# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View Ruth Franklin's Profile on Saatchi Art. Find art for sale at great prices from artists including Paintings, Photography, Sculpture, and Prints by Top Emerging Artists like Ruth Franklin.

# data[].attributes.body
PoL Úbeda Hervàs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are used to viewing a photograph as an end result. But what if a photo is used as just the starting point of another creative process? Is it still a photograph? This is one of the questions prompted by the beautifully strange artworks of Maurizio Anzeri, who intricately embroiders found photographs with coloured thread. An exhibition of his work, But It's Not Late It's Only Dark, is currently on show at Chapter as part of the Diffusion photography festival in Cardiff.

The Italian-born, British-based Anzeri searches out vintage portraits in flea markets and junk shops, viewing them, he says, as landscapes on which to map out his own unique geography of suggestion. Faces are criss-crossed with coloured skeins, or patterned in curves and circles until they are barely visible. Sometimes the end result resembles an elaborate mask; at other times an interior landscape made by a latterday surrealist plundering his fertile unconscious. Here, the poignancy that attends all discarded photographs - remnants of another time, another life of which we know nothing - is literally covered over.

Anzeri has said that his embroidered images suggest "other possible evolutionary dimensions for the people pictured", but his work has a surrealist rather than a Darwinian undertow. Sombre-looking children and sophisticated adults take on an absurdist aspect. The people pictured all but disappear in the process, becoming shadows or outlines beneath the lines. What was once a portrait is something else entirely: a formal, sculptural, diagrammatic artwork in which identity and expression is camouflaged. Anzeri creates something new and surprising by applying an old-fashioned craft to old-fashioned artefacts.

The British artist Julie Cockburn also uses embroidery to alter found photographs, though her technique is often more wilfully childlike. She also applies marker pen, correction fluid and geometric plastic shapes that she finds in old toys and games from the 1960s and 70s. Where Anzeri uses Christian names as his titles - Giovanni, Peter, Angelo - Cockburn is more mischievous, calling a woman whose head has been covered in an embroidered net The Beekeeper. Another woman, whose face is concealed by what looks like long swathes of ice-cream coloured felt, has been rechristened Madame Gelati.

Cockburn's embroidery can make her found subjects look as though their heads have been encased in a 3D geometric sculpture or simply scrawled over. One of my favourite images is entitled The Funster: a cheeky-looking boy whose head, eyes and mouth have been encircled roughly in what looks like Tippex but on closer inspection turns out to be carefully applied embroidery in white thread. Cockburn also cuts up her portraits to kaleidoscopic effect, making a child on a sofa look like a small explosion of triangle entitled Tantrum.

I am intrigued, too, by her landscapes, where circles of coloured embroidery pattern a river valley or outline a small boat on a grey sea, making it look like a bleached-out John Hinde postcard. Her work is full of echoes, both artistic and everyday, and is less tied to surrealism than Anzeri's, having its roots in a more English vernacular tradition. A recent book of her work is intriguingly called Conversations, hinting at the way she brings found photographs back to life as something new. Both artists are making old photographs live again, in work that is not quite photography but has the photograph at its heart.

Now see this

As mentioned above, the Diffusion photography festival is underway in Cardiff, featuring events, talks and exhibitions, including work by Edgar Martins, Elin Høyland, Helen Sear and Holly Davey. Until 31 May.

Belfast Exposed is hosting a group exhibition, Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography, featuring work by Paul Seawright, Donovan Wylie, Sylvia Grace Borda, John Duncan, Mary McIntyre and Victor Sloan.

From Julia Margaret Cameron to Gregory Crewdson, the V&A traces the trajectory of "untruthful" photography in Making It Up: Photographic Fictions.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Maurizio Anzeri's embroidered photographs make patterns of the past

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are used to viewing a photograph as an end result. But what if a photo is used as just the starting point of another creative process? Is it still a photograph? This is one of the questions prompted by the beautifully strange artworks of Maurizio Anzeri, who intricately embroiders found photographs with coloured thread.

# data[].attributes.body
stitching into antique? photographs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
>> As long as something creates a reaction it's alive << says Maurizio Anzeri, the Italian born artist from the city of Loano. Known for his series of eerie portraits or photo-sculptures, a term used by himself to describe his portraits, Maurizio's work will be presented this month at the Baltic (25 June - 11 October 2011) and will mark his first solo show in a major UK institution. Yatzer caught up with Maurizio Anzeri and discovered the man behind the embroidered vintage photographs who is enjoying an extraordinary moment in his career.

Maurizio's Mediterranean temperament and warm nature was evident in the way he talked about his work, an element that deeply engaged me to our conversation. You could see on his face that the passionate relationship he develops with his art and the different characters of his portraits create narratives, which intertwine in unexpected ways. >> I started to collect portraits because I had a passion for them << he says. It was this passion and obsession with faces that later became the body of work we all see now he admits. Sitting somewhere in the Mediterranean, in places where loads of people pass by, gave Maurizio the chance to observe different people, something that later turned into a great inspiration. He has been working on this series of portraits for the past three years after deciding to take a break from his previous work: Enduring Seconds. >> Enduring Seconds was a series of about 30 works which had to do with drawing and embroidery. I was using a really thin Japanese ink-pen to draw legs and then carried on with embroidery on the drawing paper. <<

Shifting from his previous project to his current practice, Maurizio says that he is interested in everything a photograph represents. When travelling, he visits flea markets and collects photographs that are later transformed into pieces of art. His portraits maintain the quality of a photograph but then start to become three-dimensional something that prompted him to invent the term: '' photo-sculpture''. It is this three-dimensional element, achieved through embroidery and the form of intervention it brings that transforms the portraits into photo-sculptures.

Talking about photography as a medium Maurizio explains that he is more interested in its use as an object and material rather than in its process. >> When we all look at a photograph, we somehow believe that we look at the truth or at some kind of reality but we know that it's not, It's just a moment << he says. Capturing a moment on that piece of paper is to Maurizio truly fascinating. >> We all still look at it as if it's real. It's trapped in there and it's like you managed to cast some kind of magic spell on that piece of paper to entrap some kind of reality to use and reuse every time you look at it <<.

Vintage photographs without a doubt carry with them something from the past but to Maurizio, his work is not about preserving or celebrating the past. >> I don't want to be nostalgic. When I work on them, to me they become very present. The catch is that at some point these photographs were to some people really important and suddenly they ended up in a box,<< he says. When confronted with his portraits it's as if Maurizio wanted to create a passage for the character to escape from their present form. You can see that a part of them is still there and the other part has become something else. >> I think that what makes them work is that the image and the embroidery at the top feed each other, << he explains. He has no intention to cover or to erase. >> It's about feeding another dimension << he says. For Maurizio, the physicality of puncturing a needle in the actual image '' is an action of penetration''. >> I have been told many times that one of the characteristics of my work is to cover when there is nothing to cover. And I like that and it's not even hidden the fact that there is nothing to cover, << he explains.

His intimate relationship with the people in the photographs is so powerful that Maurizio seamlessly admits: >> I develop relationships with each one of them. It's impossible not to <<. Almost all of his portraits are sentimentally charged objects and it's obvious that he took great care of them even if the characters portray some kind of dark and eerie aspects. >> It's a quality of the work that I respect << he says. >> Every time I decide it to do it on purpose it doesn't work. It happens while I am working on them. Sometimes a moment can be dark <<.

Maurizio's career is booming and growing and there is no stopping. In Baltic, he is going to present 25 small portraits from the past, another 12 new pieces of embroidery and four sculptures. He was fortunate to work with great minds like Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow and confesses that he stayed in London because of the people he met. He was picked up by Charles Saatchi, and exhibited at his gallery in the exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now, an exhibition that received great coverage and media attention.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Embroidered Secrets of Maurizio Anzeri | Yatzer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Known for his series of eerie portraits or photo-sculptures, a term used by himself to describe his portraits, Maurizio Anzeri's work will be presented this month at the Baltic and will mark his first solo show in a major UK institution.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Art you need to know - the world's best art on ArtStack

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jean-Michel Basquiat | La Hara (1981) | Artsy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Gagosian, Jean-Michel Basquiat, La Hara (1981), Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, 72 × 48 in

# data[].attributes.body
acrylic painter

# data[].attributes.body
graffiti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Today is the birthday of neoexpressionist artist and graffiti king extraordinaire, Jean-Michel Basquiat. The celebrated American painter, praised by everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay-Z, would turn 52 if he were still alive today.

This undated photo provided by Christie's shows Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Untitled 1981". (AP Photo/Christie's)

The Haitian-American artist rose to artistic fame in New York City in the 1980s, transitioning from the ranks of a graffiti artist to a renown gallery darling. His artwork involved traditional street designs, primitivist symbols, appropriation and text, strewn together in vibrant canvases that attracted impressively high bids at auction. Despite his fame, his paintings never strayed far from concepts of class struggle and poverty, and his mixed collages and figurative drawings addressed race, power, politics and the legacy of colonialism.

Following Basquiat's tragic death from a heroin overdose in 1988, the artist's popularity has only risen, and his contemporary style has been idolized in film, music and literature. To celebrate his birthday today, we have compiled a slideshow below of 15 things you might not have known about the painter.

BEFORE YOU GO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today is the birthday of neoexpressionist artist and graffiti king extraordinaire, Jean-Michel Basquiat. The celebrated American painter, praised by everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay-Z, would turn 52 if he were still alive today. This undated photo provided by Christie's shows Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Untitled 1981".

# data[].attributes.body
River Taw (Ivy) 1997

© Susan Derges

# data[].attributes.body
p

# data[].attributes.body
darkroom

# data[].attributes.body
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
monoprint