All posts tagged: Painter

Painter, Collector & Carl Jung Collaborator

Painter, Collector & Carl Jung Collaborator

Published by Jenni Sidey

“The deepest things in human life … can only be expressed in images,” wrote Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn. And yet, though obsessed with images, she never called herself an “artist,” even as she painted and drew. Fundamentally, she was a collector: of people, of images, of ideas, always animated by her interest in symbols and archetypes. Carl Jung, her close friend and collaborator, fueled this long, epic inquiry. Still, she remains profoundly mysterious and contradictory, a person fiercely drawn to and driven by spirituality who left few windows into her own spirit.  Related Articles Born in London to Dutch parents in 1881, Fröbe-Kapteyn was the highly educated daughter of highly educated parents. At once spiritual and analytical, she had no specific belief system. Like many Europeans who became interested in alternative or occult traditions in the early 20th century, she was drawn to and influenced by innumerable schools of spirituality, philosophy, and mythology. This paradox sits at the heart of Fröbe-Kapteyn’s philosophy: the importance, and challenge, of connecting the personal with the eternal. She was driven by …

British Painter Talks Design of Proposed 0 Bill Featuring Trump

British Painter Talks Design of Proposed $250 Bill Featuring Trump

Published by Jenni Sidey

Iain Alexander, a British painter who has exhibited in Palm Beach, Florida, designed a proposed $250 bill recently sent by the Trump Administration to the Treasury Department. In an interview with the Washington Post, Alexander said that Trump had reviewed his design and gave the okay for adding the colors of the US flag and a logo commemorating the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, which is being celebrated this year. “He likes to call me his favorite British artist,” Alexander said of Trump. Related Articles The Trump administration has been pursuing a 250 dollar bill featuring the real estate mogul-turned-president since last year, despite the fact that US law prohibits living figures from appearing on US bills. According to the Post, US treasurer Brandon Beach and senior advisor Mike Brown pushed staff at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to create prototypes of the 250 dollar bill, including one featuring Trump’s face designed by Alexander. Alexander’s signature appears below the mock-up, per the Post. Alexander said that he had proposed featuring Betsy Ross, who famously …

Influential Abstract Painter Dies at 88

Influential Abstract Painter Dies at 88

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tess Jaray, a British painter whose understated abstractions explored patterns that recur throughout the world, died on Sunday, according to an obituary posted to the artist’s official Instagram account. She was 88. Jaray specialized in paintings of grids, cubes, and undulating zigzags, all of them set atop palely colored backgrounds. She began making them during the 1960s, at a time when Minimalism reigned supreme across the pond, in the US. But her works exerted a quieter presence, without much of the drama that accompanied that movement. Related Articles She described a desire to reach something embedded deep within the human condition using these abstractions. In 2019, she told Studio International that she wanted “to make sense of the obsessive searching for patterns and repetition in nature and in art that have been so important … They may be seen as a meeting point, a coming together of the head and the heart and the external and the internal.” While Jaray may lack the name recognition had by some of the most famous artists of her …

Postwar German Painter of ‘World Theater’

Postwar German Painter of ‘World Theater’

Published by José Betancourt

Harald Metzkes, the so-called “Cézannist of Prenzlauer Berg” who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany’s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes. “Metzkes became particularly well-known in East Germany because he had no interest in socialist realism,” wrote Monopol, which asserted that he created his own “world theater” in work that wriggled free of East German strictures. The magazine quoted Robert Metzkes saying, of his father, “He wasn’t concerned with implementing cultural policy demands.” Related Articles Metzkes was born in 1929 in Saxony, Germany, and in 1949 started studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to East Berlin, where he established a distinctive painterly style that “combined poetic imagery, references to classical modernism, and deeply symbolic visual worlds,” according to the Neue Nationalgalerie. That museum is currently showing Metzkes’s Removal of the Six-Armed Goddess (1956) in an exhibition titled “Extreme Tension. Art …

First and Forever by Lynn Painter

First and Forever by Lynn Painter

Published by Jenni Sidey

A spoiler-free review of First and Forever by Lynn Painter, the sports rom-com about an NFL tight end and the diehard fan caught in a PR stunt only one side knows is fake. Funny, tender, and worth your weekend. The post First and Forever by Lynn Painter appeared first on The Bookish Elf. Source link

Painter Who Refused to Conform Dies at 84

Painter Who Refused to Conform Dies at 84

Published by Jenni Sidey

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, whose gestural abstractions consistently ran against the grain, defying the demands placed upon Black painters by critics and artists alike, died on Sunday in Mérida, Mexico. She was 84. Her galleries, Jenkins Johnson and Marianne Boesky, announced her passing on Wednesday. Lovelace O’Neal produced sprawling paints defined by tangles of drippy, roiled strokes. This was a style that placed her outside the orthodoxy of Minimalism, the dominant movement when she was maturing as an artist during the 1960s. She also arrived too late to be classified as an Abstract Expressionist. Related Articles But she did not consider herself an adherent of either movement, anyway, and in interviews, she said she enjoyed standing apart from any fashionable style or school of artistic thought. “I’m reluctant to call myself an abstract expressionist or a minimalist. I call myself a painter,” she told the New York Times in 2020, adding, “Being unruly is my nature.” Many of her most famous works were produced during the ’60s, when Lovelace O’Neal walked into a paint store in …

How Painter Akira Ikezoe Became the Spring’s Breakout Star in New York

How Painter Akira Ikezoe Became the Spring’s Breakout Star in New York

Published by José Betancourt

Akira Ikezoe has recently been thinking a lot about all that can be done with milk. It can be obtained from a cow, packaged, sold, and consumed, yes. But what if you could paint with it, or bathe in it, or even become resurrected by drinking it? These are all scenarios that appear in a new painting by Ikezoe that features an array of naked figures (and some skeletons) who are roped into a dairy-centric system that happens to involve a pit of fire and a large mural. In typical Ikezoe fashion, everything is depicted with the sobriety of a diagram in an instruction manual. It’s funny, bizarre, and more than a little terrifying. Related Articles Standing before the painting in his New York studio, Ikezoe pointed to the top of the canvas, where faceless people pull at the udders of two cows. “They are taking milk out of the cow, and they start using the milk as paint,” Ikezoe said, narrating the scene. “But someone kicked the can of paint and stepped on it, …

Georg Baselitz, Pioneering German Postwar Painter, Has Died at 88

Georg Baselitz, Pioneering German Postwar Painter, Has Died at 88

Published by José Betancourt

Georg Baselitz, a preeminent painter of postwar Germany and an engine of the 1980s Neo-Expressionist movement that rebuked Minimalism, and who would later come under fire for his comments about women artists, has died at 88. His death was first announced in a press release by Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the galleries that represented the artist.  Baselitz exploded into the German art consciousness in the 1960s with a formal grit matched by tormented subject matter: his breakout “Heroes” series (1965–66) features bloated, blocky figures balancing on ruined buildings and toppled flags. Through his eyes, postwar German society appeared raw and taut as an exposed muscle. Next came his “Fracture” series, which sees axemen and prey alike torn into strips and stitched back into mythic Germanic forests—“wounded landscapes,” as he described them.  Related Articles Baselitz pushed figuration beyond recognizable form into abstraction—ultimately, and famously, flipping the medium itself: his experiments culminated in his signature upside-down portraits and landscapes, both genres apt for his unique dissection of masculinity. This visual vocabulary emerged in The Man at the …

West Coast Painter of Thick Monochromes Dies at 82

West Coast Painter of Thick Monochromes Dies at 82

Published by Jenni Sidey

James Hayward, a West Coast painter whose abstractions earned him a loyal cult following among artists, died on April 16. He was 82, according to a brief obituary posted by his studio over the weekend. Hayward may not be among the most well-known names to emerge from the postwar period, but many artists knew and loved his work. Mike Kelley, for example, once praised him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters.” His process was marked by a certain eccentricity that differentiated his art from a lot of similar work. From the mid-1970s onward, Hayward largely produced monochrome abstractions. But where many single-color canvases from the era were characterized by the smooth, even application of paint, Hayward purposefully left his materials chunky and thick. Related Articles Referring to the phrase “monochrome abstraction,” Hayward told Artillery of his work, “People ask what does that mean—you know, lay people? I say, well basically I make one-color paintings of basically nothing.” A positive Artforum review of an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Richard Telles Fine Art …

Painter of Forceful Images Dies at 46

Painter of Forceful Images Dies at 46

Published by José Betancourt

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, a painter whose work dealt with racism and upheaval in an America riven by inequalities, died at her home in Los Angeles on Friday. She was 46. Jeffrey Deitch gallery, which will open a Dupuy-Spencer show in LA next week, announced her death on Saturday morning, but did not state a cause. Dupuy-Spencer moved freely between unflinching images of protests and tender pictures of intimacy. She was just as likely to paint a fallen Confederate monument as she was to capture sexually frank images of lovers in bed. All of the subjects she painted, she said, were “things that are meaningful to me.” Related Articles In many cases, her subject matter was often explicitly political and highly legible. In 2021, she was profiled by multiple magazines for painting the January 6 insurrection. The resultant work, titled Father, Don’t You See That I Am Burning (2021), is a feverish pile-up of figures toting guns and American flags before the Capitol building. Sigmund Freud appears amid the crowd; the painting’s title refers to a line from …