Contemporary Art and Culture
Featured Artist
Multi-disciplinary artist Kahori Kamiya uses in her sculptures a wide range of materials and techniques to explore oppositions like suffering and healing, beauty and grotesque. Her current sculptures focus on motherhood, especially on breastfeeding.
Continue reading “Kahori Kamiya – Sur/Reality at Amos Eno”
Johanna Strobel’s mind-bending multi-media sculptural installations at GiG Munich resonate with an urgent longing for an orderly system while a sense of entropy surfaces simultaneously. Plug going into socket, red and blue lights turning on and off—hint at an unstable world where information is lost through failing USB cables and unreliable mnemonic devices.
Continue reading “Low Affinity: Johanna Strobel at GiG Munich”
High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery in Colorado Springs, features 20 distinct chapters of Lombardi’s career, with artworks spanning nearly five decades. Curated by T. Michael Martin, Director of the Clara M. Eagle Gallery at Murray State University in Kentucky, the exhibition highlights the common thread throughout Lombardi’s work—an interest in blending qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, through experimentation with various media. Lombardi’s life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (1939) at a very young age and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zap Comix in 1968. Curator T. Michael Martin says, “Lombardi’s masterful mix of high and low culture is as current as the day it was created, showing how little the aesthetics of human behavior have changed. In some ways, Lombardi’s distortions are a more truthful look at society than our daily facade of polite policy and political correctness, especially in the way we prompt contention, as Lombardi offers a much-needed change and disruption through his unique sense of humor.”
Continue reading “High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery”
The group show Nice to See you Again at Underdonk features work by ten artists whose paintings, sculptures, and photographs address the loaded meaning of the outdoors during the pandemic—a shared sense of longing for the openness of the outdoors while simultaneously also craving for the warmth of the indoors. The show is organized by Leonora Loeb and Keisha P:rioleau-Martin and runs from October 30 th through November 20 th , 2021.
Continue reading “Nice to See you Again at Underdonk”
In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.
Continue reading “Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU”
Installation view, Jim Condron (front), Ilse Sorensen Murdock (back)
At first glance, Jim Condron’s whimsical sculptures and Sørensen Murdock’s landscape paintings are an unexpected match for a two-person exhibition. Yet, in Toss, the current show at Platform Project Space, artist and curator Elizabeth Hazan made it into an engaging duet. The show runs the gamut from landscape paintings on canvas to paintings and sculptures made of scavenged materials, but regardless of the used media, both artists prioritize color, texture, and composition.
Continue reading “Jim Condron and Ilse Sørensen Murdock – Toss at Platform Project Space”
The Hanover based artist Franziska Warzog makes textile sculptures characterized by bold shapes and vivid colors reminiscent of patterns in nature. As a daughter of two visual artists, she was introduced to design principles since early on.
Continue reading “Franziska Warzog: The Joy of Tactility”
Punto in Aria, Patricia Miranda’s solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center, features monumental textile- based sculpture and installations in the gallery space, as well as a site-specific lace installation on the venerable tree outside. In addition to Miranda’s artworks, the show includes items from the artist’s collection, such as panels and glass gilded with vintage and inherited gold leaf depicting lace patterns. Miranda’s work involves a rigorous research into historic material practices in context of women’s labor, ritual, and the environment. The show runs through November 7th, 2021.
Continue reading “Punto in Aria at Garrison Art Center”
Chicago based artist Rita Grendze draws, sculpts and makes large scale installations that bring the two and three dimensional forms together in imaginative ways. She creates visceral environments utilizing mostly found materials, ranging from music sheets to textiles.
Continue reading “Rita Grendze: Material Exploration”
Whilst The Factory Project runs through the most commercially driven week of the London art calendar, Frieze week, it is championed as a non-profit museum scale multi-disciplinary exhibition that has been produced by the duo Thorp Stavri with the aim of amplifying underrepresented voices of emerging to mid-career artists and curators, offering them the opportunity to exhibit new work without the constraints of commercial bias. It is set to open from October 9th to the 22nd, showcasing 10 exhibitions by 10 curators and over 110 artists within the former Tate & Lyle 67,640 sq ft warehouse and yard complex at Thameside Industrial Estate by City Airport. ” We’ve been thinking of the project as a sort of music festival, where you can travel from stage to stage (exhibition to exhibition), catching your favorite acts while discovering loads of new ones,” The Factory Project producers say.
Continue reading “The Factory Project during London Frieze Week”