Photo By Gail
In Buddhism, the Lotus symbolizes transcendence, as the flower emerges from stagnant water to bloom in bright colors. Here, the ceramicist Kawase Shinobu uses the clear blue celadon glaze known as seihakuji to capture the spiritual importance of a lotus bud. This vessel is designed to support burning incense sticks, with a lily-pad-shaped saucer to catch the falling ash.
Photographed in The Brooklyn Museum
Photo By Gail
This small-scale triptych demonstrates Cecily Brown’s characteristic use of highly expressionistic and densely layered brushstrokes that tend to blur distinctions between the representational and the abstract. Initially the painting appears devoid of recognizable subject matter, yet closer inspection reveals hints of bodily fragments entangled among lushly-rendered landscapes. There is a shared materiality between flesh and paint, which Brown suggestively exploits for both optic and erotic charge. Like the title, Fair of Face, Full of Woe (2008), which references an English fortunetelling nursery rhyme, the painting exists in constant flux, it’s visual fate determined by each new viewer.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
Photos By Gail
The Freudian dictum holds that where Id was, there Ego shall be. In Louise Bourgeois‘Â terms, the successful realization of a sculpture functions to make conscious what was previously unconscious — that is, repressed and inaccessible — and discharge unwelcome or unmanageable instinctual impulses. Her symbolic forms, like the symptoms of the neurotic, are compromise formations between a wish and a defense.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Louise Bourgeois, Conscious and Unconscious
Photos By Gail
Any weekday that I walk south on Wall Street towards Water Street to catch a bus home, I pass by this otherwise unremarkable Dollar Sign-Shaped Bike Rack, which not everyone knows was designed by Talking Heads front man, Fine Artist and Avid Bicyclist David Byrne. Until some time last year (I didn’t pay attention to exactly when this changed) there was an inverted paper coffee up — which no one would stop long enough to remove — covering the upward end of the ‘S’ shape.
Continue reading Dollar Sign Bike Rack By David Byrne, Wall Street
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Pablo Bronstein (Born 1977) is an Argentine artist based in London, who specializes in architectural sketches in ink and gouache, set in ornate frames and depicting imagined buildings incorporating styles from 18th century France and the 1980s. His Horological Promenade II (2008) installation consists of two ornate clocks, displayed on tall on plinths, and a framed drawing of those two clocks.
Horological Promenade II is part of the collection of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, on exhibit at The Whitney Museum through March 6th, 2016.