvas remains a definitive work of anti-war art. At auction, a number of Picasso's paintings have sold for more than $100 million. The indefatigable artist has been the subject of exhibitions at the world's most prestigious institutions, from the Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou to the Stedelijk Museum and Tate Modern.

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Ah Xian | China China - Bust 81 (2004) | Artsy

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Perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso may be best known for pioneering Cubism and fracturing the two-dimensional picture plane in order to convey three-dimensional space. Inspired by African and Iberian art, he also contributed to the rise of Surrealism and Expressionism.

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Gustav Klimt - The Complete Works - klimtgallery.org

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The complete works of Gustav Klimt. Large resolution images, rating, ecard, download possibility.

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Abdul Abdullah - "Coming to Terms" exhibition

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Abdul Abdullah - "Coming to Terms" exhibition

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Abdul Abdullah - "Coming to Terms" exhibition - QAGOMA - Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art

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The 'Coming to terms' series is Abdul Abdullah's most recent reply to the present mistrust directed towards Muslims in Australia. Featured in APT8, and selected by QAGOMA's new Future Collective as their first contribution to the Gallery's Collection, these five photographs repurpose the palatable tropes of traditional wedding photography to convey complex intercultural narratives, with the bride and groom donning balaclavas - a visual synonym for criminality and its threats.

Born in Perth a seventh-generation Australian, Abdul Abdullah's earliest forebear reached these shores from England in 1815. His mother is a first generation migrant - a Bugis Malay woman from Malaysia - and his father, a prominent community figure, converted to Islam in 1971. As a child, Abdullah often stood distinct from the Australian 'norm', but at the formative age of 14, the events of 11 September 2001 recast his relationship with this country. He, his family and others like him became subject to a new dimension of hate-filled aggression, violence and intimidation. The artist comments:

Australia is one of the best places in the world to live. But growing up a Muslim in this country - you get used to seeing Muslims portrayed negatively in the media. In the popular imagination . . . you are the bad guy. You start to feel the divide of them and us'. ¹

Abdullah's familiarity with this pervasive cultural prejudice has informed his most significant recent works.

The wedding (Conspiracy to commit) - the largest of the works in the series - depicts a young couple in contemporary wedding costumes that bear the vivid colour and fine embellishment of Islamic culture. They sit within a fantasy-themed scene of flowing curtains and mounds of green and white flowers, a playful exuberance common in wedding photography studios in Malaysia, where the photo was taken. Yet their expressions of happiness are substituted with rigid postures. Here, Abdullah reflects the inflammatory projections of a select political discourse and the slurry of media depictions, demonstrating something of the corruption of character through language in this take on 'commitment'. Groom II (Stratagem) and Bride II (Subterfuge) function the same way, with these related works setting each figure alone against an infinite black background with dramatic studio lighting. Emerging from the shadows, their union is seen as a construction, an elaborate plot to distract from the alleged nature of their actions.

Another pair of figures set against perfect black - Bride I (Victoria) and Groom I (Zofloya) - are different again, touching on the historicalvilification of Muslims in Western cultures through a reference to thenineteenth-century gothic novel Zofloya; or, The Moor, penned by CharlotteDacre. The tale is brimming with acts of scheming, neglect, adulteryand abandonment, which cumulatively poison the characters and theirrelationships. As the story goes, Victoria confides her sense of guiltin Zofloya after her deceptions end in the misery and suicide of othercharacters. At this moment, Zofloya is inspired to reveal his true identityto Victoria: he is Satan, her corrupter and destroyer. This intricate tale isconceivably representative of the xenophobia of its era, and in this newcontext, suggests a sustained mistrust of and bigotry towards Muslims.

The absurd notion that a wedding, a time of joy, should be misappropriated by evil, responds succinctly to the current conflation of Islam and terrorism. Engaging with representations of difference by presenting imagery in which contradictory symbols coexist, Abdullah draws attention to inconsistent attitudes and instances of mainstream cultural bias. The series' title, 'Coming to terms', perhaps reflects the artist's attempt to come to terms with the marginalisation he has experienced living in post-9/11 Australia; it could also imply a proxy attempt to draft 'terms' of understanding and awareness that might resolve this recent period of discord.

Through these striking works, Abdul Abdullah facilitates more thoughtful reflection and dialogue, encouraging viewers to engage with the subject critically, and to challenge the ways in which Muslim people continue to be unfairly represented and perceived.

Endnote
¹ Rod Pattenden, 'Atheist critic blind to current religious symbols', in Eureka Street, vol.21, no.19, 4 October 2011, www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=28496#, accessed 16 October 2015.
Peter McKay is Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMA

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Abdul Abdullah 'Coming to terms' - QAGOMA Blog

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The 'Coming to terms' series is Abdul Abdullah's most recent reply to the present mistrust directed towards Muslims in Australia. Featured in APT8, and selected by QAGOMA's new Future Collective as their first contribution to the Gallery's Collection, these five photographs repurpose the palatable tropes of traditional wedding photography to convey complex intercultural narratives, with the bride and groom donning balaclavas - a visual synonym for criminality and its threats.

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Del Kathryn Barton:  The Highway is a Disco

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Del Kathryn Barton:  The Highway is a Disco

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Del Kathryn Barton:  The Highway is a Disco
Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria

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Free entry

NGV Australia, Federation Square

Level 3, 20th-21st C Australian Art

17 Nov 17 - 12 Mar 18

The NGV presents a major solo exhibition of one of Australia's most popular artists, Del Kathryn Barton. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco reveals the artist's imaginative and deeply sensuous world, where ornately decorated species - both human and animal - are rendered in seductive line and colour. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco is a survey of new and recent work by the two times Archibald Portrait Prize winner that reveals the breadth of Barton's practice. Featuring comprehensive displays of recent paintings and drawings for which she is arguably best known, the exhibition also includes collage, sculpture, textiles and film, all drawn together by the artist's exuberant and psychedelic aesthetic.

Born in Sydney in 1972, Barton graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1993. In 2015, Barton was awarded an Australian Film, Television and Radio School Creative Fellowship, following her directorial debut of The Nightingale and the Rose (2015). Her work is held in major public collections including: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart.

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Level 3, 20th-21st C Australian Art The NGV presents a major solo exhibition of one of Australia's most popular artists, Del Kathryn Barton. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco reveals the artist's imaginative and deeply sensuous world, where ornately decorated species - both human and animal - are rendered in seductive line and colour.

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Chiharu Shiota - Webpage

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Dramma per musica by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozort
Musical Director Leonardo García Alarcón; Stage Director / Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; Set Designer Chiharu Shiota
Grand Théâtre de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

>> Château Mouton Rothschild 2021 label reveal

The original artwork "Universe of Mouton" was created to illustrate the label for Château Mouton Rothschild 2021.
In the drawing, the fragile silhouette of a human figure faces gorgeous, generous nature. It is not the centre of attention but seems small compared to the environment. It is as though the figure is holding onto the balance between nature and humans. Its grip cannot be too tight or the thread will break, nor too loose or else the cloud will blow away and the connection will be broken.

>> New Solo Catalogue
Chiharu Shiota - Who am I Tomorrow?
Kunstraum Dornbirn has published the catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition „Who am I Tomorrow?" , including the preface by Thomas Häusle, an interview with the artist and an insightful text about the exhibition by Sina Wagner as well as extensive images of the installation.

Available at Kunstraum Dornbirn

Published by Publishing House for Modern Art, Vienna
Languages: German / English

>> New Solo Publication
CHIHARU SHIOTA - THE WALL BEHIND THE WINDOWS
The KÖNIG GALERIE has published the booklet „The Wall Behind the Windows" in conjunction with the solo exhibition of the same name. After two decades of working with windows as a material, Shiota is combining thread with windows for the very first time within this exhibition. While the booklet unfolds the concepts of Shiota's artwork and especially the origin and further development of the recurring material of old windows from construction work in Berlin in the late 90s, it also contains two folded posters and three exclusive postcards.

Available at the König Galerie

Published by König Galerie
Languages: English

>> NEW SOLO CATALOGUE

The Soul Trembles - Shiota Chiharu

The extensive catalogue The Soul Trembles has been published by Long Museum (West Bund), on the occasion of the solo exhibition of the same name at the museum in 2021. The catalogue features photographs of the exhibition along with a collection of images of works from the past 25 years. In addition, an insightful text by Kataoka Mami (Deputy and Chief Director and Chief Curator of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo) regarding the artists work and interviews with Shen Qilan, and Andrea Jahn are featured within the publication. While the extensive solo exhibition "The Soul Trembles" has bee traveling throughout Asia-Pacific since 2019, it is currently being presented at the Shenzhen Museum, in Shenzhen, China, in 2023.

The Catalogue is only available at the Long Museum, Shanghai Shop.

Published by Long Museum (West Bund)
Languages: Chinese / English

until 23.06.2024
Everyone, a Universe, solo show, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain

until 30.09.2024
Wo sind wir jetzt?, solo show, KULTUR IM FLUSS - European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl - Salzkammergut 2024, Bad Ischl, Austria

until 01.09. / 06.10.2024
Beyond Consciousness, solo show, Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme; Musée des Tapisseries and Chapelle de la Visitation, Aix-en-Provence, France

until 20.03.2025
Perhaps Sunny Days, group show, Podo Museum, Jeju island, South Korea

open end
Duo Exhibition: Song Dong x Shiota Chiharu, two person show, Yuelai Art Museum, Chongqing, China

The Ship of Memories, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan

Passage, WinX Tower, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, commissioned by WinX GmbH & Co Immobilien KG, Bad Homburg

In the beginning was..., PLANTA, Balaguer (Lleida), Spain

Memory of Water, Collection at Towada Art Center, Aomori, Japan [open end]

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Dramma per musica by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozort Musical Director Leonardo García Alarcón; Stage Director / Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; Set Designer Chiharu Shiota Grand Théâtre de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland The original artwork "Universe of Mouton" was created to illustrate the label for Château Mouton Rothschild 2021.In the drawing, the fragile silhouette of a human figure faces gorgeous, generous nature.

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Cherine Fahd - Website

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Mike Parr - Annacchwartzgallery

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Anna Schwartz Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Australia which has been owned and operated by founder Anna Schwartz since 1986

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sculpture artist name contemporary art sprite yui sculpture yui biography grotesque sculptures

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Ana Mendieta - Biography, Shows, Articles & More | Artsy

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Discover and purchase Ana Mendieta's artworks, available for sale. Browse our selection of paintings, prints, and sculptures by the artist, and find art you love.

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Summary of Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta's short life was a study in displacement and its effects on a person's soul - both positive and negative. From her early years when she was separated from her Cuban family to become an adopted refugee in America throughout her adolescent years when she felt like an outsider growing up in the Midwest, the young artist felt an ever-present disconnection from the concepts of mother, place, identity, belonging, and home. For 15 of her 37 years, she explored this ache through her work, which was primarily performance, photography, and film-based. She aimed to jostle the nonchalance of people in ways that would provoke them to connect with each other more authentically, to understand that they were essentially one within humanity, and that the earth was the supreme mother to all. She wanted to pierce the veils of perceived difference in many spheres including gender, race, and geography and asked us to perceive our own indifference to more unsettling things within our midst such as prejudice and violence. The ongoing dialogue between her own body and the landscape regarding presence, absence, and the inevitable cycles within nature and life would come to be seen as an eerie foretelling of her tragic end when she fell from the window of an apartment building. However, Mendieta's impact remains, much like the images she made, stained in the psyche, asking us to consider the spiritual, ethereal, and physical connections present in our own thirst for being.

Accomplishments

Mendieta was a key figure in the Body art movement that emerged from the Performance art movement. Her sustained use of the body's simplified and often nude form to depict both presence and its opposite, absence is an essential component to her work whether denoting the human or the ethereal.

Mendieta is recognized as an important contributor to Land art, a movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked, taking the possibilities of art outside gallery confines. She used the natural environment as a perpetual setting throughout her career, most memorably in her earth-works such as Siluetas, which were created in various natural locations with particular meaning to the artist and adorned with elements indigenous to the areas.

Merging with the earth not only became a mark-making process for Mendieta, but also a metaphorical return to mother and ritualistic homage to a universally generic, feminine earth goddess. In the end, the land was perhaps her greatest collaborator, helping her express the body's place within the world and its relationship to nature.

Mendieta is also oftentimes connected with the Feminist art movement for her work on the fluidity of gender and the manipulation of her own body parts to blur the line between male/female identification. But also, she often embraced her own feminine spirit and feminine mysticism in her work, unapologetically and with copious amounts of joy.

The consistent use of blood and other organic material such as feathers, rocks, flowers, fire, and the earth reflect Mendieta's passion for religious ritual. She was especially inspired by the strain of Cuban Catholicism known as Santeria. Much of her artwork materialized as a sort of rite, orchestrated to articulate the perpetual cycles of life, death, womanhood, rebirth, and renewal.

Because of her early displacement from family and home and the trauma that produced in her early life, Mendieta became a lifelong champion of the marginalized or minoritized whether by racism, sexism, or geography. Much of the passion that went into making her work was stoked by a desire to have everybody recognize those considered "other bodies" and to accept humanity as one throbbing whole rather than a world of disjointed individuals.

Violence remains a mysterious ingredient in Mendieta's legacy. Themes of domestic violence, of turning a blind eye to violence, and forced participation in witnessing violence can all be found as a parallel strain to her more earth, feminine, nature-inspired pieces. Although never really answered, this preoccupation beats below the surface and has raised many questions over the years within fans, critics, and her own personal friends about whether or not Mendieta had personal experience of abuse especially, most poignantly, in regards to the way her life tragically ended.

Important Art by Ana Mendieta

Biography of Ana Mendieta

Early Period

Ana Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba. When she was a mere 12, she was sent to America along with her sister Raquelin as part of the Peter Pan operation, a government-sponsored project for Cuban children to flee Fidel Castro's dictatorship. The project conveyed over 14,000 minors to the United States between 1960 and 1962, operating under the radar out of fear that it would be seen as an anti-Castro political undertaking. The refugee sisters spent some time in Florida before being sent to Iowa, where they lived in foster homes and were enrolled in reform school.

The girls knew little English. They had only each other and their budding interest in art to help them cope with the harshness of their new school environment and the pain of being ripped from their family of origin. In 1966, the girls were reunited with their mother and younger brother. It wasn't until 1979 that their father was able to join them in Iowa, after having spent nearly two decades in a political prison in Cuba.

After graduating from high school Mendieta went on to study French and art at the University of Iowa. Although her early work consisted mostly of paintings, a shift would occur when she enrolled in Hans Breder's innovative and progressive Intermedia Art course. She wrote: "The turning point in art was in 1972, when I realized that my paintings were not real enough for what I want the image to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic." Her professor turned her on to the newly burgeoning performance art scene and groups such as the Viennese Actionists. She began to boldly experiment with using her own body and blood as a medium, and began incorporating aspects of live ritual from religions like Santeria into her work. This allowed her to more realistically portray themes of particular interest to her such as gender fluidity, cultural marginalization, and domestic violence. She experimented with body alteration in works where she changed the appearance of or manipulated the perception of her identity as female.

During this time Mendieta began a decade-long affair with her teacher who was 13 years her senior. Breder was a huge influence on the young artist in many ways. He drew her attention to the exciting potential in cross-disciplinary art. He utilized her as a muse, most notably in the piece La Ventosa (1971) where Mendieta lay nude on a beach holding a mirror while being overrun by waves. He documented many of her early performance pieces, and introduced her to contemporary artists such as Hans Haacke and Vito Acconci who would inspire her own work.

In the summer of 1971, Mendieta left Iowa to travel to Mexico for research. She was concerned with the painful remnants of her cultural displacement from Cuba, and would later call the trip a "going back to the source." This would also mark the beginning of Mendieta's commitment to, in her words, carrying out "a dialogue between the landscape and the female body" - a relationship between artist and earth that would come to assuage the pain of her early disconnection from mother and home like a universal womb.

Mature Period

In 1973, the on-campus rape and murder of University of Iowa student Sarah Ann Ottens led to some of Mendieta's most potent work. Shortly after the violent incident occurred, Mendieta created a piece in which her own body was used to provoke reflections within the college community about what had occurred in their midst. She smeared her naked body with cow's blood, tied herself bent over and faced down to a table in her apartment, and then invited unsuspecting students and faculty members to her apartment to "happen upon" the scene. A year later Mendieta completed Body Tracks, another piece reminiscent of a crime scene documented by a one-minute Super-8 recording. In it, we see Mendieta with her back to the camera with her arms outstretched into the shape of a V over her head in front of a blank white wall. Slowly, she proceeds to drag her blood covered hands down the wall to the floor before walking away, leaving two gory lines framing a shape from where the body has disappeared. Her work was becoming heavily reliant on the use of her own performing body as representative of other bodies marginalized by race, violence, and gender. In the summer of the following year, after having returned to Mexico, Mendieta created the first of her seminal series Siluetas - a body of work that would come to comprise over 200 pieces. Each piece consisted of Mendieta either physically laying on the ground and merging with the surrounding elements such as leaves and twigs, or using her body to make an imprint in the ground and then photographing the ensuing outline absent of her form. Mendieta would often accentuate these outlines dramatically with red pigment, stones, or other materials indigenous to the geography where they were made; sometimes she would light them in flames. The series was therapeutic for Mendieta in that it allowed her to reconnect with nature and feel rooted in place to the land.

In 1980 Mendieta returned to Cuba for the first time since she emigrated as a child, and over the next few years was able to return to the island on several occasions working as a tour guide for the Cuban Cultural Circle. During this time, Mendieta's longing for her homeland manifested not only in her artwork, but also crept into her writings:
Pain of Cuba
body I am
my orphanhood I live.

In Cuba when you die
the earth that covers us
speaks

But here,
Covered by the earth whose prisoner I am
I feel death palpitating underneath the earth.

The earth is invigorating
(it gives life) Life becomes
immortal when
it ends.

- Ana Mendieta, 1981

Shortly after receiving her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, Mendieta moved to New York, where she met and befriended many female artists at the forefront of the feminist movement such as Mary Beth Edelson, Nancy Spero, and Carolee Schneemann. With Edelson's support Mendieta joined Artists In Residence Inc., the first gallery in the United States established solely for women. Mendieta also met her future husband, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, at the gallery. After two years of active involvement in the A.I.R, Mendieta remarked, "American Feminism as it stands is basically a white middle-class movement." Her disenfranchisement with the movement also stemmed from its seeming limitations because although much of Mendieta's work was of a feminist vein, it tended to be of a more inclusive and life affirming variety than she was finding within the collective. Some of her most notable early pieces from college like Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant) (1972) had invited male participation into the feminist perspective as an ally. In 1982, when a dispute arose at A.I.R. over a collaborative piece Mendieta had made with Andre and submitted to the gallery, she resigned altogether from the organization.

A year later, Mendieta moved to Rome as part of the prestigious American Academy residency. While there, Mendieta began to shift away from performance art and started to create sculptures and drawings using natural elements - work for which she was awarded the Rome Prize in 1983. During this period Mendieta and Andre's relationship was on the decline, but in January 1985 they surprised their friends and family with news of a private wedding ceremony in Rome.

Death

A few months later, back in New York, Mendieta died suddenly and tragically by falling 33 floors from the window of the apartment she shared with Andre onto the roof of a deli. The indent her body created upon impact was an awful echo of the artist's fiercely original Siluetas works. In a verdict that divided the art world Andre was acquitted of committing second-degree murder even though neighbors of the couple had heard a woman's screams of "no" and Andre was seen with scratches on his face. Andre was quoted as saying the two had been arguing over the fact that he was becoming more successful than Mendieta, a fact that depressed her enough to commit suicide. Many leapt to defend the sculptor's career from enraged feminist circles, while Mendieta's friends, several of whom had spent time with her shortly before her death, maintained that she was incapable of killing herself. Mendieta's artwork was used in court proceedings to back up the claim that her death had been a suicide, an action Mendieta's loved ones denounced, claiming her "work was about life and power and energy and not about death."

The Legacy of Ana Mendieta

For a long time, Mendieta's highly publicized death eclipsed any attention being paid to her intensely important body of work. A recent surge of interest in her jolting performances, however, has turned a focus onto her work as being an important member of the displaced and abused women canon. Mendieta has inspired a book about her death written by Robert Katz, a feminist protest outside of the Dia Art Foundation's retrospective of Carl Andre replete with chicken blood and guts, and many of her own postmortem retrospectives. She has also influenced numerous modern artists, such as Ana Teresa Fernández, Kate Gilmore, Simone Leigh, Gina Osterloh, Antonia Wright, Nancy Spero and Tania Bruguera.

Mendieta's memory inspired several posthumous homages as well. Bruguera, a Cuban artist born in 1968, went as far as appropriating and restaging many objects and performances of Mendieta's, but re-contextualized in a Cuban setting. Her site-specific piece titled Homenaje a Ana Mendieta (1985-1996) symbolically relocated Mendieta into the history of Cuban culture, metaphorically bringing her back home. Nancy Spero, a longtime friend of Mendieta's, also recreated some of the artist's most iconic works, including Body Tracks for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum Biennial and her own performance Homage to Ana Mendieta (1991). Carolee Schneemann's Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta (1986), was a multi-media piece based on a dream Schneemann had about Mendieta soon after her death in which Mendieta's hands were falling in empty space and forming hearts drenched in blood. In the performance, Schneemann etched heart-shapes into snow with her bare hands using paint, blood, ashes, and syrup.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Ana Mendieta

Similar Art

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Ana Mendieta focused on the dialogue between her own body and the landscape regarding presence, absence, and the inevitable cycles within nature and life.

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Internationally renowned sculptor Rod Dudley is Australian, but the heart of his art is in Besozzo on Lake Maggiore. Lifelong friend Rosalind Milani Gallieni pays him a visit...
Photos by Rosalind Milani Gallieni unless otherwise stated
In fondo! In fondo, giù a sinistra..." I take the turning as instructed by the local Besozzo messo, who was conveniently directing the traffic at a junction near a derelict old warehouse, once a renowned cotton factory. I drive on in my small, lentil-orange Fiat 500 and head down a bumpy track full of deep pot-holes, and turn left, hanging onto my steering wheel as I bump along. I drive into a dead-end inside the factory, through an old rusty entrance, and see the word DUDLEY scribed onto the wall in rusty red paint. A driveway invites my 500 to drive up a high ramp, and I do the hill climb and pull up outside the top-floor entrance to Rod Dudley's studio.

He stands on the balcony in dapper red shorts and invites me into his workshop, which is immense! I walk about in amazement and admire his works hanging on the walls. Artefacts are strewn on the floor, waiting to be cast or soldered, and there are many pairs of shoes here and there, which he wears according to where he has to go in the vast 360 square metre warehouse with sixmetre- high ceilings. It's not really a studio as we would imagine it: it's a space any artist would love to work in, with natural daylight flooding in from the top of the building, wall space and workbenches everywhere. There is also a caravan in the far corner where Rod works if the Besozzo winter is too harsh - unless, of course, he runs off to Melbourne, his hometown in Australia. He tells me this is a better option in winter in any case!

CARVED ARTWORK

The day I drop by, Rod is enthused by a new process he has finally managed to work with, recreating one of his original figurative group sculptures with computerised wood carving, or a copying machine, which means he can be considerably more refined in creating his signature models. Usually each single character is painstakingly hand-carved out of wood, using the natural wood grain as a design to create depth and shape in the carved artwork.

Rod, who was born in Melbourne in 1935, had a happy childhood. His father was an engineer with the State electrical company and his mother was a dance teacher. Rod vividly remembers the times when, as a five-yearold, he waited for his mother to finish her classes, and how he would watch her students standing tall at the barre, with their long legs and their perfect posture. He tells me that from those days he still feels small (he isn't actually all that tall) and that looking up at those dancers is a memory that has stayed with him in the way he implements his work today.

Rod is still very fond of figurative art and wants to maintain a focus in that area. The first exposure he had to real visual art was his initial encounter with the Cairns family of art collectors. This experience created a hunger for visual art and, later on, Rod started training to become an art teacher. After his training he was hired at Bairnsdale and Camberwell high schools, and at Wesley College, which kept him in Melbourne. Then, unexpectedly, one day a note reached him from Italy offering him an Italian Government Travelling Scholarship. While he wasn't able to accept this intriguing offer straight away, he knew that a change of life would come with this opportunity.

It's a space any artist would love to work in.

SMALL CHAPTERS

He walks around the studio telling me small chapters of his life, prompted by a sculpture or a piece of memorabilia, and then he stops and turns to me, and with an enthusiastic smile starts off on another tangent: "Italia!" He beams. "I left Australia in 1965 and set off on the SS Galileo Galilei, which was running a service between Australia and Naples. From Trieste, I then made my way on the map to Milan's Brera Academy, L'Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Every time I said these words they were like music to my ears. The price of the trip was a king's ransom for me then, and the first few months were spent in a cold and wintery Milan with nothing but bread and milk to keep me going."

But a new dawn broke with spring and Rod began working for Giancarlo Sangregorio. Now the name is tied to his foundation, but then he was a well-known sculptor based in Sesto Calende on Lago Maggiore. The lifestyle of the lago, and Sesto Calende in particular, became a focal point for many exceptional artists, such as Lucio Fontana and Enrico Baj. Rod got to grips with his work and the new materials of Italy. His first stone and wood sculptures showed the influence of Henry Moore and Marino Marini, his maestro at the Brera Academy.

Rod is still very fond of figurative art and wants to maintain a focus in that area

His first stone and wood sculptures showed the influence of Henry Moore and Marino Marini

LASTING FLAME

Rod met Christina Connor when she was returning home after a trip - a tour of Europe with her sister. It took only a few days' company to ignite a lasting flame, and for the next year and a half the two wrote to each other consistently to maintain their friendship, as work now called Rod back to Milan. Wedding bells chimed in due course in London, where they met up again, and it was here that Rod began to paint his "heroes, and subjects from the turn of the century" using the inspiration of English pop artists Peter Blake and David Hockney (then exhibiting at the Tate), who were working around him at this time in London. In these paintings, he would find characteristic styles of hyperrealism and expressionism, which really grounded his love for art.

Rod has been featured in many prestigious exhibitions and events, and has been awarded many prizes for his works. Some of his bestknown shows include the prize exhibition in the San Fedele Gallery in 1971, an exhibition awarded by the Australian Visual Arts board in the newly renovated Triennale in 1973, and a one-man exhibition in Manfred Schönbrunn's Gallery's stand (Portrait of a Family) at the Cologne Art Fair in 1975. He features in many of Como architect Ico Parisi's shows of the mid-1970s, including the Venice Biennale, and took part in the Adelaide Festival in 1981. The most impactful pieces that were included in these shows are his group sculptures.

I ask Rod why he chose the female subject in so many of his works.

"The female figure, she presents herself as a media icon, which I know has very little to do with what she is like in flesh and blood. As an angry young socialist, I was haunted by another reality: the blatant show of wealth and power as seen in glossy magazines at the time. I had escaped from Australia's love of Tachisme and the New York School and sought the opposite: a certain realism. I loved David's hand by Michelangelo, the audacity of Warhol's soup can, or the liquid cool of a Hockney pool."

The setting, the people, the spaces and the seasons of this region are a constant inspiration to Rod.

THOUGHTS OF HOME

Rod often struggles with the thought of returning home to Australia permanently, and of whether he made the right decision moving to Italy, but he is then reminded of all that it has done for him and how he is intrigued by the insecurity of life in Italy.

Rod and Christina now live near Milan, close to the beauty of Lago Maggiore, which is a few minutes away from the studio in Besozzo. At lunchtime or after work, he often meets up with Christina in his salotto, which is a heavenly, quiet sandy beach with 180-degree views of splendour onto the lake and of the Alps beyond. A small baretto for a coffee and a chat with the locals is all it needs, while the skies are filled with swallows and swifts, white swans a-dabbling and the gulls, all reminding him of home in Queenscliffe, the oceanside borough of Melbourne.

He says he leads his life as a contented hermit.

The setting, the people, the spaces and the seasons of this region are a constant inspiration to Rod. His workshop is never really quiet, as he works with the studio full of the triumphant sounds of Beethoven, Chopin and Stan Getz accompanying his creative flair. He says he leads his life as a "contented hermit." Next he discusses hosting a summer pop-up cocktail party in amongst his pop stars and totems. He stops at nothing and the abundance of enthusiasm and energy is a source of inspiration in his works, which are collected by the likes of the Missoni family, Krizia and Elton John.

The very same characteristics I remember daunting me slightly as a young girl, when my parents would have Christina and Rod over, but now I see the consistency of their drive and admire the dedication to the choices they have made. They still live in the most beautiful town of Besozzo, which is steeped in history and surrounded by period villas with their secular gardens.

FIND OUT MORE

NEAREST AIRPORT
Milan Malpensa

WHERE TO STAY TO SENSE THE PLACE
Casetta delle Palme, Besozzo www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/16773798

WHAT TO DO DURING YOUR STAY
Lunch on Isola dei Pescatori, Lago Maggiore, and a dinner in Rod's studio

VISIT ROD'S WEBSITE
www.roddudley.com

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Rod Dudley: insights into the famous sculptor's studio and life - Italy Travel and Life

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Photos by Rosalind Milani Gallieni unless otherwise stated In fondo! In fondo, giù a sinistra..." I take the turning as instructed by the local Besozzo messo, who was conveniently directing the traffic at a junction near a derelict old warehouse, once a renowned cotton factory.

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Louise Bourgeois - Known for her large scale sculptures and installations. Work focused on Domesticity and the family (relationships), sexuality and the body as well as death/subconscious - Feminist.

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Introduction

With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences.

Using drawings, prints, sculpture and fabric works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, this resource takes an in-depth look at her work through the themes and ideas of this extraordinary artist.

Meet Louise Bourgeois

Before exploring the themes behind her work, meet the artist. In this video, Louise Bourgeois lets us into her home and shares insights into her life and work.

Childhood Trauma

Whatever materials and processes Louise Bourgeois used to create her powerful artworks, the main force behind her art was to work through her troubled childhood memories. These memories were not specific, but a layering of emotional responses to the complicated relationship she had with her parents and their relationship with each other.

Abandonment

Bourgeois's mother, Joséphine, suffered from ill health and Louise cared for her for long periods of time. Josephine died when Louise was just 22. This, and her father's unfaithfulness (he had a series of mistresses), led to a fear of abandonment, a key theme in Bourgeois's work. The backdrop of the First World War, which began when she was three years old, made her traumatic memories of childhood even more intense.

Opposing forces

Bourgeois's mother and father had very different characters. Her mother had a logical and intellectual approach to life, in contrast to the emotive and passionate character of her father. These opposing forces became a key theme of much of her later work. Her double-headed sculptures suggest the sense of two very separate forces relentlessly attached together. Janus Fleuri 1968 consists of two forms joined back to back but apparently pulling away from each other.

The spider

In 1947 Louise Bourgeois drew two small ink and charcoal drawings of a spider. Fifty years later in the late 1990s, she created a series of steel and bronze spider sculptures.

In a 2008 film made about her life, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, Bourgeois described these spider sculptures as her 'most successful subject'. Bourgeois uses the spider, both predator (a sinister threat) and protector (an industrious repairer), to symbolise the mother figure. The spinning and weaving of the spider's web links to Bourgeois's own mother, who worked in the family's tapestry restoration business, and who encouraged Louise to participate.

What Do You Think? Materials and Meanings

Explore the different materials Louise Bourgeois used.

Look at Louise Bourgeois's work in Art & Artists.

Think about what the different materials she uses adds to how the artworks look and the tactile effect they give the work.

Think about what emotions the materials might reflect and how this affects your interpretation of the work.

In 1938, just before the breakout of the Second World War, Louise Bourgeois left Paris for New York with her new husband Robert Goldwater. This move away from everything that was familiar affected her greatly. Early paintings in New York such as Runaway Girl c.1938 depict Bourgeois leaving behind her childhood home. Fallen Woman (Femme Maison) 1946-7 depicts a female figure with her head and torso covered in a house. Bourgeois wrote:

She does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide. That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she's hiding.

Running away

Louise Bourgeois's longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, compares Bourgeois from this period with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz 1939:

Like the young runaway Dorothy Gale from Kansas, Bourgeois has been on a journey to alleviate a core experience of abandonment.

Bourgeois revisited the theme of running away from home in the drawing Home for Runaway Girls 1994. In this work the words 'HOME FOR RUNAWAY GIRLS: EMPTY HOUSES. LES FILLE MERE D'ANTHONY.' are painted in gouache on sandpaper. (Mere D'Anthony was a real girls' home in Paris). Bourgeois reminds us of her ongoing feelings of displacement and her belief in art as form of therapy and escape. The artwork is oval shaped and looks a little like a door plaque. But the rough textured surface looks at odds with the comforts usually associated with 'home'.

The fallen woman

Bourgeois returned to the theme of the fallen woman in her sculpture Fallen Woman 1981, a small bronze sculpture, with a woman's head attached to a phallic-shaped handle. It looks like a club or truncheon. The figure looks sad and pathetic, and unable to make use of the power suggested by her weapon-like form.

Bourgeois said that her early work could be related to 'a fear of falling' and 'later a fear of failing'.

Women vs. home

Themes of domestic life and the home reoccur throughout Louise Bourgeois's work. Early works on canvas and paper from the mid-1940s show a female figure trapped inside a small-scale house. While her room-like Cell structures often contain objects associated with the home. Bourgeois explores the role of female identity throughout her work, often challenging the conventional role of women in the twentieth century.

Fear and Anxieties

Louise Bourgeois began to make her self-enclosed structures known as Cells in 1989 and they became an important part of her output for many years. In these works she explores themes of being trapped, anguish and fear. The word 'cell' can refer to both an enclosed room, as in a prison; as well as the most basic elements of plant or animal life, as in the cells of the body. This is how Bourgeois decsribed how seh saw the Cells:

Each cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain... each cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at

Cell XIV (Portrait) 2000 houses a metal table on which a red fabric sculpture sits on a small pedestal. The fabric sculpture is of three screaming heads which are joined together. The three fused heads suggest Cerberus, the three-headed dog in Greek mythology. In depictions of Cerberus each head is often used to represent birth, youth, and old age. The cycle of life is a theme that Bourgeois often explored in her work.

Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) 1989-93, one of Bourgeois's first cells, has a large rough marble stone supported by steel girders at its centre. The stone has carved and polished black eyes that look up towards a large circular mirror. Other mirrors inside the cell look like dressing-table mirrors or oversized vanity mirrors. They suggest the idea of home. In the wire mesh ceiling the large round mirror is attached to a hinged circular panel. This can rotate to reflect different views of the interior. Walking around the sculpture is unnerving as the eyes and mirrors both confront and reflect you. Bourgeois wrote:

It is the quality of your eyes and the strength of your eyes that are expressed here. Nobody is going to keep me from seeing what is instead of what I would like

Through Cells (Eyes and Mirrors) Bourgeois invites us to think about reality and what reality means.

Found objects and meaning

Bourgeois's use of found objects in her Cells reflects the influence of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who she once referred to as a father figure. Duchamp first used found objects in the early twentieth century. He presented these objects as artworks, calling them his ' readymades '. But whereas Duchamp's selection of objects was about the idea of the object, Bourgeois's selection is rooted in memory and biography. The objects mean something to her.

Our own body could be considered, from a topological point-of-view, a landscape with mounds and valleys and caves and holes. So it seems rather evident to me that our body is a figuration that appears in Mother Earth.
Louise Bourgeois

From her earliest paintings to her later Cells and fabric works, Louise Bourgeois explores the human body. In the 1960s, the body forms and body parts in her sculptures became more organic, very different from earlier sculptures in both shape and the materials she used. She began to use materials such as latex, plaster, marble and bronze. She also used and repeated rounded forms suggestive of male and female genitals and breasts.

Tits 1967 is a small sculpture cast in bronze. The sculpture, as the title indicates, represents two breasts fused together to create a single bulbous form. This double, mirrored form is something that Bourgeois uses a lot in her work, and shows the influence of surrealism. Tits relates to Janus Fleuri 1968 where two stunted phalluses are joined back to back to create a sexualised form that suggests both male and female organs. Both Tits and Janus Fleuri point in opposite directions - the past and the future - suggesting the importance of the past to Bourgeois.

In sculptures such as these, Bourgeois used fragmented body parts to investigate complex emotional states. They appear regularly in Bourgeois's work and are often referred to as 'part-objects'. The term 'part-object' was first used by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her writings on the development of young children. In Klein's view, the first 'part-object' we encounter in life is our mother's breast. This idea of the 'part-object' has since often been used to describe sculptures by modern and contemporary artists that take the form of body parts in exploring sexuality, desire or questions of gender.

Have a go: Body hybrids

Collaborate with a friend or family member (or group) and play this drawing game.

Draw a head and neck on a piece of paper. Fold the paper so you hide your drawn head but leave a few marks that show where your drawn neck ends. Pass the paper to your collaborator to draw the body. They should then fold the paper again and pass it back to you (or on to the next person if you are in a group) to draw the legs. Pass the paper on again to draw the feet.

Unfold the drawing to find a hybrid body.

Now change the activity by adding some objects. Draw in a shoe or table or plant, instead of sections of the body, to see what happens.

This process of making drawings was invented by surrealist artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. They called this process exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis in French). Other artists have since used the process to make unsettling drawings, including contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. Explore the Chapmans's exquisite corpse drawings in Art & Artists.

The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a schild, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them ... Later I would dream of my father's mistress. I would do it in my dreams by ringing her neck. The spiral - I love the spiral - represents control and freedom.
Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois first used the spiral form in the 1950s in two wooden sculptures and it often appears again in later works. For Bourgeois the form of the spiral comes from the twisting of tapestries in the River Bièvre when she worked as a child and young woman in the family business.

The spiral represents 'an attempt at controlling the chaos'. In the sculpture Nature Study 1986 a tightly coiled spiral morphs into a hand holding a human figure.

The spiral also suggests violence - the wringing of necks. In the hanging bronze sculpture Spiral Woman 1984 the figure is bound by a thick coil, with only her limbs visible. Trapped by the spiral she hangs in mid-air, suspended and spinning in a constant state of her own fragility.

Although the spiral can control chaos, there is always the underlying threat that the spiral will unravel.

In A l'infini 2008-9 spirals are present again. Here, the spiralling lines flow freely around representations of falling female bodies, disembodied limbs, a couple and childbirth. Interlocking etched ribbon-like lines in the multi-part work suggest a double helix - the spiral arrangement of the two strands of DNA that froms the basis for life itself. A l'infini refers to the endlessness of life. It abstractly puts across the idea of life as a journey, moving from birth, to youth, to relationship with a partner, and ultimately, to death. Birth, love, sexuality and death are an endless loop in the cycle of life.

The spiral can also be seen in a series of twelve woodcuts named Spirals from 2005. Some of the spirals are loose and sketchy while others are more tightly wound and even.

Friendship

When you are at the bottom of the well, you look around and say, who is going to get me out? In this case it is Jerry who comes and he presents a rope, and I hook myself on the rope and he pulls me out.
Louise Bourgeois, interveiw with Lawrence Rinder 9 May 1995, in Frances Morris (ed.) Louise Bougeois, 2007, p.150.

Jerry Gorovoy met Louise Bourgeois in the late 1970s and was her assistant and best friend for over thirty years. Bourgeois made lots of drawings and sculptures of Jerry Gorovoy's hands along with her own hands. She referred to these as intimate 'portraits'. The Welcoming Hands 1996, located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, is a bronze sculpture of her hands clutching those of Jerry's.

Bourgeois also depicted a representation of her friendship with Gorovoy in the multipart work 10 am Is When You Come To Me 2006. It consists of twenty hand-painted sheets that depict her hands and those of Gorovoy. The hands are mostly painted over printed musical score paper in red gouache paint. You can tell Bourgeois's hands by the wedding ring she wore. The title relates to the time Gorovoy would arrive at Bourgeois's studio or home to begin their daily routine working together.

Hands reoccur in many of Bourgeois's works, often as a symbol of being dependent on someone who supports you. Give or Take 2002 can be read as a commentary on the sometimes conflicted reliance of friendship. This sculpture presents a two-handed limb - one open, the other clasped - an object that is simultaneously gentle and cold.

Earlier in her career Bourgeois had also used friendship as inspiration. Personages 1946-55, are totem-like wooden sculptures that she grouped together to create installations. They depict individuals and Bourgeois's relationship with them, reflecting her homesickness and the people she left behind in Paris. Knife Couple 1949 is an example of these. Bourgeois often used her roof as a studio and the tall forms of the Personages suggest the skyscrapers and rooftops that surrounded her.

Writing and Recording

I love language... you can stand anything if you write it down... words put in connection can open up new relations... a new view of things.
Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois kept journals from a young age. Her childhood experiences were hoarded in her diaries and she continued to write and record her thoughts, activities and experiences throughout her life. As well as using the writing in her journals as a memory bank of ideas for her work, she also included text from her journals in her artworks.

In 1947 Louise Bourgeois produced a group of prints called He Disappeared into Complete Silence that combined poetic text with engravings. Bourgeois later combined words, phrases and drawing in her artworks, sometimes embroidering these onto cloth. The text she uses is aimed at the viewer and includes didactic (or preachy), ironic and sometimes moralising statements. These are either presented playfully, or, as critic Robert Storr says, 'with jarring psychological' bluntness.

In Repairs in the Sky 1999, one of a series of lead wall reliefs, the title of the work is engraved into the surface in capital letters. Around the text are five cavities, which resemble bullet holes that pierce into the lead. These have been 'repaired' with fabric and thread. Here, Bourgeois again combines opposing elements: the soft lead, thread and fabric are contrasted against steel, which has been hammered and distorted with the cavities and the text engraving.

In the woven fabric piece 2009, Bourgeois lists her fears as silence, the darkness, falling down, insomnia and emptiness. These are themes and anxieties that reoccur throughout her work. Bourgeois was an obsessive list-maker with a fascination for dictionaries and encyclopedias, perhaps because of their sense of completeness and certainty.

Bourgeois also kept three types of diaries. She described these as:

The written, the spoken (into a tape recorder), and my drawing diary, which is the most important. Having these diaries means that I keep my house in order.

Like drawing, writing was a compulsion for Bourgeois; her writings are a collection deeply personal thoughts and memories like her sculptures and drawings.

What do you think? Text and language

Think about these quotes by Louise Bourgeois and how they relate to her artworks.

Look at her use of language in artworks such as Home for Runaway Girls and . Identify when you feel she is being didactic (teaching or instructing us about something), ironic (sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek), or moralising.

Have a go: Words, motifs and narratives

Do you keep a diary or journal? Or do you write 'to do' lists or write things down that you want to remember?

Pick out phrases or words that are important from your writing.

How would you use these in an artwork to add meaning?

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Introduction With a career spanning eight decades from the 1930s until 2010, Louise Bourgeois is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that are inspired by her own memories and experiences.

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Summary of Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois' life was a prolific demonstration of utilizing the creation of art as a tool for processing one's inner emotionality and psychological landscape. Working across a wide variety of mediums that included painting, drawing, and sculpture, her work dealt largely in dissecting, exploring, and reacting to the traumatic events from her own childhood that included her father's infidelity. Bourgeois' often brooding and sexually explicit subject matter and her presentation of the female viewpoint in regards to suppression, feminism, and sensuality alongside a distinct focus on three-dimensional form were rare for women artists at the time. Her single-minded devotion to expression, both as an artist and as a mentor to young artists, lent Bourgeois an international importance that remains vast, manifested most strongly through her influence on the development of conceptual and Installation Art.

Accomplishments

Bourgeois wholly autobiographical artwork is renowned for its highly personal thematic content involving the unconscious, sexual desire, jealousy, betrayal, fear, anxiety, loneliness, and the body. These themes draw on events in her childhood for which she considered making art a therapeutic or cathartic process.

Bourgeois transformed her experiences into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and psychological pain.

The artist likened her work, and its myriad installation settings, as "cells" - or containers of memory, which both froze a recollection or feeling in time while also evoking the emotions that said memories produced.

Through the use of abstract form and a wide variety of media, Bourgeois dealt with notions of universal balance, playfully juxtaposing materials conventionally considered male or female. She would, for example, use rough or hard materials most strongly associated with masculinity to sculpt soft biomorphic forms suggestive of femininity.

Biography of Louise Bourgeois

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Louise Bourgeois' life was a prolific demonstration of utilizing the creation of art as a tool for processing one's inner emotionality and psychological landscape. Working across a wide variety of mediums that included painting, drawing, and sculpture, her work dealt largely in dissecting, exploring, and reacting to the traumatic events from her own childhood that included her father's infidelity.

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Eva Hesse worked with simple materials to suggest a wide range of organic associations, psychological moods, and sexual themes.

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Film

The documentary , by Marcie Begleiter (2016), investigates the life and artistic practice of one of the most influential and experimental artists of the last half-century. Emerging from the male-dominated artistic milieu of 1960s minimalism, Hesse created work that pushed new boundaries as she deliberately chose complicated and often impermanent materials for her sculptures.

Following the screening, Annette Lemieux, artist and senior lecturer on visual and environmental studies at Harvard University, will be joined by Mary Schneider Enriquez, curator of Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, to discuss Hesse's legacy of making art that challenges materiality and inspiring the next generation of sculptors.

The screening and discussion will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Free admission

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

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Eva Hesse: Film Screening and Discussion | Harvard Art Museums

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Film The documentary , by Marcie Begleiter (2016), investigates the life and artistic practice of one of the most influential and experimental artists of the last half-century. Emerging from the male-dominated artistic milieu of 1960s minimalism, Hesse created work that pushed new boundaries as she deliberately chose complicated and often impermanent materials for her sculptures.

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Antony Gormely - Deals with the human form as his subject. Works with matter, objects and bodies. Works from moulds. He treats the body not as an object but a place in real time. Explores the common condition to all human beings. He believes he is making space - within us and without us. Focuses on the darkness of the body. Explores dark matter within this work. Breaks the form down into particles.

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Open Book, 1993

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At the core of Hossein Valamanesh’s art lies the relationship between humans and the natural world and a sense of place informed by cultural history and personal memory. Valamanesh was born in Iran in 1949 and trained as an artist ...

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Fiona Hall

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Located on the spectacular Sydney Harbour, the MCA is open to visitors every day.

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SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Wrong Way Time, Australia Pavilion curated by Linda Michael, 56 th Venice Biennale

Fiona Hall, Force Field, Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand

Fiona Hall, Force Field, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand

Fiona Hall, Force Field, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Fiona Hall, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Fiona Hall, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

So so (1995) installation, Coffs Harbour City Gallery

Fieldwork, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

A Transit through Paradise, Gallery 706, Colombo, Sri Lanka

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

State of Play, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

SAPPERS & SHRAPNEL: CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE ART OF THE TRENCHES, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Today Tomorrow Yesterday, Museum of Contemporary, Sydney

Best in Show, Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales

The Nest, an exhibition of art in nature, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York

Creative Accounting, UQ Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane

Creative Accounting, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Windsor, NSW.

Creative Accounting, Manningham Art Gallery, Doncaster, VIC.

Creative Accounting, Albury Library Museum, Albury, NSW

TarraWarra Biennale: Whisper in my Mask curated by Djon Mundine and Natalie King, TarraWarra Museum of Art, TarraWarra.

Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014: Whorled Explorations, Kochi, Kerala, India (curated by Jitish Kallat)

Dark Heart, 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (curated by Nick Mitzevich)

Australia, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

New 2013: Selected Recent Acquisitions, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane

Mythopoetic: Women artists from Australia and India, Griffith University, Queensland

Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev)

ANIMAL/HUMAN, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane

Contemporary Australia: Women, Queensland Art Gallery /Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Kermadec: Nine Artists Explore the South Pacific (touring): Tauranga Art Gallery, New Zealand, New Zealand Maritime Museum, Auckland

Djalkiri- We are Standing on Their Names - Blue Mud Bay (touring); Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre , Tennant Creek, Botanic Gardens, Adelaide, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, Geelong Art Gallery , Geelong, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, Burnie Regional Gallery, Burnie, UTS Gallery, Sydney.

17 Biennale of Sydney, Beauty of Distance, songs of survival in a precarious age. Directed by David Elliot

True Story, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

DeOverkant/Downunder, Den Haag Sculpture 2007, Netherlands

Artist Makes Video, Art Rage Survey 1994-1998, Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane

Forty Eight Hours of Visual Arts, (FEHVA), Byron Bay, NSW

New Nature, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand

Auckland Triennial, Auckland, New Zealand

Strange Cargo: Contemporary art as a state of encounter, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Orange Regional Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and Tweed River Regional Gallery

Strangely Familiar, with Fiona MacDonald, curator Ricky Subritzky, University of Technology Sydney Gallery

Uncanny (the unnaturally strange), curator Rhana Devenport, Artspace, Auckland

After Van Gogh: Australian artists in homage to Vincent, curator Rodney James, Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery

Unstrung: the bead in contemporary art, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Curated by Louise Tegart, Victoria

MCA Collection: New Acquisitions in Context, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Lapped, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown. Sepetmber- October, 2005.

After Van Gogh: Australian Artists in Homage to Vincent, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, Victoria, Australia

Material Girls and Boys, curated by Barbara Flynn, Deloitte, March-June 2005

Living Together is Easy, curated by Eriko Osaka and Jason Smith, Contemporary Art Centre, Art Tower Mito, Mito Arts Foundation, Mito-shi, Japan; The National Gallery of Victoria, The Ian Potter Centre, Melbourne, Victoria

More Easily Imagined: Crossings of the Blue Mountains, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968 - 2002, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne

Lure of the Southern Seas: the Voyages of Dumont D'Urville 1826 - 1840, Museum of Sydney, Sydney

2 Sight Australian Photography in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2002

Sculpture by the Sea, exh. cat., Bondi 2002

The Dirty Dozen, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

The First Twenty Years, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Converge: where art + science meet, 2002 Adelaide Biennial, Art Gallery of South Australia

Unpacking Europe, Haus de Kulturen de Welt,Berlin, Germany

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Desire, RMIT Gallery, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne

The Art of Transformation, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales ( Gene Pool, Government House, Sydney)

Terra Mirabilis/Wonderful Land, Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff, Wales

Chemistry: Art in South Australia 1990-2000, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Mirror with a Memory: A History of the Photographic Portrait in Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

All Stars 2000, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

he Sydney Sculpture Walk, Mrs Macquarie's Chair, Sydney

Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901-2001, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

New Republics: Contemporary Art from Australia, Canada and South Africa, Canada House Gallery, London; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Canberra School of Art; University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art

Signature Works, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney

Clemenger Art Award, Museum of Modern Art, Heide, Melbourne

Tensions, Griffith Artworks, Griffith University, Queensland

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart

The Power To Move; Aspects of Australian Photography, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, February

96 Containers, Adelaide Festival of the Arts, Adelaide, March

Death, Lewers Bequest and Penrith Regional Art Gallery, April

How Say You, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

Inheritance, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, March

Colonial/Post Colonial, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, May

Container 96 - Art Across Oceans, Copenhagen, May

Asia Pacific Triennale, Queensland Art Gallery, Sept '96 - Jan '97

Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography! Museum of Contemporary Art

Art Cologne Internationaler Kunstmarkt, Koln Messe, Germany, November

Art Rage 96, compilation for ABC TV video (collaboration with Destiny Deacon), January

Adelaide Festival Artists' Projects, Festival Centre, Adelaide

The Temple of Flora, Waverley City Gallery, Melbourne

Harbour Hymns, City Songs, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Art Contemporain Australien, Noumea, New Caledonia

Photography: Recent Acquisitions, Australian National Gallery, Canberra

Fragmentation and Fabrication: Recent Australian Photography, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Terminal Garden, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide

Twenty Contemporary Australian Photographers, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Art from Australia. Eight Contemporary Views, Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, VACB & Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra

Vision in Disbelief Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Contemporary Colour Photography, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales

New American Photographs, California State College, San Bernardo, California, United States

Eternal Present, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Travelling Exhibition

Church Street Photographic Centre, Melbourne

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria

La Trobe Regional Art Gallery, Victoria

Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania

Olympic Fine Art Collection, SOCOG, Sydney

All Along the Watch Towers, Centre d'arts et de nature, Chaumont-sur-Loire, France

Anzac Memorial Centenary Project Commission, Hyde Park, Sydney

South Australia Rephotographed

Polaroid 20 x 24 Commission, New York, United States

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One of Australia's most prominent contemporary artists, Fiona Hall is best known for extraordinary works that transform quotidian materials into vital organic forms with both historical and contemporary resonances. Hall works across a broad range of mediums including photography, painting, sculpture, moving image and installation, often employing forms of museological display.

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In 1978, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and other artists-all part of a loose collective known as Studio Z-descended on an area beneath a Los Angeles freeway. Typically frequented by the houseless, the city's freeway underpasses are also normally filled with urban detritus. On that day, however, for a Nengudi-organized performance known as Ceremony for Freeway Fets, it also played host to clarinetists, drummers, flautists, dancers, and more. Hassinger, who had committed to take part on the day of the event, twirled repeatedly as traffic sped by; Nengudi's sculptures made of pantyhose were strewn around a set of pylons. A vacant space that typically had a static feel was briefly animated and filled with joy.

Ceremony for Freeway Fets was only performed once, and like many works by Nengudi, it no longer exists. (Photographs documenting the performance act mainly as showcases for the outfits donned by its participants. In some cases, this puffy, distressed garb resembles the plastic bags that lined the freeway.) Nengudi once described the work as an attempt to approximate "an African village." That this makeshift community's vibrancy is still palpable from photographs alone is a testament to Nengudi and her collaborators' ability to mine radiant energy from even the most mundane things.

Nengudi's work in all its indefinable glory will this week become the subject of a survey at the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition. Having previously appeared at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado (the state that Nengudi has called home since 1989), the show, titled "Topologies," considers her as an essential figure within the history of performance art. While the exhibition includes a number of sculptures, including ones from her famed "R.S.V.P." series that make use of pantyhose and sand, her performances are often only hinted at through documentation. Nevertheless, this is often enough to conjure the electric presence that animates Nengudi's art.

In fact, Nengudi has written that she often did not want to create objects that existed forever. "I have fought the joy of creating impermanent objects most of my life," she wrote in a 1995 artist statement. "An artist's supposed greatest desire is the making of objects that will last lifetimes for posterity after all. This has never been a priority for me. My purpose is to create an experience that will vibrate with the connecting thread."
Bodies are present, even when people are absent, in Nengudi's art.
In the early 1970s, during a short period where she was based in New York, Nengudi created what she called "fabric spirits." Composed of little more than fabric strung up with cord, these sculptures resembled arcing bodies or flayed skins, and were hung from fire escapes, fences, and even a staircase near her East Harlem apartment. In a statement from the era, Nengudi described them as containing "the inner souls or spirits of people I have seen on the city streets; particularly in Harlem."

These sculptures, like many others by Nengudi, conjure humans whose bodies are no longer there-a theme that would be picked up a few years later in her "R.S.V.P." series, which is perhaps her most well-known body of work. In these works, Nengudi relies on pantyhose purchased at thrift shops, stuffing it in places with sand and elongating its nylon form by knotting it, pinning it, and stretching it across corners, walls, and floors. The "R.S.V.P." works, with their fleshy look, resemble limbs and genitalia, and though many have ascribed to them feminine qualities, some have also seen in them male attributes, too.

According to Linda Goode Bryant, who exhibited these works at her famed New York gallery Just Above Midtown during the '70s, men reacted strongly to them. "It was a common reaction among male visitors to the gallery to grasp or subconsciously cover parts of their body with their hands when they saw that long, straight pins had been stuck into some of these sacks," Bryant wrote in an essay published in the "Topologies" catalogue.

The "R.S.V.P." works are allusive, elusive, and often difficult to parse. Film scholar Rizvana Bradley has suggested that these works are not intended to have a gender, saying that the sand in them "mimics the weight of the human body and also marks its uncanny disfigurement." When Nengudi first started making them in 1975, not long after giving birth to a child, she had in mind Black wet-nurses who repeatedly care for children. "The body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape," she wrote in 1977.

Today, the most famous images of her "R.S.V.P." works are the ones of performers-many of them Black women-twining their bodies through their elongated strips of nylon. In one 1976 performance intended purely for the camera, Nengudi pulled her skirt over her head and gently tugged at an "R.S.V.P." sculpture. "I wanted to be a hidden image," she wrote. And in another 1977 performance that now exists only in photos, Maren Hassinger contorts her body so that her arms and legs are lightly bound by Nengudi's art. In one image, Hassinger puts her body in a bridge-like position, so that her back is supported by nylon. Because of the way the photograph, it's unclear where she begins and the sculpture ends.
Influences from Africa, avant-garde art, and more merge in Nengudi's work.
Nengudi's oeuvre has always been a hybrid one. Born in 1943 in Chicago as Sue Irons, she was raised in California and later attended what is now California State University, Los Angeles, where she studied art and dance. In 1965, while still a student, Irons did an internship in the art and dance education department of the Pasadena Art Museum, which at that time was a destination for its presentations of cutting-edge art. She developed a fascination with the work of Paul Klee, who made use of inscrutable symbols that appear to contain their own hidden language.

Meanwhile, while in the library at school, she came across a book on the Japanese avant-garde and developed a love of Gutai, a postwar movement that sought to collapse all divisions between art and life by relying on readily available materials, including dirt, cloth, and light tubes. "What spoke to Nengudi from the images she saw was the ephemeral and quotidian nature of the employed materials, as well as the visible role granted to play and improvisation," Lenbachhaus curator Stephanie Weber has written. Inspired by Gutai, she briefly moved to Japan on a fellowship and began studying forms of Japanese theater like Noh and Kabuki.

When she returned to California in 1967, she also became involved with the scene around the Watts Tower, in a predominantly Black Los Angeles neighborhood that had been transformed by protests spurred by police brutality two years earlier. She fell in with a scene centered around the Black-owned Brockman Gallery and David Hammons's studio, and in the '70s, she furthered an interest in African art that was also being explored by many of her colleagues at the time. In 1974, a boyfriend from Zaire rechristened her Senga Nengudi-"Senga" means "listen" or "hear" in Duala, and "Nengudi" translates to "a woman who comes to power as a traditional healer," the artist explained in a 2013 oral history.

Her later performances evinced an interest in African art. For the 1978/79 performance Masked Taping, she attached pieces of tape to her body and moved about, to explore "elements of my African heritage of mask making, dance, rites and rituals," the artist wrote. Meanwhile, art historian Kellie Jones has connected Ceremony for Freeway Fets to traditions like Gèlèdé, a Nigerian masquerade meant as a celebration of female power.
Commonplace materials are given new life in Nengudi's art.
Nengudi's first mature artworks were a series known as "Water Compositions," for which she filled plastic sacs with water tinged rich shades of purple, green, and blue by food coloring. These works stood in marked contrast to what was expected of Black artists at the time. "No one would even speak to her because we were all doing political art," Hammons told Jones in her 2017 book South of Pico. "She couldn't relate." The "Water Compositions" later appeared at the Musée Rath in Geneva, in a 1971 show called "8 artistes afro-américains," which was met with protests targeting the exhibition because it wasn't political enough. (That same year, she stopped producing the "Water Compositions," fearing that they would be connected to the exploding market for waterbeds.)

In spite of the initial pushback Nengudi received for her art, she continued making work in that vein throughout her career, relying on "low" materials and breathing new life into them through her sculpture. Made in the mode of Gutai figures like Kazuo Shiraga, who once fashioned a circle out of mud and called it art, or Atsuko Tanaka, who formed a dress out of lighting tubes, Nengudi gave this style a new meaning by tethering her materials to urban spaces around her.

It's a sensibility best glimpsed in Nengudi's 1988 installation Bulemia, whose untranslatable title was given by artist and Yoruba priest Charles Abramson. The room-size work was filled with newspapers-they covered its walls and lay crushed in balls on the floor; a now-lost audio component accompanied it. The installation's title-and to some degree the work itself-did not mean much, but for Nengudi, the piece had great significance. She once described it as "a great library of life where one enters to freely collect information."

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Pulled Bodies, Fabric Spirits, and Celebration: Senga Nengudi's Elusive Art Finds Joy in the Everyday

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In 1978, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and other artists-all part of a loose collective known as Studio Z-descended on an area beneath a Los Angeles freeway. Typically frequented by the houseless, the city's freeway underpasses are also normally filled with urban detritus.

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Senga Nengudi, photographed in Boulder, Colo., in October 2020. Credit... Caleb Santiago Alvarado

The Great ReadArts and letters

Almost 50 years after the debut of her arresting womb-like sculptures, Senga Nengudi is still challenging what it means to live in a body, especially when that body is Black and female.

Senga Nengudi, photographed in Boulder, Colo., in October 2020. Credit... Caleb Santiago Alvarado

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IN 1975, AFTER the birth of her first son, the artist Senga Nengudi began making a series of sculptures with nylon pantyhose, prompted by the physical and psychological changes she experienced during pregnancy. She was in her early 30s, a first-time mother, and fascinated by how her own body had grown and morphed. She wanted to express the human body's elasticity, how it could expand and contract like her sinuous new material, which she cut, ripped and tied. She'd then fill these amorphous forms with sand, which, she said, gave her sculptures a "kind of sensuality that the body has."

From a distance they looked like amoebas, and up close they bulged and rippled like flesh. In one of her early installations - 1977's "R.S.V.P. I" - she took 10 pairs of nylon pantyhose in varying shades of tan, many of them previously worn, and pinned the ends taut to the walls of a room, while filling the center gusset with sand, creating forms that were simultaneously spindly and bulbous, sensuous and monstrous. She once described them as "abstracted reflections of used bodies." There were thematic precedents for Nengudi's sculptures in the alien-like abstractions of Louise Bourgeois and in Bruce Nauman 's assemblages of mundane objects like wallboard, but the way she manipulated a drugstore accessory into a visceral invocation of the human form was nothing less than startling.

These pieces became known as the " R.S.V.P." works, named for the enigmatic announcement card for Nengudi's first New York solo show - was it an exhibition title or a request? - at the gallery Just Above Midtown in 1977. The dozens of "R.S.V.P." sculptures Nengudi went on to make over the next few years had their own personalities: Some, like "R.S.V.P." (1975-77), a dark brown pair of pantyhose that splayed open like stretched legs, with other sand-filled hosiery hanging over it like pendulums, were expansive and friendly; others, like 1976's wishbone-shaped " R.S.V.P. V," were claustrophobic and menacing. Sometimes, Nengudi, who had been dancing since childhood, used the sculptures as both settings and partners for intricately choreographed performances that responded to the work's distinct form and are preserved in black-and-white photos from the time, with the artist or one of her friends (or both) clad in nylon tights and entangled in her work.

In the decades after she debuted them, Nengudi's sculptures became icons of the Black Arts Movement, the multidisciplinary intellectual flourishing in the '60s and '70s that coincided with and gave artistic shape to the rising political activism and Black nationalism of the era. They have also become touchstones in feminist art (a concurrent artistic movement) for the way even their materials tear apart, in a literal sense, traditional notions of femininity. (Nengudi has noted that, because of the humbleness of her materials, she could "put my entire show in my purse": "I started thinking, 'What is the core of a woman's existence? The purse,'" she said.)

And yet, for decades, she lingered on the periphery of the art world: always creating but rarely seeing her work in mainstream galleries and museums. The '70s may have been an era of inspired creativity, but it was also a decade of rigid boundaries and narrow identities - both within the establishment and outside it - and Nengudi's pieces were difficult to categorize. She was a sculptor, but one who used cheap or found materials. She was a dancer, but at the heart of her performances were these strange creations. Her work was too conceptual to be embraced by the mainstream art world as "Black art," which expected a strictly figurative and sociological view of Black life in America, but it was also too distinctly personal to be celebrated alongside the mostly white men who defined the conceptual art of the era. She was uncategorizable in an age that, for all its experimentation, still treasured systems of organization.

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In December, though, nearly 50 years after she began making the "R.S.V.P." series, a retrospective of Nengudi's work will be on view at the Denver Art Museum. The show makes plain the extent to which Nengudi and her work were essential fulcrums around which gathered a community of Black artists - fellow genre-defiers like David Hammons, Maren Hassinger and Lorraine O'Grady - who were likewise ignored by the mainstream art world in their formative years but have since been recognized as some of our most significant living artists. On her quest to discover herself and reflect her own experiences, she also broadened the very notion of what a Black artist could be.

NENGUDI WAS BORN Sue Irons in Chicago in 1943. Her father died when she was 3 years old, and after several years, her mother decided to head west. "She had this love of California," Nengudi said of her mother, Elois, a graceful woman fond of serving rice and beans on fine china with a bottle of champagne. "She only made one trip out there, and that was enough for her." Nengudi is based in Colorado Springs, where she has lived for the past 31 years, but she was speaking to me over Zoom from a cavernous, mostly unadorned studio in Boulder, where she was on a residency. Her voice, unusually soft, echoed off the high ceilings as she stared a little beyond me.

She grew up between Los Angeles and Pasadena. As the only child of a single working parent - her mother was an escrow officer - she spent a lot of her time alone, parked in front of a television, watching Fred Astaire, Lena Horne and Katherine Dunham. She admired Dunham, in particular, who was one of Hollywood's first Black choreographers, and was captivated by Astaire's use of props, like a hatrack or an umbrella. The way he moved with objects - transforming the inanimate into something alive and kinetic - influenced her own later performance pieces. "I want dancers to be activators," she said. "I want them to partner with the sculpture." Indeed, it was movement, more than visual art, that informed Nengudi's early creative life. She took both ballet and modern dance classes. It wasn't until she was in college that she was forced to make a decision between pursuing a career in visual art or in dance. At that time, she "didn't have what they considered a dancer's body," she said. Dancers were expected to be tall and thin, which Nengudi wasn't. There was also the question of longevity and sustainability: As a dancer, there were physical limits to what her body might allow her to do over time. Those restrictions did not apply to artists. "I felt that you could live forever and still be an artist," she said. "You can live to 100 and still have the ability to express yourself."

Nengudi majored in fine arts at California State University, Los Angeles, where she was one of two Black students and the only Black woman in the art department. "Oftentimes, I was the only Black person in a room. Sometimes it was OK, and sometimes it was not," she said. "It was lonely." But two discoveries made her feel less alone. The first was the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum), where she worked as an assistant art instructor and encountered the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as happenings: free-form, predominantly improvised performances that artists like Claes Oldenburg and Red Grooms first began developing in the late 1950s by creating stage sets out of everyday materials such as cardboard and encouraging viewers to move about freely in them. They were a way of demonstrating that art was and could be anything an artist wanted, and this freedom, combined with how the museum introduced art to children - employees would take kids through the galleries and dance in front of the works - gave Nengudi the confidence to develop her own ideas about dance's fellowship with art. The second transformative space for her was the Watts Towers Arts Center, a community hub in the historically Black neighborhood of Los Angeles that was co-founded by the legendary sculptor Noah Purifoy. Here, Nengudi discovered more ways to rethink what art could be, this time centered around Blackness. In 1965, the Watts neighborhood was the site of a six-day uprising ignited by an altercation between a Black motorist and a white police officer. The rebellion radicalized a number of Black artists at the time and, as numerous businesses were damaged or destroyed, inspired a cultural shift in Black art toward assemblage, the process of making work from discarded materials. Although Nengudi's work was already moving in this direction, she credits Purifoy for reinforcing her understanding of aesthetic and what it means to be an artist. "Noah was the most amazing man because he walked his talk, he didn't really care about money, he cared about the creative process and art itself," Nengudi said. She was also inspired by the elementary- and middle-school-age students in her mixed-media classes at Watts Towers, marveling at their "open-ended way of dealing with art. You say, 'Oh, dear, that's a beautiful flower you're painting,' and then they take black paint and paint all over it."

But it was after college, in 1966, that Nengudi had one of her most important educational experiences while attending a postgraduate program at Waseda University in Tokyo. She'd chosen Japan because of her interest in the Gutai group, the Japanese collective who, like her, were using found objects and performance to redefine artistic practices. At the time of the group's founding, Japan was a country in flux and in the midst of a deep identity crisis. Just shy of a decade out from the humiliation of World War II, it was trying to square its ancient traditions with a second industrial revolution, and the Gutai group, who were admirers of Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, sought, as they put it in their 1956 manifesto, "to go beyond abstraction." They preceded modern performance artists, who wouldn't come into their own in the West until later in the 1960s: The Gutai group's paintings were made by rolling in a pile of mud, or by foot instead of hand, or by jumping through a paper screen. Nengudi was in awe of their spontaneity, their defiance. "I was just floored," Nengudi said of their work. "I said, 'This is it. This is what I am about.'"

Nengudi had anticipated some culture shock upon arriving in Japan, as well as racism, but once she got to Tokyo, she was "treated so graciously." In fact, her only bad experience came from an encounter with white Americans in the city's well-touristed Ginza district. She was immediately taken with Japanese culture, and became interested in theater traditions like Kabuki and Noh. The way ritual governed life in Japan - from how people answered the phone to how they bathed - influenced her as well. The country had a sophisticated but simple elegance that resisted the Western impulse to "clutter something up," she said in a 2013 oral history interview with the Smithsonian Institution. A year later, Nengudi left Tokyo for America with "a deep desire to find a connecting link" between the culture she had just experienced and the one to which she was returning.

In many ways, she found that link in New York, where she moved in 1971 on the advice of a professor who told her that the city was a boot camp for artists. She arrived six years after the poet LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka) had moved to Harlem; his relocation, in the eyes of some, created a distinction between an "uptown" artist (those who, like Baraka, were working within the framework of Black nationalism) and a "downtown" one (those who appealed to a mainstream, mostly white, crowd). Nengudi's decision to live uptown was rooted in a desire to be closer to those from whom she could learn and affirm her own identity as a Black person. "It was more like an adventure - I was so excited about Blackness," she said. "I wanted to know everything about myself that was not available in Los Angeles." She moved into an apartment in East Harlem and began working as an instructor at the Children's Art Carnival, a community program started by the Black artist Betty Blayton-Taylor, who was also a sculptor. In her spare time, she hung out with the Harlem-based Weusi Artist Collective, whose members invoked African themes and symbols in their work. She was inspired by all of New York's qualities, from how the neighborhoods were rigidly divided along racial lines to the various ways people celebrated their ethnic backgrounds, as in the annual West Indian Carnival, which included a parade.

Although she was inspired, Nengudi didn't show much work during this period, in part because she didn't fit neatly into the mold of either an uptown or downtown artist, but also because she was too shy. But she did create, and the project that came out of this period seems to portend the "R.S.V.P." works: a series of two-dimensional silhouettes, slightly larger than an actual person, which she cut out of colored cloth meant for flags and tied to scaffolding and fences or dangled between alleyways. Even in these early works, which she called "spirits" or "souls," one can see how she would eventually influence an artist like David Hammons, who after moving to New York would make art in the '70s and '80s from materials discarded on the city streets - empty glass bottles, bottle caps, human hair - and install them in inconspicuous public areas, as if in secret. These were sculptures influenced by movement: Representations of the heroin addicts Nengudi would see high on the street corner, swaying back and forth, flirting with the ground but never falling. "It was such a dance," she said. "This movement, unfortunately it was what it was, but it was graceful."

AFTER THREE YEARS, in 1974, Nengudi returned to Los Angeles. New York had changed her in many ways: It deepened her understanding of Black history and culture, as well as validated her sense of self, imbuing her with a new confidence. But it wasn't until the birth of her first child - with her partner at the time, Rene Pyatt, who died shortly thereafter - that she had a revival. "Even though I spent most of my life without a child, it felt like my life began when they were born," she said of her sons (her second - with her husband, Ellioutt Fittz, a retired electrician - was born in 1979). Motherhood made her hyperaware of her own body. Giving birth moved her to search for a material that could withstand repeated manipulations that would mirror, she says, the "kind of freaky" experience of having a human being develop in your own body. Along with her stint in New York, it also inspired a new identity: After becoming a mother, she decided to change her name from Sue Irons to Senga Nengudi. "Senga," she was told, meant something akin to a sage in the Bantu language Lingala.

The name proved prophetic, or was perhaps a promise on which Nengudi made good. Over the following decades - in which white-owned galleries remained essentially closed off to Black artists, and museums continued to ignore them - Black artists were confined to exhibiting in libraries and community centers. With the official channels of the art world unavailable to them, Nengudi and her peers had to create new ones for themselves. She began a series of large public collaborations that became hallmarks of the era. Along with artists like Maren Hassinger - who also used everyday objects to create sculptures - she started the collective Studio Z, members of which participated in Nengudi's first public group performance, 1978's " Ceremony for Freeway Fets." The performance, which ran for less than an hour, took place under a highway near the Los Angeles Convention Center and consisted of a small ensemble of artists playing various instruments - a saxophone, a flute and drums - and Nengudi, Hammons and Hassinger dancing in elaborate costumes. Hassinger represented the female spirit (wearing one of the pantyhose sculptures on her head like a crown) while Hammons, the male spirit, wore bright-colored pants and carried a decorative staff. Nengudi, wearing a white tarp and mask, acted as the bridge between the two gendered energies. "I wanted to kind of do an opening ritual to celebrate and christen the area it was in," Nengudi said; the site represented the crossroads of a wide variety of cultural and ethnic identities in Los Angeles and reminded her of an African village.

Although there is no surviving footage of the performance, it was documented in Roderick Young's photographs, which chronicle a remarkable moment of Black art in Los Angeles in the 1970s. In his photos, the gathering appears as a kind of celebration anointing Nengudi the de facto leader. When she talked about the performance later with the filmmaker Barbara McCullough, who was present for the ceremony and later included it in a film, Nengudi described herself as "practically possessed" and lost in a "rapture." "Over the years, I have described her as a mild-mannered wild woman," McCullough said of Nengudi recently. "Her ideas are so expansive and somewhat disconnected from the normal way of thinking." McCullough learned from Nengudi that "you could do your art with anything."

Studio Z encouraged Nengudi to be more outward with performance. But the collective also reminded her of the importance of relationships and interactivity, a theme that remains key to her practice. "We would get together to try and push the envelope and find new ways of doing things and new vocabularies for ourselves," Nengudi said. One of her most important and longest collaborations was with Hassinger, who is best known for her sculptures composed of industrial materials like wire rope, and whose friendship with the artist began with long phone conversations, the kind that, Hassinger said, people just don't have anymore. "They would be all over the place," Hassinger said. "A lot of it would center around art and projects that we were working on, but a lot of it would also be gossip and raising children and making dinner." They also had a shared background in dance: Both women had studied under instructors from the Lester Horton company, the first in the United States to be racially integrated.

Hassinger became one of Nengudi's primary collaborators in the "R.S.V.P." performances, and they have remained fixtures in each other's work for nearly 40 years. In photographs of a 1977 performance at Pearl C. Wood Gallery in Los Angeles, Hassinger, who has an Afro and is wearing a black bodysuit and tights, activates the sculptures by entrapping herself in the nylon pinned to the gallery wall. In another image, Hassinger sits in a kind of boat pose - feet lifted, knees pulled to her chest and hands supporting her body - as the nylon wraps around her chest, thighs and head. The choreography recalls the simple, usually spontaneous gestures of the Gutai group, or the nodding-out addicts Nengudi first encountered in New York years earlier. The movements varied from performance to performance, and depended on the shape and size of the sculpture, but the intervention of a human form within one of the sculptures - a hand stretched out to the wall, or propped up on her head mid-handstand - seemed to enhance the humanlike characteristics of Nengudi's work, until both forms were indistinguishable from each other.

Like the rest of contemporary art, performance works had up until this point been presented as a largely white activity, populated exclusively by the same lithe bodies that had marginalized Nengudi as a dancer years earlier. There was so little to compare it to in the late '70s that it was easy to overlook just how groundbreaking it was to see two Black women in their 30s, with Afros and curves, contorting their figures in form-fitting clothing, while Nengudi's strangely beautiful nylon forms wrapped around them like an old friend, holding them in her embrace.

AFTER THE "R.S.V.P." series, Nengudi began working on increasingly ambitious projects while continuing to experiment with found materials and nontraditional spaces. In " Masked Taping" (1979), she covered her body from the knees up in pieces of masking tape and had herself photographed as she moved about her darkened studio as a ghostlike outline. And in a 1996 solo exhibition, " Wet Night - Early Dawn - Scat Chant - Pilgrim's Song," she used found objects like baking pans, dry cleaner bags, chopsticks and Santeria candles to pay homage to religious iconography and the relationship between the real and unreal.

But in 2003, she returned to the "R.S.V.P." series, recreating some of her original nylon sculptures, after her friend Lorraine O'Grady insisted "there was still energy in them." By this time, Nengudi was in a different stage of her life. She was teaching at the University of Colorado and caring for her ailing mother, who had been paralyzed by a stroke (she died in 2004). Remaking the pieces was a challenge. First, the nature of the materials had changed: "You think of pantyhose as pantyhose, but no, they have different crotches; they have different elasticity," she said in the Smithsonian oral history. But she was also a different person, and in the process of preparing these works, Nengudi began to reflect anew on how they related to her own body. Whereas she had once seen them as a metaphor for new motherhood, she now began to see them in relation to the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child, something she hadn't even told her mother about. "I've never really mentioned it, because I didn't want my work to be seen with a narrow lens," Nengudi said. "But there are some elements in there that I think have to do with that abuse."

She was between 10 and 13 years old and living in Los Angeles. It was one of her mother's boyfriends. She feared talking about it, because he had threatened to kill her mother if she did. In remembering this period, Nengudi expressed appreciation for the way her mother, who was also being abused by the boyfriend, brought her into the decision-making process. When Nengudi's mother had enough money to leave the relationship, she had two choices - purchase a car or rent a new home. She asked Nengudi what she wanted to do. "I said, 'If we get a car, then we can run away,' and she says, 'OK, that's what we'll do,'" Nengudi said.

The pandemic has made Nengudi reflect more about what had happened to her as a child, because she's been thinking about children for whom home is not a safe space: What will happen to them, to their bodies? For more than half her life, in her distortions of the human form, she has been exploring how we occupy our own bodies. "I often say, the psyche as well as the body can, you know, stretch and come back into shape," she said. "But sometimes it doesn't." This may not have been the original intention of the works, but it is what they have become: a story of bodies in transformation, acting and being acted upon, doing their best to exist in the world.

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An Artist's Continuing Exploration of the Human Form (Published 2020)

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The Great ReadArts and letters Almost 50 years after the debut of her arresting womb-like sculptures, Senga Nengudi is still challenging what it means to live in a body, especially when that body is Black and female. Senga Nengudi, photographed in Boulder, Colo., in October 2020. Credit...

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Tempest II, 2020
Oil, acrylic, felt, and gesso on board
60 x 48 inches

Assorted painted stones
Acrylic on bluestone
Dimensions variable

Assorted painted stones
Acrylic on bluestone
Dimensions variable

Assorted painted stones
Acrylic on bluestone
Dimensions variable

Winged Woman, c. 1958
Wood

53 x 12 x 10 inches

Arching Woman, c. 1972

Ceramic

23 x 22 x 13 inches

Leaf Head, c. 1978

Ceramic

19 x 18 1/2 x 12 inches

Leap II, 1998-2000
Acrylic, oil, and collage on panel

54 x 48 1/4 inches

Sky, 2009-2011
Archival pigment print on bamboo paper

16 x 21 1/4 inches
Edition of 9

Gravity, 2009-2011
Archival pigment print on bamboo paper

16 x 21 1/4 inches
Edition of 9

Ship Wreck II, 2009-2011
Archival pigment print on bamboo paper

16 x 21 1/4 inches
Edition of 9

Born in London, England, in 1933 Mary Frank moved to the United States with her family in 1940. In the early 1950s she studied with Hans Hoffman and Max Beckmann. Frank works across disciplines as a sculptor, painter, photographer and gifted ceramic artist. Without allegiance to any particular way of working or medium, Frank is fueled by her ever present urge for direct and honest expression. Frank's process begins with some form of abstraction from which she teases out what she describes as a pre-existing time and atmosphere where events can take place. Her recurring imagery act as an alphabet, combined in order to evoke feelings of grief, love, sorrow, ecstasy, mourning and exultation.

Mary Frank has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including a retrospective organized by the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York in 1978; an in-depth look at her Persephone Series at the Brooklyn Museum in 1988; and Natural Histories, organized by the DeCordova Museum in 1988 which traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Everson Museum of Art. In 2000, the Neuberger presented Encounters, a major traveling retrospective accompanied by a book by Linda Nochlin. In 2003, Experiences, a solo exhibition of Mary Frank's paintings was organized by the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond. In 1990 a major survey of Mary Frank's work, written by Hayden Herrera, was published by Abrams, New York. Shadows of Africa, a collaboration between the artist and poet Peter Matthiessen, was published by Abrams in 1992.

Frank's work is in the collection of numerous institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC , the Jewish Museum, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, the Newark Museum, NJ, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Frank lives and works in New York City and Woodstock, New York.
For the complete biography, please download the PDF.

Mary Frank in Conversation with David Hornung
January 25, 2020

Mary Frank in Conversation with John Yau, Terry Tempest Williams and Peter Kayafas

December 14, 2017

Mary Frank in Conversation with John Yau
December 12, 2013 at DC Moore Gallery

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Tempest II, 2020 Oil, acrylic, felt, and gesso on board 60 x 48 inches Assorted painted stones Acrylic on bluestone Dimensions variable Assorted painted stones Acrylic on bluestone Dimensions variable Assorted painted stones Acrylic on bluestone Dimensions variable Winged Woman, c. 1958 Wood 53 x 12 x 10 inches Arching Woman, c.

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Christian Boltanski Christian Boltanski is a contemporary French Conceptual artist best known for his photographic installations. View Christian Boltanski’s 639 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. See avai…

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Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz was a pioneer of fiber-based sculpture and installation in the 1960s. She began making abstract fiber works in the 1950s, when her government was advocating social realism. Her earliest works were monumental hanging textiles, which she named "Abakans." They function as both objects and spaces.

She turned to figurative textile works in the 1970s, creating the headless and fragmented human forms for which she is best known. She began receiving public commissions, which led her beyond textiles to materials such as bronze, wood, stone, and clay.

Abakanowicz's art was affected by her experiences in Poland under Nazi and Soviet occupation during World War II and its aftermath. Although she drew inspiration from her autobiography, her sculptures possess an ambiguity that encourages multiple interpretations, speaking broadly to human experience.

Abakanowicz's work has been featured in more than 40 solo exhibitions worldwide and honored with numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in Hamilton, New Jersey, in 2005.

Artist Details

Name

Birth

Death

Phonetic Spelling

mahg-dah-LEH-nah ah-bah-kah-NOH-veech

NMWA Exhibitions

Works by Magdalena Abakanowicz

4 Seated Figures

Magdalena Abakanowicz's 4 Seated Figures blends her personal memories with her broader vision of a modern world shaped by war and political upheaval. Both headless and handless, these figures reflect the artist's direct experience-she witnessed her mother being shot in the hands as soldiers stormed their home in Poland during World War II. Abakanowicz noted, however, that the figures are genderless and...

Posted: Mar 24, 2021 in From the Collection

NMWA founder Wilhelmina Cole Holladay (1922-2021) was a visionary collector of great art by women. Get to know five of her favorite modern and contemporary artists from the museum's collection.

Blog Category: From the Collection

Posted: Mar 06, 2019 in 5 Fast Facts

As part of NMWA's #5WomenArtists campaign, impress your friends with five fast facts about artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose work is part of NMWA's collection.

Blog Category: 5 Fast Facts

Posted: May 25, 2017 in From the Collection

The museum's newly reinstalled collection emphasizes connections between historical and contemporary art. Organized by the themes of the body, nature, domesticity, fabrication, and herstory, each gallery delves into a topic...

New York Avenue Sculpture Project: Magdalena Abakanowicz

This outdoor installation included a range of monumentally-scaled sculptures by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz featuring grouped human figures and birds in flight that exemplify issues universal to humankind.

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Magdalena Abakanowicz | Artist Profile | NMWA

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Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz was a pioneer of fiber-based sculpture and installation in the 1960s. She began making abstract fiber works in the 1950s, when her government was advocating social realism. Her earliest works were monumental hanging textiles, which she named "Abakans." They function as both objects and spaces.

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ORLAN is a contemporary French artist known for the radical act of changing her appearance with plastic surgery in the name of art. Similar to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, ORLAN uses her face and body as malleable tools for shifting identities. "I have been the first artist to use aesthetic surgery in another context-not to appear younger or better according to the designated pattern. I wanted to disrupt the standards of beauty," she explained. Born Mireille Porte on May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne, France, she changed her name at the age of 15 before studying painting as a young woman. During the 1970s, the artist produced a provocative series of photographs known as Incidental Striptease (1974-1975), in which she took the pose of Sandro Botticelli's Venus while wrapped in semen-stained sheets. ORLAN began using cosmetic surgery in the early 1990s, basing her new features on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1503) and François Boucher 's depiction of the goddess Europa, she had her cheekbones, brows, and lips altered. In 2018, the artist was ordered to pay Lady Gaga and Universal Music Group a total of $18,000 in courts fees, after losing her appeal in an intellectual property infringement lawsuit against the pop star. ORLAN currently lives between New York, NY, Paris, France, and Los Angeles, CA. Today, her works are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

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ORLAN is a contemporary French artist known for the radical act of changing her appearance with plastic surgery in the name of art. View ORLAN's 70 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices.

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Antony Gormley: Sculpted space, within and without

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Rene Magritte was an internationally acclaimed surrealist artist of all time, yet it was not until his 50s, when he was finally able to reach some form of fame and recognition for his work. Rene Magritte described his paintings saying, "My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable."

Rene Magritte was born in 1898, to a wealthy manufacturer father. In 1912, his mom was found drowned in the River Sambre. She had committed suicide, and the family was publicly humiliated because of it. From 1916 to 1918, Rene decided to study at the Academie des Beaux-Art, which was located in Brussels. He left the school, because he thought that it was a waste of time. All his paintings afterward reflect cubism, the movements which were introduced by Pablo Picasso and was very popular at the time. In 1922 he married Georgette, and took a number of small jobs, including painting cabbage roses for a wallpaper company, in order to be able to pay the bills.

During the early period of his career, shortly following his marriage, Rene Magritte would spend the free time that he had, creating art forms and worked on a number of pieces; it was during this time period that he realized surrealism was the art form which he most enjoyed. The Menaced Assassin was one of his earliest pieces in 1926, which showcased the surrealist style which he had been working on; The Lost Jockey was another piece that he introduced in 1925, which also showcased this art form. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of variants on this piece, and changed the format to recreate what the viewer was experiencing.

In 1927, Rene Magritte had his first one-man show, which took place at the Galerie la Centauri in Brussels. During this period of his life, he was producing nearly one piece of art work each day, which made for an extensive showing, and a variety of unique styles for visitors of the exhibit to see. But critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris.

In 1920s, influenced by the writings of psychologist Sigmund Freud, the literary, intellectual, and artistic movement called Surrealism sought a revolution against the constraints of the rational mind; and by extension, they saw the rules of a society as oppressive. Surrealism also embraces a Marxist ideology that demands an orthodox approach to history as a product of the material interaction of collective interests, and many renowned Surrealism artists, later on, became 20th-century Counterculture symbols such as Marxist Che Guevara.

After moving to Paris, Rene Magritte became friends with artist Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. In about the same time, influenced by de Chirico's paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte start to paint erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings. His works defined a split between the visual automatism fostered by Joan Miro and a new form of illusionistic Surrealism practiced by the Spaniard Salvador Dali.

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. "

- Rene Magritte

To Magritte, what is concealed is more important than what is open to view: this was true both of his own fears and of his manner of depicting the mysterious. If he wrapped a body in linen, if he spread curtains or wall-hangings, if he concealed heads under hoods, then it was not so much to hide as to achieve an effect of alienation. He employed this technique at a very early stage, for example, The Invention of Life, The Lover, and The Central Story, these are certainly his major works.

During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, Magritte remained in Brussels, which led to a break with fellow artist Andre Breton. After the fallout with Breton, Rene Magritte briefly adopted a colorful, painterly style in 1943-44, an interlude known as his " Renoir Period", as a reaction to his feelings of alienation and abandonment that came with living in German-occupied Belgium. During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake paintings of Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, and Cezanne - this venture was later taken over by his brother Paul Magritte.

Rene Magritte stayed in Brussels for the remainder of his life. During the majority of his career, his work followed a surrealist style, and he very rarely, if ever, strayed away from this form. Much of the work he created depicted similar scenes, and recurring themes. Some of his favorites were floating rocks, or creating a painting within a painting, and he also used many inanimate objects, within a human figure, creating the distinct styles which other artists did not.

During the course of his career, Rene Magritte would also use famous paintings, which were created by other artists, to put his own surrealist twist on it. One of the works he did, was to recreate The Balcony (a piece after the masterpiece of the same name, by Edouard Manet ), and in this piece he replaced the figures that were in the image, with coffins. This, was one way for Magritte to showcase his style, and to create a unique design, forcing viewers of his pieces, to look outside of the norm, and focus on the distinctive features which were not originally present.

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. "

- Rene Magritte

Along the similar lines, and with a focus on the surrealist style which he stayed true to, during his career, Rene Magritte began to work on sculptures at a later part of his career as well. He had a playful and provocative sense of humor, which worked in many of the pieces which he created, and which became some of his most well-known pieces throughout the course of his career. One such example of this is the series of pipe paintings which he created. The fascination he had with a paradoxical world, is clearly seen when you view the entire series as a whole piece, rather than viewing the images on their own.

Although in recent years many of the works created by Rene Magritte have been on exhibit, during the course of his career he also had certain features exhibited in Brussels, as well as around the world. In 1936, one exhibit was held in New York City, and following this, two retrospective exhibits were also held. One was in 1965, at the Museum of Modern Art, and a second was held in 1992, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Not only were a number of artists intrigued by, and influenced by the work Rene Magritte created, but popular culture, and the art world in general, were extremely influenced by his creative, and unique ability to take something so ordinary, yet make viewers of his pieces see something completely different. His ability to present figures in a suggestive, yet questioning manner, made his work extremely desirable, especially during the 1960s. In fact, much of his work has been plagiarized and used in books, print ads, and other manners, due to the distinct style, and the inability of artists to create in a similar manner.

Although he died in 1967, of pancreatic cancer, much of the work of Rene Magritte is still on display today, in his hometown, and around the world. Not only did he introduce a new style, but he was also a leader in the surrealist style. Along with Dali's Persistence of Memory, Magritte's masterpieces The Son of Man and The Treachery of Images become the iconic images of the Surrealism movement. Magritte brought an entirely new way of looking at art, with the paintings, as well as some of the sculptures which he created, during the course of his career.

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Rene Magritte: 100 Famous Paintings Analysis, Complete Works, & Bio

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Rene Magritte was an internationally acclaimed surrealist artist of all time, yet it was not until his 50s, when he was finally able to reach some form of fame and recognition for his work.

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Clouds, pipes, bowler hats, and green apples: these remain some of the most immediately recognizable icons of René Magritte, the Belgian painter and well-known Surrealist. He produced a body of work that rendered such commonplace things strange, slotting them into unfamiliar or uncanny scenes, or deliberately mislabeling them in order to "make the most everyday objects shriek aloud." With his pictorial and linguistic puzzles, Magritte made the familiar disturbing and strange, posing questions about the nature of representation and reality.

Magritte began his career as a graphic artist and quasi-abstract painter, but his work underwent a transformation in 1926, when he began to reinvent himself as a figurative artist. A key canvas in this project was The Menaced Assassin, his largest and most densely populated painting to date. Completed in 1927 and included in the artist's first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels, it helped launch his career as a Surrealist painter whose interest in severing the links between surface and essence would remain a constant. Painted in the deadpan style that would become his hallmark, each figure appears as though in a state of suspended animation: a naked female corpse with blood at the mouth lies on a red chaise longue, while a suited man nearby listens to a phonograph. Two men in bowler hats flank the doorway, and three male heads hover outside the rear window. Cinematic in its staging, the scene suggests a menacing narrative, but the specifics remain elusive, the visual details hard to reconcile into a single, coherent storyline.

In September 1927, Magritte moved to Paris to be closer to the French Surrealist group. His three years there would be the most prolific of his life. Surrealism, a movement led by André Breton, sought to liberate the mind by subverting rational thought and giving free rein to the unconscious. Until the late 1920s, Surrealist painting had tended toward a style of biomorphic abstraction, often achieved through automatic techniques supposedly outside the artist's conscious control, as advocated by Breton (and seen, for instance, in André Masson's free application of gesso and sand in Battle of Fishes). Magritte, by contrast, pursued a figurative style that, in his words, "challenge[d] the real world" through a naturalistic and highly detailed depiction of ordinary objects and subjects.

A signal development of Magritte's time in Paris was his word-paintings, in which he sought to investigate the relationship between text and image, often breaking apart well-worn connections between the two. One such work, The Palace of Curtains, III, presents viewers with two representations of the sky: on the left, a shard of atmospheric blue; on the right, the corresponding noun, ciel (French for sky), written in the artist's neat, firm script. Magritte thus divided a single concept into two, cleaving its visual and verbal signs into discrete, self-contained panels. Image and language interrupt one another, challenging artistic conventions of representation and urging viewers to ask which, if either, is more "real" than the other. With The False Mirror, Magritte posed a similar puzzle about observation. Here, an enormous eye fills the canvas, its iris a powder-blue sky dotted with clouds, its pupil a jet-black dot. The eye looks at the viewer, while the viewer looks both at and through the eye, as through a window, becoming both observer and observed.

Magritte reimagined painting as a critical tool that could challenge perception and engage the viewer's mind. His was a method of severing objects from their names, revealing language to be an artifice-full of traps and uncertainties.

Note: The opening quote is from "Foreword," in René Magritte, 1898-1967, ed. Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen (Ghent: Ludion, 2005), p. 11.

Natalie Dupêcher, independent scholar, 2017

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Ishibashi Yui’s Sculptures Visualize Tension Between Humans and Nature

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Fixated on a mythological depiction of nature, Japanese artist Ishibashi Yui sculpts feral children that appear to belong to another realm of reality. Pallid, hairless human bodies become fused with roots and vines, brought to life through a mixture of wood, resin, clay, wire and paint. Oftentimes, the figures appear imprisoned by the flora. In Then, It Returns Slowly, a pregnant woman's face erupts with flesh-colored growths that form a tree trunk. The character in Dream of 10 Billion Years succumbs to a similar fate as her limbs are fused with a chair and her head becomes a bouquet-like arrangement of leaves and branches. These sculptures personify nature as a force that reclaims its power from its human occupants. Take a look at some of Yui's sculptures below.

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Ishibashi Yui’s Sculptures Visualize Tension Between Humans and Nature

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Fixated on a mythological depiction of nature, Japanese artist Ishibashi Yui sculpts feral children that appear to belong to another realm of reality. Pallid, hairless human bodies become fused wit…

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art portrait tree judith gold drawing wallpaper landscape beethoven frieze tattoo

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Archibald prize winning artist Del Kathryn Barton’s detailed and vibrant paintings explore the symbolic language of femininity, interweaving references to traditional folklore and the cosmos. Barton’s practice is grounded in self-referentiality, drawing from a euphoric, emotional inner world.

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Archibald prize winning artist Del Kathryn Barton's detailed and vibrant paintings explore the symbolic language of femininity, interweaving references to traditional folklore and the cosmos. Barton's practice is grounded in self-referentiality, drawing from a euphoric, emotional inner world.

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Del Kathryn - Artist CV & Artworks | Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Australia

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Archibald prize winning artist Del Kathryn Barton's detailed and vibrant paintings explore the symbolic lan­guage of femininity, interweaving references to traditional folklore and the cos­mos. Barton's practice is grounded in self-referentiality, drawing from a euphoric, emotional inner world.