Ellannah “Ella” Sadkin is a London-based artist who works primarily with acrylic and graffiti pens to produce colorful and abstract works. With its hard black lines, bright flat color and organic and geometric shapes, her style is often described as surrealist cartooning.
Snow White
Sadkin was a child of the nineties and a huge cartoon fan, and cites early drawing of The Simpson’s characters as her first foray into cartooning.
Ariel (Little Mermaid)
As an adolescent growing up in New York, Sadkin was heavily influenced by the vibrant street graffiti scene. This later inspired her approach to composition, with large canvas pieces resembling graffiti murals in their layer-upon-layer approach.
Alice
Sadkin is a self-taught artist and lists Kaws as a primary influence. Her appropriation of cartoon aesthetics has been described as Ren and Stimpy on acid meets Takashi Murakami. Nice!
Photographed at The Pivot Gallery in Chelsea, NYC.
Dream Furor Colligendi, 2014, By Keiicha Tanaami (All Photos By Gail)
You never know what you will discover on a Saturday afternoon art crawl in the Chelsea Gallery District. What happens more than you can imagine is that Geoffrey I fall in love with the work of an artist who is new to us, despite them having a career that spans decades. Sometimes, that artist has already passed, and we have occasion to mourn a great loss at the same time that we are welcoming a lifetime of beautiful art into our own lives. Because when it comes to art, it is just impossible to know everything. Continue reading Discovering the Art of Keiicha Tanaami: Visible Darkness / Invisible Darkness→
When I was in California at Christmastime, a little bit of advanced planning allowed me to enjoy a visit to the new Broad Museum of contemporary art, located in beautiful downtown Los Angeles. Featuring 2,000 works of art from the private collection of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad (pronounced like “Bro-d”), admission is free of charge, but because the museum just opened on September 20th, 2015, the demand for tickets is so high that they must be reserved online in advance.
By December, the list was already booked up through February 2016! It is times like these that writing an awesome blog like The Worley Gig comes in handy. With a couple of exchanged emails, the Broad’s press office was kind enough to extend VIP-treatment to myself and two guests, which included front-of-the-line cutting privileges that saved us about two hours of waiting in a queue that already wrapped around two sides of the building by the time the museum opened at 11 AM. It is good to be the King, or Queen, whatever.
Remember The Good Things By Seonna Hong (All Photos By Gail)
If you stop by Jonathan LeVine Gallery to see the latest Martin Wittfooth exhibit, be sure to also see If You Lived Here I’d Be Home By Now, a series of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Seonna Hong, her debut solo exhibition, which is running concurrently in the rear gallery. After completing a series of self-reflective work throughout her career, Hong has discovered a way to look forward, with this collection of paintings that signify her return to the New York art world after eight years. Of course, I had an immediate attraction to all of the paintings in this exhibit, because there is so much pink in them!
Hong is a multi-disciplinary talent with international recognition as a painter, illustrator and animation production artist. Notable accolades include an Emmy Award for Individual Achievement in Production Design for her work on the animated series My Life as a Teenage Robot. She is also the author of Animus, a critically acclaimed moving picture book. And it is worth mentioning that, in 2008, she was chosen by Takashi Murakami as the first American to have a solo exhibition at the world renowned KaiKai Kiki Gallery in Japan.
Come Undone
Where Hong’s previous works focused on reckoning, forgiveness and ‘wishing I said all the things I didn’t say,’ If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now explores the possibilities of what’s to come. In the artist’s words, “My once melancholic and somber pieces have given way to a new kind of hopefulness.”
The Magic Number
Continuing to move away from compositions of fully formed ideas, Hong’s process is spontaneous yet deliberate. Using paint swirls and scrapes to define space and texture, her signature characterization of girls and animals remains, but they exist less as protagonists and more as a lens to view the expressionistic landscapes that they occupy.
One in the Morning
In If You Lived Here, I’d Be Home by Now the artist works with a visual and literal vocabulary that takes cues from her personal life. By incorporating text and using books as her canvas for a selection of works, Hong examines the universal themes of exploration and reconnecting with our sense of childlike wonder.
L: Deciding How It Should Go. R: Diamond of the Truest Kind
Sea Level
Seonna Hong’s If You Lived Here I’d Be Home By Now will be on Exhibit through November 14th, 2015 at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, Located at 529 West 20th Street, 9th Floor, in the Chelsea Gallery District.
Tan Tan Bo – In Communication, 2014 (All Photos By Gail)
As much as everyone is already whining about the impending hellish winter that we are surely in for again this year, all you have to do is walk into the cavernous Gagosian Gallery space on West 24th Street and get an eyeful of the 18 foot high sculptures reaching towards the celing and 30 foot long murals unfurling across the walls in Takashi Murakami’s In The Land of The Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow to realize that — Polar Vortex be damned — New York City is the Center of The Universe, and that is where you want to be.
I’m not going to go into detail here about who Takashi Murakami is and why his art is important. You either already love his work, or will be compelled to find out based on the photos in this blog post. Or you don’t give a shit, who cares? Use The Google to your advantage, is all I’m saying.
The art exhibited in Murakami’s In The Land of The Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow is about the artist telling his personal story in response to historic natural disasters; specifically the Great Tōhoku Earthquake of 2011. Since that devastating event, Murakami has explored other Japanese art produced in response to historic natural disasters.
Gallery View with Sanmon (Sacred Gate)
At Gagosian, Murakami has created an immersive installation, entered through a 56-ton replica of a Sanmon (Sacred Gate), which also includes paintings of eclectic Arhats (Perfected Persons); dissolving clones of his popular creation Mr. Dob; and Karajishi, the mythic lions that guard Japanese Buddhist temples.
Sacred Gate Detail
Here is a contemporary belief system, constructed in the wake of disaster, that merges earlier faiths, myths, and images into an amalgamated spirituality of the artist’s imagination. In totemic sculptures representing demons, religious sites, and self-portraits; and paintings that conflate classical Japanese techniques with Abstract Expressionist tropes, science-fiction, manga, and Buddhist and Shinto imagery, Murakami investigates the role of faith amid the inexorable transience and trauma of existence.
That’s right: it’s heavy.
Gold Leaf Mural with Karajishi (Detail)
Also, there are lots of skulls.
Not long after we entered the gallery, an elderly gentleman approached me and asked what I thought of the art. When I told him I thought it was just fantastic, he went off on an elaborate rant about how he didn’t like it at all because Murakami puts too much stuff on the canvas. Then he went on about that for a while, citing artists like M. C. Escher, who expressed sophisticated visual concepts without putting “too much stuff” on the canvas, whatever.
Platinum Leaf Mural with Karajishi
When he finally came up for air, I offered my opinion that perhaps Murakami’s fans appreciate the high level of detail in the paintings. That couldn’t be possible, he insisted, because there was just too much stuff going on, “too many ideas.” I’m certainly all about having a lively conversation with someone over differing opinions concerning contemporary art, but if you start telling me that what I think is wrong, well, that’s where I am going to shut you down.
This is the painting I stared at for fifteen minutes while Mr. Too Much Stuff on the Canvas chewed my ear off.
Eventually, Geoffrey appeared and, after I caught his eye and mouthed the words “help me” in his general direction, I was rescued. At that moment, I admit I was thinking about that episode of Seinfeld, where Elaine and Jerry, upon arriving at a party, agree on a hand gesture that they will use to signal each other from across the room if they are being monopolized in conversation by someone who’s driving them insane. Because life imitates art.
Red Demon
Blue Demon
Too much stuff on the canvas. What a bunch of bullshit. If he didn’t like the art, why was he there? I got yer Too Much Stuff on the Canvas right here.
Mr. Dob with a bunch of stuff!
See how Murakami puts himself in the art. So cute.
And also, this little guy.
Of course, Murakami was in the house, because he is awesome like that. Here he is standing in front of a mural depicting those Arhats I mentioned earlier. He took the time to pose for photos with everyone, what a guy!
He is always smiling and has the best hats!
Here’s some more stuff we liked!
Impressive.
Here you see Murakami do something a bit different with his signature smiling face flowers. The black and platinum fields on each canvas are embossed with the imprint of hundreds of skulls.
Invoking the Vitality of a Universe Beyond Imagination (Statue of the Artist), 2014
Must See Art: Go Now!
In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow by Takashi Murakami will be on Exhibit Through January 17th, 2015 at Gagosian Gallery, Located at 555 West 24th Street, In the Chelsea Gallery District.
