Photos By Gail
A headless cow? A bench to sit on? Actually, it’s both! German-born artist Julia Lohmann (b.1977) investigates the contradictions in our relationship to animals using off-cuts of leather, and other meat-industry waste products in her design. The Waltraud Cow-Bench (2004) is an appropriately cow-shaped upholstered leather bench, a “bovine memento mori,” the designer calls it. Continue reading Eye On Design: Waltraud Cow Bench By Julia Lohmann
Photo By Gail
In the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) began making copies of artworks by famous men and presenting them as her own. Exhibiting in downtown commercial galleries, Levine shocked audiences with her ‘theft.’ She questioned the authenticity, originality and value of the artworks and, like her peers Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, confronted the myth of the heroic male artist. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Sherrie Levine, Large Check: 1 – 12
Photos By Gail
Since the early 2000s, Seth Price has been fascinated by vacuum forming, a process in which plastic is heated and sucked against a mold. The artist repurposes the technique, traditionally used for commercial packaging, and casts unexpected objects. For Vintage Bomber (2006), he forced a PVC over the mold of a bomber jacket. Bubbles, creases, and other deformations run throughout the surface, rendering the military garment unfamiliar. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Present: Seth Price, Vintage Bomber
All Photos By Gail
If you think this voluptuous chair and round ottoman (tethered by a thin back chord) resemble a woman giving birth, you are on to something. The chair that made Gaetano Pesce famous in 1969 (reissued in 1994), Up 5 is largely characteristic of the designer’s unique philosophy, imbuing personality into his designs through unconventional materials.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Up 5 Chair and Up 6 Ottoman By Gaetano Pesce
Photo By Gail
“The woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported to the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter,” Henri Rousseau wrote of his enigmatic painting, The Dream (1910) . The setting for the musician and the reclining female nude – a moonlit jungle full of exotic foliage and wildlife – was inspired by his visits to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, a combined botanical garden and zoo. “When I am in these hothouses and see the strange plants from exotic lands, it seems to me that I am entering a dream,“ he once said. Entirely self-taught, Rousseau worked a day job as a customs inspector until around 1885, when he retired on a tiny pension to pursue a full-time career as an artist.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.