Month: October 2009

MARKO VUOKOLA

braskartblog

The works of The Seventh Wave are pairs of
photographs each with precisely the same cropping
and angle of view… The camera is on a tripod. I
first take one photograph, and after a while
another. I have wanted to vary the interval,
keeping it “unscientific” and even indefinite.
Anything between two seconds and six hours can
pass between the moments when the pictures were taken.

In some of the pairs, the difference can be seen
easily, while in others it is less obvious. Even
in the blink of an eye, many atoms will revolve,
a grasshopper can leap, and a glimmer of light can change place.”

This was how Marko Vuokola (born 1967) described
the works of The Seventh Wave in 2007. By that
time, the subjects of the images had ranged from
Finnish sea and lake scenes to the grounds of
Versailles, the earth and skies of Texas, and an
Audi dealership in Helsinki’s Herttoniemi suburb.
Since then, the series has been expanded with
images of paradise islands in Vietnam, an urban
landscape and the window of a Finnish apartment building.

A characteristic feature of Marko Vuokola’s work
is that he takes large numbers of pictures, which
he then sorts, selects and rejects until only one
pair, almost perfect, remains of each “theme”.

Marko Vuokola’s art is at once grand – addressing
the major basic issues of life – and restrained.
It is demanding and enduring, similar only to itself.

Since 1989, Marko Vuokola’s work has been in
dozens of exhibitions in Finland, Scandinavia,
other European countries, and in the United
States, Australia and Asia. He held his first
solo exhibition at Galerie Anhava in 1992.

Anhava

Shepard Fairey: Supply & Demand

braskartblog

Shepard Fairey, the Los Angeles-based street artist behind the red, white, and blue Obama campaign image that swept the globe, is the subject of an exciting new exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The 20-year retrospective, the first solo show of the artist’s work, explores the breadth of Fairey’s career.

In 1989 the first Andre the Giant has a posse sticker was created and the OBEY GIANT project was born. Twenty years later, Shepard Fairey has a solo retrospective exhibition at The Warhol. Within that time, Fairey has gone from artsy prankster and skateboarders’ underground hero to worldwide cultural phenomenon for his murals, fine art prints, and street art poster campaigns.

The Warhol Museum

Obey Giant

Barrão

Barrao

Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present the exhibition by Rio de Janeiro artist Barrão. This show, Barrão’s first in São Paulo since 1992, features ten new sculptures constructed through a process of gluing together the fragments of porcelain objects.

The artist began to work with appropriations of everyday objects in the 1980s. Since then, he has used household appliances, such as refrigerators, egg beaters and televisions, and more recently has begun to create sculptures with decorative porcelain, always subverting – with humor and irony – the original meaning of the objects.

Barrão groups pieces of the things he appropriates, gluing them together with epoxy resin and leaving the glued seams visible in the finished sculpture. As Luis Camilo Osório has stated, “some of the pieces can suggest new formattings, and the result arises from chance happenings along the way – purposeful and random acts go hand-in-hand.” The artworks are guided by classic sculptural questions, such as the concern for volumetrics. In all the sculptures there is a central cohesive volume from which the extremities extend.

Generally made with old and used commonplace objects, the sculptures are loaded with pop and kitsch references. There is no logical hierarchy among the objects; Barrão’s interest is focused on their forms, colors and sizes, and therefore an elephant, a skull, a Buddha, a teacup, a teapot or a little cat belong to the same classification.

In Delícia Tropical [Tropical Delicacy], a series of teacups, little vases, pots and pieces of decorative items with stamped fruit patterns are balanced to create a colorful and narrow 1.9-meter-high totem pole. At its top are four little ceramic parrots. Ninfas Derramadas [Spilled Nymphs] is made up of small sculptures of Greek goddesses with bare breasts arranged upside down. The delicate goddesses form a kind of white tail for the rest of the work, consisting of an accumulation of fragments of blue jugs and teacups.

Another “unforeseen conjoinment” is seen in Hospedeiros [Hosts], in which a ceramic dog has its head cut off and separated from its body, to which the artist glues a series of other ready-made objects, such as an elephant, a teapot and an umbrella handle.

His works evince a curious spirit that enjoys taking objects apart and then sticking them together in a way that confers a new sort of operation to them. With no regard for the household use or decorative function of these objects, Barrão disorders and destroys them, to then construct his artworks from their fragments.