Blinding Berlin: ‘Pan’ by Johann Besse
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Whitewash // Nicholas Alan Cope
Whitewash by Nicholas Alan Cope
Nicholas Alan Cope's photographs evoke a unique vision of Los Angeles and its contrasts as seen exclusively through its everyday architecture.
Searching for the sublime core of the city's true nature, Cope strips away the extraneous, and focuses on the sheer beauty and simplicity of the cityscape. To an outsider, the profound cultural, historical, and architectural imprint of the City of Angels can be lost amongst the unsightly sprawl of stucco, strip malls, and irrelevant adornment.
While the sunlight can be unforgiving and harsh, bleaching the landscape into a pale hue, the allure, for Cope, lies in the consistency and ubiquity of the buildings combined with the severity of the light accentuating the dramatic elegance of the architecture. Whitewash utilizes the whitest whites, the blackest blacks, and the modern and stark architecture of an idealized future that never arrived to tell the visual story of LA's uniquely conflicted soul.
Raised in Maryland, Nicholas moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and attended Art Center College of Design. Since graduating Nicholas has worked for a number of commercial and editorial clients while also working on personal projects. His first book Whitewash was released by powerHouse Books in April of 2013.
Words and images: Courtesy of Nicholas Alan Cope
Master of Plaster // Rachel Whiteread
Master of Plaster // Rachel Whiteread
Rachel Whiteread studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. Using plaster, rubber and resin, she makes sculptures of the spaces in, under and on everyday objects. Her work operates on many levels. It captures and gives materiality to the sometimes unfamiliar spaces of familiar life (bath, sink, mattress or chair), transforming the domestic into the public; it fossilises everyday objects in the absence of human usage and it allows those objects to stand anthropomorphically for human beings themselves.
Her choice of subject-matter reflects an awareness of the intrinsically human-scaled design of the objects with which we surround ourselves and exploits the severing of this connection, by removal of the object's function, to express absence and loss. Her early work allowed autobiographical elements. Later works move towards the expression of a universal human position, and their titles become correspondingly more prosaic.
She won the Turner Prize in 1993.
She lives and works in London.
Text: Tate.org
Photography: Courtsey of Tate.org, Gagosian Gallery
A++ // Matteo Cremonesi
A++ exhibition by Matteo Cremonesi
A photographic practice grounded on close-ups, which pays a special attention to creating synthetic, impersonal, austere, ephemeral, formally balanced, polite images, that describe and express the detail, what’s minute, the “skin” or thin surface of things over and over. Attributing and assigning to such tendency for formalization the ability to emotionally narrate attitudes and the meaning of a discourse, or maybe, more simply, just a “sensitivity”.
Cremonesi proposes a reconfiguration of landscape photography, which, from the static take onto the common object moves towards a surfacing practice, expressed through the innocence and ambiguity of the latter. It is also framed by the effects of patinas and by the helplessness of the look.
"Sculptures" is a series of works composed of collections (Bin, Printer, Photocopier, Washer, Camera, Mirror) of photographic images of everyday objects. The images report subjects, shapes, materials. Lingering on them through repeated formal cuts to investigate their characteristics. The search for an ideal dimension of the subject together with the attempt to look at it as if recording natural subjects becomes a chance to carry out a perceptual reflection with the purpose of producing a representation of the contemporary technological habitat which could establish a connection with the very perception of what is “natural”.
A++ by artist Matteo Cremonesi at Jarach Gallery in Venice.
Still on till November 8th.
Photography: Courtsey of Matteo Cremonesi
Cubes // Sou Fujimoto
Many Small Cubes by Sou Fujimoto
Architect: Sou Fujimoto
Location: Paris
Year: 2014
Photographs: Marc Domage
"The floating masses of Many Small Cubes create a new experience of space, a rhythm of flickering shadows and lights, as being under the trees."
"The architecture forms one unified element whose balance and stability are carefully designed: the position of each cube and each tree participates to the overall stability, yet reaching a random-like feeling, bringing the whole architecture closer to nature."
Sou Fujimoto
Underground Spa // Carmody Groarke
// Kivik Pavilion by David Chipperfield + Antony Gormley
// Kivik pavilion by David Chipperfield + Antony Gormley
David Chipperfield Architects and artist Antony Gormley have designed the Kivik Art Centre in Österlen, Sweden. The concrete structure consists of three parts with equal volumes: an enclosed space in the base, an open viewing platform further up and a tower with spiral stairs leading to an 18m high viewing platform.
Gormley says: "I see the work as a meditation on the status of sculpture and architecture and their respective relationships with light, mass and space using the material most associated with modernity: concrete."
Kivik Pavilions is a project that combines architecture with art and design. Fundamental are issues of environmental solutions, a symbiosis of the landscape and the pavilion, and corporate partnership with industries in the region. The latest pavilion was created by architect Petra Gipp and visual artist Runa Islam in 2011
For more about Antony Gormley check our recent post here.
Photographs by åke e:son lindman + gerry johansson
// Installation Art by Antony Gormley
// Installation Art + Sculptures by Antony Gormley
British artist Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has been widely exhibited throughout international exhibitions.
The objects hover between being architecture and being an image of architecture. Contained objects in a defined internal space.
In the Ropac Gallery installation, all the lights were removed and the frames were painted with two layers of phosphorescent paint that absorbed light during the day and emitted it at night. In the night-mode the work assumes an unstable position between the virtual and the real.
For more news check his page for an insight into his art practice and the studio.
all images courtesy of Antony Gormley
// Precise Poetry: Lina Bo Bardi's Architecture
// Precise Poetry: Lina Bo Bardi's Architecture
Precise Poetry: Lina Bo Bardi's Architecture, a new documentary by Austrian director Belinda Rukschcio about Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who created poetry through architectural precision. A journey through her most important architectural projects, told in a series of interviews by Bo Bardi's colleagues and friends, recount the social political constraints and personal events that would lead to the timelessness of her work.
check for all upcoming screening dates precise-poetry.com
// Muller van Severen
// Muller van Severen
"Muller van Severen" is another great design export from Belgium.
The design of Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen, who are also both practicing as visual artists, is something in between art and furniture. They call it a 'furniture project'.The duo met in Gent, where Fien was studying photography and Hannes plastics. No wonder their collections can be seen as pieces of art and remind of sculptural objects.
The furniture is made of a thin wire structure, that frames the sculpture and has a transparent character. Like 'drawings in a space' thats how the designer like to call it. The minimalistic use of material and construction leads to clear forms and an own timeless aesthetic.
We are pretty sure that we will hear a lot more about their great designs in the future!
If you are also in love with their work, try to step by the new exhibition of their design at Gallery Valerie_Traan in Antwerp till 25 of October!
photography by Muller van Severen