Sunday, 12 February 2023
Jannick Deslauriers, Artist, Lives and works in Montreal
Yayoi Kusama, Japan, b. 1929
“I am an obsessional artist.” -Yayoi Kusama
A vital part of New York’s avant-garde art scene from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Yayoi Kusama developed a distinctive style utilizing approaches associated with Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, Feminist art, and Institutional Critique—but she always defined herself in her own terms. “I am an obsessional artist,” she once said. “People may call me otherwise, but…I consider myself a heretic of the art world.”1
Kusama was born in 1929 into a well-off but dysfunctional family in Nagano, Japan. Largely shielded from the horrors of World War II, she was, as she has claimed, nevertheless scarred by her mother’s cruelty, her father’s infidelities, and her family’s discouragement of her interest in art making. She started painting at the age of 10 when she began experiencing the visual and aural hallucinations that would plague her, while also fueling her creativity, for the rest of her life. She has maintained that her “artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease.”2
After a stint studying traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto, Kusama left school and moved to New York in 1958. There she felt she could pursue her art unfettered—and make waves. “When I arrived in New York, action painting was the rage…” she reflected. “I wanted to be completely detached from that and start a new art movement.”3 She began by making large-scale monochromatic paintings, for which she quickly gained critical attention. By the 1960s, the prolific artist was producing paintings, drawings, sculpture, Happenings, installation, fashion, and film. In 1969, she founded Kusama Enterprises, a commercial outlet selling clothing, bags, and even cars. These products feature her singular aesthetic, characterized by her liberal use of polka dots and dense, repeating patterns to create a sense of infinity.
In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. Two years later, seeking treatment for her obsessive-compulsive neurosis, she entered a facility where she lives and works to this day. She continues to produce paintings and sculpture, and, in the 1980s, added poetry and fiction to her range of creative pursuits.
-Karen Kedmey, independent art historian and writer, 2017
Above image and text source is MOMA: https://www.moma.org/artists/3315
Yayoi Kusama with sculptures in her New York studio, 1963–4. © 2012 Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.
Source link for above images, Inside/Out at MOMA
https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/10/09/yayoi-kusamas-return-to-moma/
Saturday, 11 February 2023
Abdoulaye Konaté, Artist, West Africa, b. 1953
Adopting a unique process of assemblage, Konaté cuts-up, dyes, sews, and reassembles pieces of fabric (mostly cotton), then reconfigures them into large-scale, boldly coloured tapestries with incredibly detailed surfaces, creating arresting optical effects.
Working mostly with textile materials, dyes, and dyeing techniques indigenous to his native Mali, Konaté's installations form abstract visual tableaus which are at once explorations in colour and weaving cloth yet speak to more complicated global socio-political themes that resonate far beyond his local context.
In early works on paper rendered in acrylic, colourful motifs refer to graphic signs and cosmological symbols used by Malian societies, the most prominent of these being ciwara (or amulets)—a ritual object representing an antelope head, used by the Bambara ethnic group in Mali. The head of the beast, which typically forms part of a zoomorphic crest with elegant lines, evokes the graceful ripple of an antelopes form and is an important symbol used in masks worn to perform traditional dance and rituals of initiation.
Colour in Konaté's work isn't merely aesthetic and serves as a metaphor for themes as diverse as war, power struggles, religion, globalisation, ecological shifts, and the AIDS epidemic which he poignantly visualised in his 1995 work Lutte contre de HIV. This large textile work depicts a figure with an imposing red target at its centre, suggestive of being marked by illness, accompanied by a suitcase placed in front, containing three screenprints and a blanket referencing personal artefacts and ephemera related to the suffering brought on by the disease.
As the artist has previously said of his influences, 'I can say that in my art there are two well-defined lines of thought. On the one hand, there is the purely aesthetic side, influenced by the nature and cultural traditions of Mali, my country, and that determines the colours and the materials of my work. On the other hand, there is a more spiritual side, which stems from the desire to investigate and describe through my work the human suffering, which reflects itself on the relations between states, politics, the environment, society and the family. Addressing very urgent issues such as AIDS, fanatism and environmental threats, my works draw attention to the problems that plague the modern man and that are caused by a fundamental lack of tolerance in Africa as elsewhere in the world.'
Text Source: https://ocula.com/artists/abdoulaye-konate/
Bisa Butler, Artist, American, b. 1973
Source link:
https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/fellow/bisa-butler/
Bisa Butler was born to educators in Orange, NJ, the youngest of four children. Butler earned a BFA from Howard University, where she refined her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson, and Ernie Barnes. She later began to experiment with fabric as a medium and collage technique. During graduate studies at Montclair State University, where she earned her MA in 2005, she took a Fiber Arts class and had an artistic epiphany, finally realizing how to express her art by combining painting and drawing skills with sewing.
Butler worked as a high school art teacher for ten years in Newark Public Schools and for three years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, NJ. Her work has been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and many other public and private collectors. In the fall of 2020, a solo exhibition of her work opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit that began at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY; her work was concurrently featured as part of a group show at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Butler is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.
Artist Website:
Beverly Semmes, Artist, American, b. 1958
Carmen Argote, Aritst, Los Angeles-based artist. She hails from Guadalajara. b. 1981
In-Line (magnet drawing)
About the Piece
Artist Statement
Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, American, b. 1925, d. 2008
Layers
76 x 36 inches
Offset lithograph transferred to
collage of paper bags and fabric
Edition of 32
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