10 Applicable Artworks About Hands

Almost everything we do is done with our hands. We type, eat, lift and hold with a palm surrounded by four dextrous fingers and a very useful thumb. Hands mean action – when they’re at work, so are we. Here, artists show us hands detached from the bodies they belong to so that we see them as our hands, our mother’s and our brother’s hands. Things as basic as body parts bring us together, show us what we have in common. These artworks give our hands imagined abilities we’d never have considered, letting us for a moment feel attentive, skilled, connected, trapped and powerful all at once.

The 16th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “The hand is the visible part of the brain.” These paintings and drawings and photographs let us see the outcome of what’s within.

1. Katarzyna

  Wolodkiewicz, Caress (2011)

[zl_mate_code name=”Orange Dynamic” label=”3″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”In a world of swirling brushstrokes, a single hand reaches down with fingers curled.

The hand carefully scratches a blue line against the orange, spreading its soft color deeper into a fire of orange and red.”]

hand2

[/zl_mate_code] Source: mydarkenedeyes.tumblr.com

 

 

2. Mary E. Bresciani, Radioactive

  (2013) 

[zl_mate_code name=”Green Dynamic” label=”4″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”Five fingers are laid out matter-of-factly before us in black and white.

We can see bones glowing underneath the skin because here we have x-Ray vision. “]

hand9

[/zl_mate_code] Source: unplu66ed.tumblr.com

 

 

3. Hong Sungchul, String

  Mirror (2009)

[zl_mate_code name=”Pink Dynamic” label=”1″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”In a photograph printed on elastic strings, two pairs of hands reach a cross the distance, grabbing wrists and doubling the bond by pulling gently, elegantly forward with the other hand. “]

hand4

[/zl_mate_code] Source: insolacion.tumblr.com

 

 

4. Shohei Otomo

[zl_mate_code name=”Blue Dynamic” label=”2″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”A hand that’s drawn in black and white makes the red elastic glow.

The rubber band is stretched around the thumb from pinky to index finger, locked and loaded with the potential energy to snap.”]

hand5

[/zl_mate_code] Source: insolacion.tumblr.com

 

 

5. Truls Espedal, The

   Return (2010)

[zl_mate_code name=”Orange Dynamic” label=”3″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”A tiny bird is coming in for a landing on an outstretched finger.

The hand emerges from the center of the canvas’ dark bottom, its palm in the exact middle of a green-brown background.”]

hand [/zl_mate_code] Source: fer1972.tumblr.com

 

 

6. Corinne Reid 

[zl_mate_code name=”Blue Dynamic” label=”2″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”This hand extends from the bottom in the same way, but it’s joined by a scratchy vine of black and grey that surrounds it and the pencil it holds.

Does the creepy vine carry the words for the pencil to write or prohibit them?”]

hand3

[/zl_mate_code] Source: insolacion.tumblr.com 

 

 

7. Daniel Grzeszkiewicz,

  I’m Back

[zl_mate_code name=”Green Dynamic” label=”4″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”A hand breaks through a wall, dramatically pulling itself through the hole it made.

The wall drips black and the hand is hunched forward like it’s on the prowl for more wall to break.”]

hand8

[/zl_mate_code] Source: perpetu8.tumblr.com

 

 

 

8. artist unknown

[zl_mate_code name=”Pink Dynamic” label=”1″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”Two pink hands melt in a sea of turquoise.

One is just fingers but the other is cut off at the wrist, stretching up to avoid the fate of becoming liquified pink.”]

hand1

[/zl_mate_code] Source: cmd-zeta.tumblr.com

 

 

9. Bethany LeAnne, Creating

  Disasters

[zl_mate_code name=”Orange Dynamic” label=”3″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”Two hands cup a lightening bolt that springs from a tiny glowing cloud.

There’s real power here, or at least a deep desire for it – a need to feel able to do more.”]

hand10

[/zl_mate_code] Source: unplu66ed.tumblr.com

 

 

10. Oriol Angrill Jordà, Hand by

   Hands (2007)

[zl_mate_code name=”Blue Dynamic” label=”2″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”A hand has hands for fingers.

Five different hands move and stretch from the same palm, like we’re looking into multiple dimensions of expression.”]

hand6

[/zl_mate_code] Source: insolacion.tumblr.com

 

 

 

 

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Google Homepage Honors Saul Bass

Graphic designer Saul Bass would have been 93 today. The pioneering artist brought design aesthetics to film, designing the title sequences of legendary movies like Vertigo and West Side Story. He created a style that still sticks in our brains decades later.

He worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, and for more than 40 years he brought his one-of-a-kind aesthetic to the big screen. The graphics in Catch Me if You Can and Mad Men pay homage to his style and innovation.

Today the Google homepage features a dynamic video that takes the word “Google” through each of Bass’ most iconic designs, beginning with the letters running together and apart from Psycho, and ending with the running clock from Around the World in 80 Days

Source: The Christian Science Monitor, Wikipedia

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Degas, Miss La La, & The Cirque Fernando at the Morgan Library & Museum

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York is transitioning two of their main galleries right now, so if you visit before May 10th, the only temporary installation you’ll find is the second floor room currently holding Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando. 

The entire exhibit is based on a single painting hung in the center of the back wall: Degas’ “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” painted in oil in 1879, and the only work Degas ever painted with a circus subject. As you walk clockwise around the room, you’re first greeted with the pastel and oil studies completed in preparation for the final work, but after you pass the painting, you find Henry Gabriel Ibels’ lithographs of circus rings from the 1860s, followed by late nineteenth century circus posters – two of which feature Miss La La.

Miss La La was an aerialist traveling with the Troupe Kaira who performed for Degas during their appearance at the Cirque Fernando in Paris from December 1878 to February of the following year. In the painting she’s performing one of her signature acts: gripping a rope with her teeth and flying through the air.

Photo May 03, 11 23 31 AM

 

Books lay open under glass in the gallery’s center – a novel about the circus that a friend of Degas wrote around the same time and glossaries of infamous circus performers and tricks of the trade. The exhibit ends with a far-reaching connection to Renaissance representations of the angels in ceiling paintings, calling Miss La La a “secular angel” because her occupation also involves people craning their necks to see her. The four brown wash drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo completed centuries before the rest of the exhibit’s work seemed like too obvious a filler, especially for an institution whose holdings lie predominantly in drawings.

As you leave the exhibit it hits you that the whole thing only takes up half of the room because its entrance is blocked off by large introductory walls. It’s difficult to curate an entire show around a singular work, especially when it’s the only one where the artist worked that subject matter. Seeing the different studies that led up to the final piece is definitely the highlight, but it could have been rounded out with paintings and studies from other artists who painted more circus scenes, even though their names might not have the booming resonance of da Vinci or Degas.

 

From left, The Trustees of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; Tate, London/Art Resource, New York; National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York. via NYTimes.

From left, The Trustees of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; Tate, London/Art Resource, New York; National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York. via NYTimes.

 

Photo May 03, 11 10 20 AM

Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Museum Miss La La around 1880. via NYTimes.

Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Museum
Miss La La around 1880. via NYTimes.

Photo May 03, 11 22 18 AM

Degas' "Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando" via Wikipaintings.

Degas’ “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” via Wikipaintings.

For more about the Morgan’s exhibit, see their website. 

 

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