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Charles Ray’s sculptures are often loosely patterned on pre-existing ideas and things. Such is the case with Tractor (2005), which takes as its point of departure a boyhood memory and, more directly, an abandoned vintage tractor found in the San Fernando Valley, California.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Charles Ray, Tractor
All Photos By Gail
Damien Hirst’s 2005 work, Virgin (Exposed) reimagines Edgar Degas’s The Little Fourteen Year-Old Dancer as a pregnant specimen, while its title references the Virgin Mary and the Immaculate Conception.
Its garish colors recall the anatomical models and illustrations found in physicians’ offices. Partially flayed and cross-sectioned, the work also evokes historical anatomical female figures whose abdomens could be opened, often to prurient effect, to reveal reproductive organs. However, here there is no frisson of revelation and concealment, and instead the female interior is unsparingly exposed in the public space of a gallery.
Photographed in The Met Breuer (Now Closed) as Part of the 2018 Exhibit, Like Life: Sculpture, Color and The Body.
Photo By Gail
After suffering a stroke in 2002 that left his right arm partially paralyzed, Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) was no longer able to take photographs, nor was he able to transfer and arrange them into new compositions, as he had been doing since the early 1950s. As Triathlon (Scenario) (2005) shows, these obstacles did not prevent him from making art. Relying on the sorts of collaborative processes that had fueled his work for decades, Rauschenberg invited his friends to take photographs with digital cameras that he provided. He then selected from the images they produced and instructed one of his studio assistants at the time, Kevin Pottorf , in the transfer and arrangements of these images onto two panels
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
Throughout her long career, Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) treated the motif of spiders across many different media, from drawings and prints to monumental outdoor sculpture. The theme was initially associated with her mother, a tapestry restorer, but grew to take on broader associations as a strong female protector against evil. This example, Spider Woman — dating from the last decade of the artist’s life — represents a female spider with a human face, contained within an egg-shaped form. The vibrant scarlet ink is a color that Bourgeois favored in her later work.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
If you happen to be lucky enough to visit the Danish city of Copenhagen, don’t miss your chance to make a very fun visit to their fantastic Designmuseum, which is where I saw this super modern ladder designed by Karen Kjaegaard. The space-saving, bright red lacquered Apple Jack Ladder was part of Kjaegaard’s My Private Garden exhibit, which took place at the Designmuseum in 2005. The ladder is manufactured by Trip Trap. Read more about the My Private Garden exhibit at This Link!