Contemporary Art and Culture
The 2025 art fair season has descended upon us, and with it comes a myriad of activities. Amidst the hustle and bustle of moving around the cities to see what’s on view, there were many standouts at this year’s presentations at the Armory and Art on Paper.
Continue reading “Art Fair Highlights: The Armory and Art on Paper”
Out on the Main Line, the world of craft takes center stage at Wayne Art Center in two distinct but complementary shows. CraftForms 2024, 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft and Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, together invite viewers to contemplate the power of form, material, and cultural aesthetics. In Old City, at the Museum for Art in Wood, Mark Sfirri explores the many definitions of family through his exquisite woodworking in La Famiglia. Cerulean Arts Gallery and Studio in Center City pairs the dreamy drawings and paintings of two Philadelphia artists, Gary Grissom and Louise Vinueza, in A Day in The Life. Together, these four exhibitions offer a diverse range of artistic viewpoints from the global scope of contemporary craft to the exploration of family and nostalgia.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in January 2025”
In Running Line, on view at FORMah gallery, objects stripped of function take on new roles: charged, amorphous, and poetic. Israeli artist Noga Yudkovik-Etzioni creates a space where memory, material, and form converge through elongated installations on the floor and a series of small wall-mounted paper-based reliefs
Continue reading “Running Line: Noga Yudkovik Etzioni at FORMah Gallery”
Around six in the morning, Alaina Enslen scales the steps of her Hudson Valley home to the attic where she works. Skylights invite brightness into the whitewashed studio. A hotplate rests upon a wax-spattered tabletop; she turns it on, waiting until it reaches about 170°F. After five minutes, the surface is finally hot enough to melt pigmented beeswax, an integral ingredient in her paintings. She collages in an 11-inch by 14-inch sketchbook, teasing out new ideas with pieces of fabric and leftover monotypes. “I set no expectations for the work,” the artist insists. “It’s all about experiment and play.”
Continue reading “Time as Space: Alaina Enslen in The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery”
Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.
Continue reading “Kate Dodd: MVA Open Studios”
Todd Bartel came to serious collage because of an assignment he received on the first day of his first class as a freshman at RISD. He recalls the desks were strewn with magazines, and as soon as the course started, Professor Hardu Keck gave the students a prompt, “Create five collages that work with the following sentence: Surrealism is the chance happening of finding an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” Keck did not mention he was quoting Andre Breton, who was quoting Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He expected his students to work with the strangeness of visual combination and found imagery. That was Todd Bartel’s introduction to Surrealism and chance coupling. He fell in love with collage immediately, coming up with forty-five collages by the first week. One of the key elements that draws him to collage is that it can involve a vast array of analog and digital technologies. “I consider myself an Omni-coupler,” he says.
Continue reading “Todd Bartel: an Omni-coupler”
Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s richly layered drawings, prints, paintings and installations draw on her daily life as a mother, daughter, homemaker and artist living in New York. She grew up in Jaipur, India and came to the USA to complete her undergraduate art education at Cornell University. Here, she found herself working with many of the elements she had encountered in her daily life growing up in India — homes she lived in, her relationships, events, color, block prints, miniature and folk paintings.
Continue reading “Nandini Bagla Chirimar: Becoming Who We Are”
Malaysian born and New York based artist Padma Rajendran works in diverse media yet currently views paper and fabric as her primary materials. She highlights the portable nature of paper and fabric, along with their significance as “keepers of culture, comfort, and call upon the function of the decorative”. Padma Rajendran shares here some insight on her work, what brought her there and where she is heading from here.
Continue reading “Padma Rajendran – On Cultural Tenderness”
Bianca Severijns is a Dutch born artist who lives in Israel. Her sculptural installation range from wearable sculpture to wall relief made of paper. Through an elaborate process she utilizes this medium with remarkable skills to create simultaneously playful and thought provoking sculptures which evoke reflections on displacement, the meaning of a safe home, and coping mechanisms. For instance, her Blanket sculpture which is currently showing at the recently opened TLV Biennial 2020 particularly resonates with the angst during the pandemic. Since we have finalized the interview process before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we have recently re-visited our last question in order to bring her responses up to date.
Continue reading “Bianca Severijns - Paper Transformations”
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Morgan Jesse Lappin b. 1979 is a visual artist, entertainer, musician and image-maker Lappin first started creating collage art in 2007 for a clothing company creating original designs. In 2008, Lappin moved to Brooklyn and began working with paper to create contemporary collages. His art, like his mind, is a combination of comedy and chaos with elements of music, vintage horror and sci-fi. Lappin’s work ranges from seven-foot- long cartoon metropolises, to fictional album covers, to take-out Greek diner coffee cups embedded with tiny paper worlds. He uses nostalgic material from his childhood from the 80s, such as VHS Tape boxes, video game cartridges, and any other 80’s household items that could cause you to experience flashbacks. Having a background in collecting and curating, he set out to assemble some of his favorite collage artists from NYC, and so in 2013 the Brooklyn Collage Collective was born. The BCC has now exhibited all over the world and has a strong global presence amongst collage makers and collectors alike.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Morgan Jesse Lappin”