Miquel Barceló

Paintings by Miquel Barceló from 1984. Today I am glad to be working on my blog from a similar landscape to these ones by Barceló. On a bar terrace now in Ibiza on my holiday. Apologies to those that checked the last two weeks and didn´t find many posts. I have been very busy working on a project for next year.
Have a nice day! (I am gonna jump into the sea now!)

David Hockney

Philip Guston National Gallery of Art Video

She Who Measures

Check this animation out. I went along to Alpha-ville Audiovisual Festival on saturday at the Horse Hospital In Bloomsbury, Central London. "She Who Measures" is a short film that amongst others was curated by Future Films.
Director: Veljko Popović / Croatia / 2008
www.shewhomeasures.com

Martin Melcher

A couple of weeks ago I visited the AOP (Asociation of Photographers) Gallery in London where I saw the AOP Awards 2009. The exhibition actually finishes on the 10th of September. This is Martin Melcher´s work. (www.martinmelcher.com)
Have a nice week end!

Gordon Cheung at his studio

Gordon Cheung

Gordon Cheung is of Hong Kong origin and born in London 1975 where he lives and works. I saw his work for the first time at the Keith Talent Gallery in London in 2002.

"Cheung’s paintings capture the hallucinations between the virtual and actual realities of a globalised world oscillating between Utopia and Dystopia."(gordoncheung.com)

"I use the Financial Times newspaper stock listings as I think of the stock market as a global dream-world that literally flows through all of us. This for me is a contemporary form of landscape from where I take inspiration and fuse images from the Internet on computer before printing directly onto sections of the stock listings to jigsaw back together on canvas.

When I started using the stock listings around 12 years ago we were going through a digital and communications revolution. Mobile phone technology and the Internet were being made readily available and this totally reconfigured our perception of space time into a state of constant flux. There was talk about globalisation, cyberspace, global villages, information superhighways and digital frontiers – we experienced a kind of digital euphoria over the prospect of a potential Utopia. This of course dissipated with the tech stock dot com millionaire crash which was followed by the techno-hysteria over the Millennium bug. We then experienced the twin tower attacks that consequently gave us the War on Terror. So for me I am taking inspiration from what is around us rooted in that Utopic technological revolution and the consequent threatening waves of apocalypse.

If you look through the body of work recurring motifs do exist such as the ruinous skyscrapers, luminous voids and rainbows. They’re all symbols of hope and despair brought together into a beautiful dark ambiguity."(full interview)

www.gordoncheung.com

JR

"JR´s work is about much more than size. He uses surprise and humour and courage to break down boundaries between people. He takes his art on to the street and into war zones and places where art seems to have no place. He creates odd juxtapositions that forces people to ask questions and to smile.
He started by creating large stencils and then industrial-size photocopies of his pictures and pasting them up in the streets of Paris. He then took photographs of street scenes wich included his own fly-posted photographs or "photograffs". He posted these photographs in the streets as well."
"In the past two years JR has exporetd the idea of "grimaces for peace" across the globe. He took close-ups in Israel and Palestine of grimacing people who did the same jobs: taxi-drivers, hairdressers, chefs, security guards. He blew them up and stuck them side by side, on buildings on either side om the Israel-Palestinian divide and on the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank.
Wich were the grimacing Paelestinians? Wich were the grimacing Israelies? Most people could not tell. JR took pictures of Israelies and Palestinians staring at his pictures. He posted those up as well."
"I own the biggest art gallery in the world, JR says. I exhibit freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people that are not museum visitors. My work mixes art and act. It talks about commitments, beauty, freedom, identity and limit.
JR takes art into places ruled by suspicion, poverty, violence and oppression but insists he is making an artistic statement, not a political one. I am an not an artist with a cause, but an artist who causes people to think - he says." (The Independent)
(full article on Press)

JR

http://jr-art.net/