Jessica Stockholder

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcD0rLQWk0

Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction materials—bricks, concrete, plywood, and sheetrock. Bringing the vibrant, Technicolor plastic products of consumer culture to her work, she later adds painted areas of bright purple, turquoise, pink, orange and green, calibrating each color for maximum optical and spatial impact. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures, and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind, and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities—abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire.

Born in Seattle, Washington, and trained at Yale University, Jessica Stockholder creates architectural scenarios and sculptural assemblages of a highly pictorial quality. Her work fuses found objects—ranging from construction materials to furniture and textiles, as well as everyday discarded household items. Stockholder’s work challenges the distinction between painting and sculpture, object and environment, decorative beauty and practical use. Her series of freestanding assemblages begun in 1988 with Kissing the Wall aesthetically inscribe themselves somewhere between home and Home Depot by introducing an air of animated domesticity and privacy into the anonymity of the gallery. Physically and emotionally engaging, they are exuberant visual essays on notions of private and public spheres and the conflation of private and public consumption.

Nancy Rubins

Nancy Rubins has been creating visually stunning sculptures out of salvaged industrial and consumer goods including mattresses, trailers, hot water heaters, airplanes and small appliances since the late 1970s. In her hands, such everyday objects become unfamiliar and astonishing, as they are trussed and finessed into heroic forms that defy both gravity and our expectations for how these things should behave. The sculptures may appear precarious but are, in fact, delicately balanced and precisely engineered. While her works are often read as social commentary on consumer society and technological obsolescence, Rubins is most interested in the formal properties, availability, and utilitarian beauty of the particular items with which she works. As she explains, "When I first starting collecting objects after graduate school, it was the quantity and variety that attracted me--and the idea that I could go to Goodwill and pay fifty cents for a whole carload of televisions with marvelous plastic consoles, antennas, and wiring. They had both an amazing appeal and an inherent sadness to them."
Nancy Rubins' ebuilient sculpture seems to drag everything along with it. In its explosive, turbulent gestures, Rubins, work can be aligned to the esthetic of the Baroque: theatrical in effect, her sprawling sculptures create a sense of vertigo. All curves and diagonals, Rubins, works form jagged, spiraling silhouettes that frustrate any attempt to locate a frontal or primary view. Her work is outsize, crackling with so much energy that it seems to continually shift and churn, to temporarily defy gravity.
In her attention-grabbing sculptures, Nancy Rubins achieves an unexpected monumentality with such gnarly mediums as wrecked airplane parts, derelict mobile homes, discarded appliances and trussed mattresses stuffed with gooey, rotting cakes. Beyond the poetic associations of their odd materials, critics have seen the sculptures as social commentary on topics ranging from environmental pollution to sexual abuse and eating disorders. Such far-flung interpretations, however, only scratch the surface of Rubins's much broader enterprise.

Remco de Fouw

Remco de Fouw is a contemporary Irish artist in mid career, living and working in Dublin, whose work will be familiar to anyone who has travelled on the Naas Bypass. At this stage 'Perpetual Motion' sited at the Naas Bypass, co-created with Rachel Joynt has reached iconic status as a landmark on the Irish landscape. His other commissions include 'The Green Machine' in Temple Bar and 'Quintessometry' at Waterford Regional Hospital.

Remco is a prolific artist who has won a number of prestigious awards including the international Alexander Wejchert Award. He has exhibited at major visual arts events in Ireland and has had several solo exhibitions at national galleries such as The Project in Temple Bar and Limerick City Gallery of Art.

As a full time professional Artist, public commissions make up the main body of his work. Among these are 'Quintessometry' at Waterford Genereal Hospital. 'First Conundrum' at Festival Square, Edinburgh International Conferance Center. 'Gods Navel' at Charlotte plc Southampton. 'Silent Witness' at Meath county buildings, Ash Bourne. 'Eye Witness' at the N26 Ballina and 'A fracture in time', Castleblayney bombing Memorial Co. Monaghan

Rachel Joynt

Rachel Joynt (Born 1966 in County Kerry) is an Irish sculptor who has created some prominent Irish public art. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1989 with a degree in sculpture.
Rachel Joynt is preoccupied by the historical texture of place and in her work she often seems to expose or memorialize the past as a substrate of the present. Her commissions include People's Island (1988) in which brass footprints and bird feet criss-cross a well-traversed pedestrian island near Dublin's O'Connell Bridge. She collaborated with Remco de Fouw to make Perpetual Motion (1995), a large sphere with road markings which stands on the Naas dual carriageway and featured as a visual shorthand for leaving Dublin in The Apology, a Guinness advert. She made the 900 underlit glass cobblestones which were installed in early 2005 along the edge of Dublin's Liffey river; many of these cobblestones contain bronze or silver fish.

Works in collections and on display

• People's Island (1988) on the pedestrian island south of O'Connell Bridge, Dublin
• A pavement piece depicting Viking crafts, outside Christ Church cathedral, Dublin.
• Solas na Glasrai (The grocers' light) corner of Moore Street and Parnell Street, Dublin.

A brass light standard hung with casts of fish, fruit and vegetables

• Perpetual Motion (1995) (with Remco deFouw) Naas bypass, Co. Kildare.

RTE radio show about Perpetual Motion

• A marble seat with inset bronze book at the Clare library headquarters in Ennis.

Clare Library historical webpage

• Noah's Egg (2004) University College Dublin Veterinary School, Belfield, Dublin

Press release describing Noah's Egg

• A series of underlit glass cobblestones along the Liffey campshires (2005).

Press release describing the Rachel Joynt cobblestones

David Nash

David Nash is known for works in wood and shaping living trees. His large wood sculptures are sometimes carved or partially burned to produce blackening. His main tools for these sculptures are chainsaw and an axe to carve the wood and a blowtorch to char the wood.
He also makes land art, of which the best known is Wooden Boulder, begun in 1978. This work involves a journey of large wooden sphere from a Welsh mountainside to the Atlantic Ocean. Wooden Boulder is a large wooden sphere carved by Nash in the North Wales landscape and left there to weather. Over the years the boulder has slipped, rolled and sometime been pushed through the landscape following the course of streams and rivers until finally it was last seen in the estuary of the river Dwyryd. Since then, it probably washed out to the Irish Sea, the sculptor has no idea of its location, and enjoys the notion that wood which grew out of the land will finally return to it.
Nash also makes sculptures which stay in the landscape. For example, Ash Dome is a ring of ash trees he planted in 1977 and was trained to form a domed shape. It's sited at a secret location somewhere in Snowdonia and whenever it's filmed. Crews are taken there by a circuitous route to guard its security.
In the late 1980s Nash worked at the Djerassi resident artist program, near Woodside, California, where he used Redwood and Madrone wood for his sculptures. Nash has worked with schools, university groups, and teachers throughout his career. He has created a varied body of work in which the relationship between man and nature is a central theme. His artistic ethos has been one of direct, physical involvement with his chosen material - wood - and the landscape.
Since 1967 his sculpture has formed two distinctive groupings; sculptures which connect with the outside, the landscape of making and placements, and works which are presented inside, within and in relation to, architectural environments. The inorganic, non-allusive sculptures that Nash makes using unseasoned wood are based on the universal geometry of the cube, the sphere and the pyramid. He uses the directions of mark-making to his favoured forms vertical for the cube, horizontal for the sphere, and diagonal for the pyramid. Although the innate character of the material is taken into account, and allowed to affect the outcome, he never allows it to dictate the sculpture's final identity. Nash even uses burners to char the wood, once again transforming the material through blackening.
Nash took a different approach to carving. Rather than chisels and abrasives, he uses chain saws and a blowtorch. As his show of recent work at Haines proves once again, he has dexterity with a chain saw that nearly defies belief. In "Downpour", he has cut roughly parallel diagonal grooves into a 7 1/2-foot-tall slab of lime wood. He has blackened the bottom of the slab, so the piece as a whole suggests an image of slashing rain on soaked earth. Internal contradictions improbably give the piece content: the sense of motion coaxed from a totemic ally static piece of material, scorching creating the impression of waterlogged ground and the blatant evidence of process producing an image, which typically blots out awareness of process. Sometimes Nash's procedures merely set a process in motion. In "Crack and Warp Column" and the seven elements of "Crack and Warp Wall" , Nash made evenly spaced horizontal cuts in sundried wood columns, and let the exposed layers split and bend at random as moisture leaves them. The directness of Nash's techniques and the familiarity of his material can leave his work looking as offhand as folk art. But anyone who knows modern sculpture will see Nash's familiarity with it winking from his work. Merely think of the segmented verticals in "Crack and Warp Wall" as spinal columns and the memory of Henri Matisse's wall-hugging bronze "Backs" rushes in, though they are modelled and cast, rather than carved. Several of Nash's new pieces let us see a surrealistic side not always apparent in his work.
"Walking Manzanita", an upended tree, truncated and stripped to its thickest branches, looks like a headless, multiplexed something gingerly picking its way across the floor on cloven hooves. Nash has striated each branch with lengthwise cuts to enhance their hint of fluid animation. "Walking Manzanita" also puns on the titles of Alberto Giacometti's late "Walking Man" sculptures, which echo back to the incipient stride in archaic Greek carved figures where historians see the roots of classical art. Some of Nash's pieces fail to rise above feats of power-tool carving, but his best work displays a relentless—and occasionally fulfilled—ambition to connect with both the ancient and modern energies of his art form.

Andreas Gursky

 

http://www.ubu.com/film/gursky_world.html  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drn1EUz_LOg

He was born in Leipzig in 1955, but he grew up in Düsseldorf, the son of a commercial photographer. In the early 1980s, at Germany's State Art Academy, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gursky received strong training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher,^[1] a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial machinery and architecture. A similar approach may be found in Gursky's methodical approach to his own, larger-scale photography. Other notable influences are the British landscape photographer John Davies, whose highly detailed high vantage point images had a strong effect on the street level photographs Gursky was then making, and to a lesser degree the American photographer Joel Sternfeld.

Career and style

Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed. Writing in The New Yorker magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable." In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school. In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works:

"The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky...I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic color prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance."

Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own." Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.
Gursky's Dance Valley festival photograph, taken near Amsterdam in 1995, depicts attendees facing a DJ stand in a large arena, beneath strobe lighting effects. The pouring smoke resembles a human hand, holding the crowd in stasis. After completing the print, Gursky explained the only music he now listens to is the anonymous, beat-heavy style known as Trance, as its symmetry and simplicity echoes his own work—while playing towards a deeper, more visceral emotion.
As of early 2007, Gursky holds the record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His print 99 Cent II, Diptych, sold for GBP 1.7 million (USD $3.3 million) at Sotheby's, London.

Michael Warren

www.michaelwarren.ie
Michael Warren (born 1950 in Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland) is an Irish sculptor who produces site-specific public art.
Inspired by Oisín Kelly, his art teacher at St Columba's College, Michael Warren studied at Bath Academy of Art, at Trinity College, Dublin and, from 1971-75, at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. He now lives and works in Co. Wexford.
He has a number of very visible works in Ireland, including the large sweeping wood sculpture in front of the Dublin Civic Offices. Wood Quay, where the civic offices stand, was the centre of Viking Dublin and the sculpture evokes the form, and the powerful grace, of a Viking ship. It also reflects vertically the horizontal sweep of the nearby Liffey as it enters its bay. A complex balance of meanings matching a delicate, though massive, balance of substance is typical of his work. Warren himself describes the useful ambiguity of abstraction (Hill 1998)

"Whatever you might intend a form to suggest, people will find its significance from within their own culture, so that something that is read as a reference to Viking longboats in Dublin, is seen as evoking the art of calligraphy when viewed in Japan"

With Roland Tallon he created Tulach a' tSolais (Mound of Light), a memorial to the 1798 rebellion. Here, a room was hollowed out of a small hill; the room contains two abstract curved oak forms and is illuminated by natural light falling through a long slot in its ceiling and walls. Despite the unusual and abstract constitution of this memorial and despite the fraught political resonance of the rebellion, Tulach a' tSolais is popular and something of a local attraction. His Gateway in Dún Laoghaire is less popular with some local people calling for it to be removed.
At the northern entrance to the village of Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, is a sculpture by Michael Warren, depicting the thrones of the ancient seat of the Kings of South Leinster at Dinn Righ (The hill of the Kings). The Kings of Leinster lived near the village.

Work on display

• Gateway (2002) Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin
• A Pagan Place (1991) Encamp, Principality of Andorra
• Bronze Arch (2003) Gongju, Korea
• Tulach a' tSolais (1999) Oulart Hill, Co Wexford
• Throughway (1991) University College Dublin
• Beneath the 'bow (1991) Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
• Untitled (1985) College Park, Trinity College, Dublin.
• Wood quay (1995) Dublin Civic Offices.