3. February 2015
And here we go again… Mexico City´s „Fashion Week“ of the Art World is about to start. Many small and big events line up to celebrate contemporary art and it´s creators. One of the most famous events will be the Zona Maco, as Latin America´s most important contemporary art fair. But there will be many more shows and exhibitions to see, like the Salón Acme or the Material Art Fair, just to name a few…
This year Zona Maco presents more than a 100 exhibitors which will be separated into five sections: General, New Proposals, Zona Maco Sur, Modern Art, and Design we hopefully can expect some pleasant newcomers and surprises!!!
23. October 2014
For most of us clean and drinkable water is something so natural and almost boring, that we take it for granted. But for many many people it´s not… That´s why filmmaker Mary Jordan brought the The Water Tank Project to life. With the support of over 100 artists, among them famous ones like Ed Ruscha, Olaf Hayek, Jeff Koons and Barry McGee and many well-known sponsors this part art exhibition, part awareness campaign was launched this summer in New York City. Around 17.000 water tanks are used as canvas for urban art to remind the people of the importance to help fighting the global water crisis. And with a little bit of luck The Water Tank Project will soon be in your city too.
4. September 2014
And again, the French Galerie Itinerrance strikes with an awesome idea to unite the crème de la crème of today’s street art. The new project is called Djerbahood and takes place in a Tunisian village called Erriadh on the island of Djerba. 150 street artists gathered up to transform this sleepy village in an open-air museum. With a media partner like ARTE Creative and participants like ROA, Seth, Axel Void, INTI and Swoon it can´t go wrong. The documentary series „Welcome to Djerbahood“ on ARTE Creative shows 10 days in the life of the artists, creating, hanging out and having fun under the boiling sun of Tunisia. And check Djerbahood´s Facebook page for the newest murals.
10. July 2014
What a wonderful statement: „Painting is more than work, it is life; it calls upon instinct and demands relentless practice.“ This is what I call a dedicated artist. For Brazilian-born Marcelo Daldoce „art making is a calling, study, leisure, therapy and pleasure.“ And we can all be part of it while enjoying his marvelous watercolor paintings. But they are technically more than just paintings.
Because after the actual act of painting, the artist starts to fold his work in geometric patterns and by doing this he withdraws its two-dimensionality. His work comes to life and the figures in it seem to literally live in the paintings as if they inhabit it, like a house or rather a beautiful home created by an outstanding artist.
1. July 2014
At some point we grew out of being surrounded by our beloved teddy bears. But what to do with the cuddly companions you shared your childhood with? Argentine artist Agustina Woodgate has the answer: Colorful plushy rugs!!!
By using uncountable toy animal skins she creates enormous and complex mandala-like rugs that delight all age groups. And what a wonderful reincarnation for all the abandoned teddies people just threw away once they felt too old for them. But Woodgate not only ties rugs, her main focus is the interplay between human beings and their environment usually visualized through objects, context-based installations, performance & event-based projects.
25. June 2014
Surrealism was an epoch making new style back in the in the early 1920s, being characterized by the dreamlike landscapes and unrealistic compositions of it´s works. But this art style is still alive, evolved and re-interpreted by many talented artists around the world. Like Korean-born Jung Yean Min who was mainly inspired by Hieronymus Bosch.
Her work aims to be disturbing by integrating a familiar world with a strange one and the other way round. Abandoning time and reality her bizarre landscapes in often quite vulnerable colors offer us am end-of-the-world scenery that we could call magic realism if we don´t like to use the word Surrealism.
5. June 2014
If Michelangelo would have known how sculpturing will evolve during the next almost 500 years, he would probably died of a heart attack before even finishing David… But that´s Zeitgeist and it´s important to go and try new things. Like Italian-trained sculptor Alasdair Thomson who almost exclusively works with marble. And in this case by creating a series of flowing garments. The elegance of this work is that a hard and cold material like marble seems to be so floating and delicate that it´s almost impossible to believe it´s made of stone. But Thomson handled this material so well, that the final works actually looks like the textile originals he borrowed from his friends to use them as models.
13. May 2014
When we think about tulle, the first image that usually pops up in our heads is the one of a ballerina’s tutu. But not in the case of Benjamin Shine. He actually creates almost photorealistic portraits made of only a single sheet of this very delicate fabric.
Portraying mainly icons like Elisabeth Taylor and Princess Diana he transforms this quite unusual material into a three-dimensional painting that has a look and feel of art made with paintbrush or smoke. And this by only folding and ironing the sheet until a face appears, detailed as a drawing. One of his probably most known pieces is the black tulle work made in collaboration with Givenchy that was published almost everywhere in the fashion world.
5. May 2014
That all earthly things come to an end is an open secret, but how society handles murder and crime is another subject. A subject that Columbian artist Andrés Orjuela investigates to turn into amazing art projects. One of them was the intervention of the front pages of „Alarma!“, a Mexican crime magazine. By modifying the covers the artist created awareness of the merciless interaction and handling of death.
But the artist also approaches death in a less shocking way. For instance in “Edén” where Orjuela collected beautiful but completely desiccated flowers at the markets of Xochimilco (Mexico City) to document their fleeting beauty. Both projects reflect hat life can be very brutal. And once dead occurred, both, the corpses and the flowers, get unmasked, packed up in black plastic bags, ready to be forgotten and thrown away. But instead it should remind us of the fact that beauty fades and life is transient, but still very precious.
27. April 2014
Even though I follow Maya Hayuk´s art for years I never featured her art on this blog – time to change this: During the last years Hayuk became a real star of the contemporary art scene… Her numerous massively scaled murals of crisscrossing fluorescent and pastel-hewn stripes are spread all over the world and her psychedelic, colorful and vibrant paintings have been exhibited in countless exhibitions and museums.
But she´s not only producing art in the streets and her studio in Brooklyn, but has as well curated several exhibitions herself and created album covers for bands like TV on the Radio, The Beastie Boys and Devendra Banhardt.
And here we go again… Mexico City´s „Fashion Week“ of the Art World is about to start. Many small and big events line up to celebrate contemporary art and it´s creators. One of the most famous events will be the Zona Maco, as Latin America´s most important contemporary art fair. But there will be many more shows and exhibitions to see, like the Salón Acme or the Material Art Fair, just to name a few…
