Feb 15, 2013 | sculpture
“Shift” by Emil Alzamora, 2008
A torso emerges from the grass, made of rough white rock with his swaying left to right – a motion indicated by a dizzying technique in sculpture magic that records all the little individual moments while the head moves through space and creates a fluid connection between two heads that looks like a sleeker artistic version of The Matrix. The tumblr Like a Field Mouse titled the piece, “Not shaking the grass” which I thought was cute. But the sculpture is actually called “Shift,” created by Peruvian artist Emil Alzamora, whose portfolio contains surreal sculptures of the human form like this one that twist and elongate bodies in ways that question nearly everything, from consumer culture to the time space continuum.
“Ultima Thule” by Emil Alzamora, ceramic, 2007
My favorite were these stuck-in-time sculptures, which included “Ultima Thule” too – a man standing in two places, connected to his former self by the same kind of blur of motion that’s repeated here but creates a more basic, symmetrical representation of the same idea. The sculptures in this world experience every moment individually and forever, multiple consciousnesses frozen between two places – eternal but limited.
The slenderness of their bodies almost makes them seem like aliens, like a Modern sculptural version of the Mannerist style that painters raved about after the High Renaissance, where women had long fingers and necks that reached just a little too high. The baby Jesus in Parmigianino’s “Madonna with Long Neck” looks like he was stretched like taffy, his long body way too giant for a baby.
But in Alzamora’s sculptures, this elongation is refined and tailored, the ceramic pieces often shiny with glaze. Some bodies remain muscular but most are thin with a remoteness that brings an element of robot to the alien/human mix. Be careful to keep these aesthetics away from the robotics industry cause it would be a poetic, beautiful death if they took over the world.
See more of Alzamora’s work on his website here.
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Feb 14, 2013 | painting
Marco Grassi is an Italian artist working in Milan, and his artworks are all casual colorful interpretations of people – usually sexy women. Some of his styles are looser than others, letting the color scribble across or swath wherever they please. His lines are always perfect though, each knowing exactly where that body part would emerge from the sometimes empty, sometimes patterned background.
Each of these women have so much personality behind their simply drawn expressions, but it’s always some form of happiness: peace, excitement, and especially “come hither.”
The piece below was my absolute favorite: the girl closes her eyes with so much serenity, like she’s finally free of a what used to be an excruciatingly heavy burden. Her hair shines, picking up reflections of gold and yellow, and the horizontal wooden striped pattern covers her skin in purples and pinks, like colors coming in the wind. A beautiful trusting face beneath a reflective color filter, applied by the artist’s hand to accentuate parts of her face and body in purple and gold.
See more of Marco Grassi’s work on his website here.
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Feb 1, 2013 | installation, interviews, painting
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| Sophia Ainslie’s mural in progress on 1/30/13 at the Kingston Gallery |
On Wednesday I was lucky enough to meet with Sophia Ainslie, a South African artist who’s currently working on a mural at the Kingston Gallery in Boston’s South End. Right now I’m working on
an Artscope post about this new show “in person,” but I needed to write something else too because it was just so incredible to watch that mural come to life.
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| Mural with projection. |
Sophia had three trained assistants painting while I was there, two up on ladders filling in bright colored sections and one standing, tracing the lines coming from a projector. The projector contained a zoomed in section of the wall’s intended design, made with a computer that was used to combine works from “Fragments,” the drawing series Sophia has been working on for the past four years.
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| Sophia Ainslie (right) instructing an assistant. |
She made a number of murals from this same series last year, but this is the first time she’s ever used assistants. She told me she wanted to see how much of the work she could give away, kind of like Sol LeWitt but without giving it all up – more like Frank Stella she said. She wants the concept to be hers, but she was still very particular about how the assistants painted, she trained them and walked them through the process, overseeing the wall’s development every step of the way. “I’m a painter,” she said, “I’m seduced by the architecture of paint.”
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| Paper works for “in person” at the Kingston Gallery |
The lined sections of this feathered, almost camouflage-like design, were inspired by landscapes, but the ones seen beneath her feet so that she’s involved in what surrounds her. The colored bits are abstracted interpretations of her mother’s last X-ray, before she made the decision against surgery for cancer at the age of 82. Sophia has been developing this series since her mother’s passing in 2009, and now the horizontal large-scale medium of the mural is allowing for a release, “This is more about a letting go,” she said, “all the other images were vertical and more about the body. This is a release of her.”
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| Sophia Ainslie (right) instructing an assistant. |
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| Mural with finished design taped up. |
See more of Sophia’s work on her website here.
And read more about this show in my Artscope post!
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