Looking for the best TV show for one small child? It can be like searching through a huge sea of shows, trying to find the right mix of fun and learning. Parents often think hard about what will keep their children happy and also help them learn.
Continue reading Exploring the Types of TV Shows That a Small Child Will Love
Photo By Gail
War (2003) by artist Paula Rego (1935 — 2022) is based on a newspaper photograph of Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of a bomb explosion during the Iraq war. Rego was shaken by the image of a mother carrying a baby, seemingly frozen in fear, and a girl screaming standing next to them.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: War By Paula Rego
Image Source for Above Photo. All Other Photos By Gail
If you ever take the NYC Subway, you have probably seen the hilarious and extremely adorable ads for Casper mattresses and bedding, because they are all over the inside of the train cars. If you are not sure if you have seen them, they look like this:
All Photos By Gail
Mike Weiss Gallery is currently hosting Stefanie Gutheil’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, The Home of Mr. Peeps and it is all kinds of crazy fun. For this show, the Berlin-based artist has delved deep into the recesses of her imagination – back where horned beasts, laser beams, onesies, a brass marching band, phonographs, multi-talented chickens, the original stooge named Krampus and a giant pink elephant all reside – and emerged with a phantasmagoric stable of characters à la a secularized and hallucinatory version of Noah’s Arc. With this herd of misfit creatures, Gutheil has left normality at the door and transformed the gallery into a sanctuary of the bizarre – a surreal, utopic landscape of chromatic and psychological vibrancy.
With all their quirks and foibles in plain sight, the artist’s fantastical creatures appear to us as friends and intimates. In fact, it is precisely because of the alluring, almost childlike honesty inherent in the figures unabashed eccentricities that connection with the works is nearly inevitable. Yet there is more to these characters than their carnivalesque appearance; in each, Gutheil has instilled an emotional gravity that seems both personally derived and universally comprehensible.
Sometimes the sentiment is uplifting – for example in A Walk in the Forest, where we find two cronies strutting with emoticon-worthy smiles strewn across their faces. Other times, the mood isn’t always so chummy. In Safe Bet, it is impossible to say with certainty whether the winged yet dense-looking humanoid is falling down or flying upward, if it has walked the plank by force or leapt from the diving board by choice.
In their peculiar features and with their hearts on their sleeves, Gutheil’s oddballs all emit a vaguely familiar sense of the folkloric, as if the artist unraveled them from traditional fables and stitched together her own. The horned, anthropomorphic, anti-Santa Claus fictional beast of German-Austrian descent named Krampus, for example, seems to make an appearance in multiple works. Instead of a facsimile representation, though, Gutheil has flipped the idea of Krampus on its head – in one work it walks a man-carrying pig and in another it nonchalantly strolls through the forest with a friend – by stripping it of its menace and making it comical.
Yet in her fairytales, Gutheil has not set a narrative. Instead, she provides all the raw, jumbled materials – the characters, the costumes, the emotions, and the stage – and leaves us to imagine our own farfetched tales, whether somberly retrospective or curiously, whimsically, and optimistically infantile.
Stefanie Gutheil’s The Home of Mr. Peeps will be on Exhibit Through January 30th, 2016 at Mike Weiss Gallery, Located at 520 West 24th Street, in the Chelsea Gallery District.
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Take a look at any of the dozen or so paintings by LA-based artist Nathan Spoor on view now at NYC’s Bold Hype Gallery, and it’s obvious that you never, ever have to grow up if you don’t want to. Phantom Passport is the artist’s latest collection, featuring new paintings created by Spoor over the last two years. When you examine the image density in these paintings, which depict characters from storybooks or the artist’s own fecund imagination, toys, games and strange, dreamlike interactions and landscapes, you can see how it would take months for Spoor to fine tune each canvas. His pictures are amazingly complex and I enjoyed trying to pick out familiar images in each one; from the “Cootie” plastic bug assembly toy I enjoyed playing with as a small child, to characters from Alice In Wonderland and various Fairy Tales. I continually discovered new elements for the first time, even after multiple viewings.
Nathan was at Thursday night’s opening party and he was super nice (and, oh, so handsome). I asked him if, like Kenny Scharf, he outlines each image before beginning to compile the layers of visual montage that will fill his canvas, and he said that yes, he always has a carefully planned outline before he even gets started. You can also tell that his paintings are extremely personal to him. Spoor also writes for acclaimed art publications like Hi Fructose and Juxtapoz magazines, so you know his writing, like his painting, marries passion with an understanding of the arts in context. I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on his future endeavors. With Nathan Spoor’s Phantom Passport, Bold Hype Gallery has hit another one out of the park.
Phanton Passport is on Exhibit until June 4, 2011 at Bold Hype Gallery, Located at 547 W 27th Street (Between 10th and 11th Aves) 5th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Gallery Hours are 12 – 5 PM, Tuesday – Saturday
