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Monday, November 21, 2011

Yuko Shimizu; A Phantasmagorical Graphic Novel

The exceptional illustrator Yuko Shimizu creates her work melding traditional Japanese graphic prints with surreal comic art. Inspired by Matthew Barney, Jean Paul Gaultier, Raymond Pettibon, and eccentric raconteur Momus, the award-winning New York-based artist draws her basic forms and figures with calligraphy brushes and later digitally supplements them with additional colors and backgrounds. This technique results in elegant and harmoniously composed creative visions and science-fiction fantasies, which are often erotically charged and combine the best of American pop and Japanese comic culture.

Yuko Shimizu has won numerous international awards and has done commissioned work for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Playboy, GQ, the New York Times and many more...

A comprehensive collection of Shimizu's different strikes and strokes, this book explores the Japan-born artist's marriage of East and West, commerce and art, mind and matter, sexy heroines and restrained sensuality.

From Yuko Shimizu

© Copyright Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu © Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu @Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu ©Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu @Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu ©Gestalten 2011

Yuko Shimizu is published by Gestalten-Berlin

Courtesy Yuko Shimizu / Gestalten-Berlin

This post is also featured on the Huffington Post

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Romy Schneider; A Tribute to an Unforgettable Actress

After a first exhibition dedicated to the Brigitte Bardot myth, Espace Landowski - Boulogne-Billancourt welcomes a new exhibition about one of the biggest legends of cinema: Romy Schneider.

Romy Schneider was a fascinating actress due to her fragility and determination. This exhibition built on a chronological basis, plunges visitors deep into the life and career of the actress, who by the late 1950s no longer wanted to be Sissi, and by the 1970s was a celebrated star of French cinema.

The Austrian-born German actress bemoaned her roles in Germany and went to Paris to play women who did justice to her acting abilities and expectations. She settled in France at the beginning of the 1970s, where she advanced to be one of the biggest stars of French cinema. She won several awards and made films with nearly all the great directors and actors of that period. Romy Schneider died in Paris in May 1982.

The exhibit will present new documents, numerous photographs, press images, original posters, film stills, personal objects and costumes. Viewers will be immersed in the fate of an exceptional woman through correspondence and fan souvenirs that reflect the cult worship that Romy Schneider inspired from an early age and as well as the role she played in the Franco-German reconciliation.

Romy Schneider exhibition

An homage to the star for the 30th Anniversary of her death

Romy Schneider, 1972

© Eva Sereny / Camerapress / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider, in "Les Innocents aux mains sales," a film from Claude Chabrol, 1974

© Botti / Stills / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider during the movie shoot "Les choses de la vie" from Claude Sautet, Sept. 16, 1969

© Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider with her son David, January 1968

© Jean-Pierre Bonnotte / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider and actor Karl Henry Bohm during the movie shoot "Sissi," 1955

© Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider met for the first time on the movie shoot "Christine," June 24, 1958

© Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, Nice, August 1968

© Jean-Pierre Bonnotte / Gamma-Rapho

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider during the movie shoot "La Piscine" from Jacques Deray, August 1968

© Jean-Pierre Bonnotte / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider on the beach while filming "Dix heures et demi du soir?" from Jules Dassin, 1964

© Botti / Stills / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider, 1968

© Jean-Pierre Bonnotte / Gamma-Rapho

Coco Chanel and Romy Schneider, 1960

© Botti / Stills / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider, 1972

© Eva Sereny / Camerapress / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider, 1974

© Reporters Associes / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider during the movie shoot " L'important c'est d'aimer," from Andrzej Zulawski, 1974

© Botti / Stills / Gamma-Rapho

Romy Schneider exhibition is currently on view at Espace Landowski - Boulogne Billancourt, France

November 4, 2011 to February 22, 2012

Courtesy Espace Landowski - Boulogne Billancourt, France
This post is also featured on the Huffington Post

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Alice in Wonderland Revisited

Lewis Carroll's timeless novels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, have fascinated and inspired many generations of artists since the first novel was published over 150 years ago. Alice in Wonderland at Tate Liverpool is the first exhibition to provide a comprehensive historical exploration of how the stories have influenced the visual arts, providing insight into the creation of the novels, the adoption of the text as an inspiration for artists and the revision of its key themes by artists up to present day.

Carroll's stories were soon adopted by artists. Surrealist artists from the 1930s onwards were drawn towards this fantastical world where natural laws were suspended. From the 1960s through the 1970s, conceptual artists took Alice as foil for exploring our relationship to perception and reality, and the stories inspired responses in both Pop and Psychedelic art.

There will be the opportunity to see the original drawings by Sir John Tenniel, Salvador Dali's series of twelve Alice in Wonderland illustrations, work by Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Dorothea Tanning and many more...

A journey through 150 years of one of the most imaginative sources of inspiration ever: Alice in Wonderland.

Alice Pleasance Liddell, Summer 1858

©National Portrait Gallery, London

Salvador Dali, The Pool of Tears, Alice in Wonderland 1969

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

Salvador Dali

The Rabbit Sends A Little Bill, Alice in Wonderland 1969

Annelies Strba, Nyima 445, 2009

©Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Magic Lantern Slide

John Wesley, (Untitled) Falling Alice, 1963

John Wesley, Humpty Dumpty, 1963

Kiki Smith, Pool of Tears (After Lewis Carroll), 2000

Max Ernst, Alice 1941

Courtesy Tate Liverpool, UK

Alice in Wonderland

November 4, 2011 - January 29, 2012
This post is featured on the Huffington Post

Monday, November 14, 2011

Cooper & Gorfer: " My Quiet of Gold," a journey in rural Kyrgyzstan

Cooper & Gorfer consists of the two artists Sarah Cooper (USA, 1974) and Nina Gorfer (Austria, 1979). With their backgrounds in art, architecture, graphic design and photography, they began their collaboration in 2006. Their work belongs to a narrative tradition within photography existing at the intersection of contemporary photography and 18th and 19th century painting. Place and story are the catalysts of their work, transforming narrative and memories into images that are digitally processed to create painterly collages.

For their exhibition My Quiet of Gold, Cooper and Gorfer traveled to the rural areas of Kyrgyzstan to collect sagas and stories in conversations and interviews with local inhabitants. Out of these tales, the duo created striking photographic portraits that go far beyond mere documentation to tell and visually interpret romantic-melancholy stories of love, sorrow, and betrayal in a completely new and non-linear ways.

"Like the portrait in Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Grey', our images show more than just an objective view of the person portrayed. Instead, they also depict something we cannot see - the past, the insubstantial and intangible, where the life and sentiment of the person photographed are woven together with our perception and experience of the moment. In the end, our pictures are the stories' beautiful remains."
~~ Cooper & Gorfer

Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer live and work in Gothenburg, Sweden.

My Quiet of Gold is an exhibition from the renowned Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, and is currently on view at Gestalten Space, Berlin. A book of the same name has also been published, and is available through the gallery.

My Quiet of Gold