photo Mauren M Evans for Financial Times.
Last week I got to attend an artist talk with Tracey Emin at New York Academy of Art as she was interviewed by writer and critic Jerry Saltz. It was wonderful to see her in person and hear how her life had been affected by cancer, and how she is motivated, a fire under her, to make the most of her remaining productive years.
Read the article here on Isadore&Dunn Gallery.
I’m Here, I’m Alive — Financial Times
Margo Sarkisova, Black Sun Rising, 2022
Isadore&Dunn Art Gallery, (for whom I am a co-founder) put up a show this season from Margo Sarkisova, an Assyrian artist from Ukraine who has had to deal with life under attack from Russia’s full scale invasion in February. The work reflect the anxiety of an artist whose world is on its head, from a time where her future and her safety were very uncertain.
We thank her for sharing these prints and her experience in the hopes that it sheds more light on the real human experience of living through such a difficult situation.
See the show here.
George Condo is an American painter and artist. He lives in New York.
He talks about Picasso and early 20th century artists rebelling against his classical training… for Condo painting in the 80’s it was all about rebelling against abstraction. Back to figurative image making.
Produced by DressCode
Director Dan Covert
The fact that most people don’t understand what graphic design means… has that helped you?
Yes, ‘cause if you decide to define something for yourself it helps if other people don’t have a definition for it. I understood early on that if I call myself a designer I can do whatever I want.
I can direct a commercials, I can do an animation I can create installations in museums, I can have shows I can do all these things.
For years I’ve held up Ray and Charles Eames for their amazing ability, as Designers, to do whatever is they want. Direct a film? Yes. Design a typeface? yes. A Chair? A house? Yes of course. A pattern, a bicycle? for sure. Anything. Everything.
This guy gets it. This is my goal, my foil against specialization. If it is ideas, creative, aesthetics, storytelling? Yes, in fact, I can.
Helen Almeida is a Portuguese artist and photographer who was active creating surreal photography and collage from the 1967 on into the 80's.
Her work plays with the line between the art and the viewer, breaking the forth wall, acknowledging the medium. Playing with expectations. It also makes the artist herself, the subject of the work. Another boundary to play against.
There is no difference between the work and artist's body. In her work, a woman's image is always present, but the image is transformed in a painting or drawing. Almeida avoided creating self-portraits. Rather, "My work is my body, my body is my work." "I am the canvas."[5] Her work has been described as "halfway between a performance (capturing an instant), and body art (the body itself as the absolute protagonist).[6]
More:
Marilyn Minter
Last year I had the opportunity to see PRETTY/DIRTY at the Brooklyn Museum I had gone to the museum for something else entirely, but wandered into this show and it floored me. These large scale images eight feet, ten feet across. Paintings on Aluminum panel, photoreal based on amazingly lush and layered photographs. Video of high heeled feet smashing glass ornaments, water, paint and pearls.
There’s a lot to go into the sex positive feminism of these works, or the combining of dirty rough grit with beauty, and what beauty actually is. What our relationships are to our own sexuality the artifice of makeup and dress. I honestly should have to read more interviews and more from the artist directly but for now suffice it to say that these works are technically impressive and undeniably powerful.
Yuri Schwedoff is a Russian artist and painter. These works seem to mostly be digital, but they are rendered with a high degree of realism. They are dark and atmospheric. Fantastical stuff. Very fun.
I don’t know where or if photography plays into his workflow, but it seems like it must, at least as reference for faces, poses etc. Or maybe he is just that skilled at knowing how light plays on things. I know for me personally, if I’m drawing from a live model or a photograph, there are always details and features that show up that I would totally miss if I am drawing purely from my mind. Things from my head look cartoony and odd. Its not the same. But certainly with practice you can develop a knowledge of anatomy and color and light that gets you to realistically imagine most anything.
Charlie Immer is a painter. He lives in Maryland.
'My concepts come from my fascination with anatomy and my love of candy and toys. I have so much fun creating the blood and bones of my characters. The contrast of the smooth bodies and the complex systems beneath spilling out is very appealing to me. As I’m painting I also try to assign flavors to my characters like blueberry and green apple.'
From his interview on wow x wow
I love these paintings. There is very creative world building going on within them. A sort of logic of how these undead hordes of candy-coated skeletons exist and co-mingle. They are all cute and some are genuinely gross. Genuinely disturbing. It's awesome. Perfectly crossing fantasy, surrealism, cartoons and like a photo-real still life awareness of materials and color a classic oil painter. Very unique, very fun work. And the colors are just mouth watering.
Esad Ribic is a painter from Croatia.
I've recently read Thor, the Unworthy (Coipel) and Thor God of Thunder, The God Butcher (Ribic) comics and I am blown away by the quality of the art on each page. A lot of this work is comprised of very strong compositions and watercolor, which in many instances show a sort of greyed down, washed out color into the shadows. A suggestion of atmosphere and depth that you seldom see. Comics tend to lean heavily on black, and fill in colors underneath. But these paintings are fading away, into the distance, and yet still remain dynamic and strong. Striking.
Amazing surreal paintings from Martine Johanna.
Martine Johanna a painter and artist from Amsterdam.
Alberto Mieglo. Spanish painter and concept artist. Notable works include visdev for Tron Uprsing and the Beatles Rockband Open (which is how I first found his work). Simply stunning.
Michael Carson has an amazing sense of color and contrast in these portraits. He's injecting heat into shadows and muted down washed out greys across heavy saturated spaces. They feel a bit like really beautifully overexposed film slides. I am fascinated by this use of color. Wonderful stuff.
