Contemporary Artists- Notes from second meeting

Contemporary Artists


Kojo Griffin- http://www.kojogriffin.com/home.html
Gallery- Salt Works Gallery
Atlanta Gerogia
http://www.saltworksgallery.com/

Artist Statement-

his website has a spot for it but its not filled in. I guess he hasn’t finished it yet?
Some info from press releases- The paintings in An Acausal Connecting Principle mark a bold departure as well as a new beginning for Griffin. Griffin’s signature anthropomorphic characters have been retired. The eight new paintings explore Griffin’s exciting and bold exploration into the act of painting. Instead of an overarching idea connecting each work, Griffin approaches each painting on its own, with the subject matter chosen chiefly as a carrier of technique and process. The resulting paintings are confident and audacious, each delving into territory that is both accomplished and experimental. Quality Pictures is pleased to announce Swing States of Mind, the gallery's second exhibition of work by Kojo Griffin. In Swing States of Mind, the Atlanta artist debuts six new paintings of arresting visual and creative depth. These psychologically charged pieces will be complemented by a selection of Griffin's paintings, drawings, and prints
from the past eight years. Tracing the creative evolution of this restless artist, Swing States of Mind not only signals an exciting new direction for Griffin, but also looks to history for a more profound understanding of the present. Griffin's new paintings find a cast of familiar figures returning from an extended absence. The psychologically bruised animals that populated Griffin's early work have reappeared, although time has not been especially kind. Rendered damaged and ghostly, the morose, upright creatures now inhabit a stark interior space - as cold psychologically as it is architecturally. Griffin's brushwork strikes a tense harmony of abandon and control here, as fierce strokes of deep, moody hues push up again the artist's command of the figure.
My comments- Kojo Griffin uses ink, pencil and acrylic on paper and canvas. Whether he is using his well know hybrid animal-people or another anonymous human-type representation, Griffin’s work always addresses highly charged emotional and psychological issues. He is most well known for his work dealing with victimology and violence. Often times his backgrounds are abstracted with patterns that help lend an understanding of the characters he depicts.



Jeff Wall- no website
Gallery- Marian Goodman Gallery
New York (Chelsea), New York
http://mariangoodman.com/mg/nyc.html

Artist Statement- couldn’t find one, probably because he is too famous.
Some info from press releases- After a brief but eventful career that embodies the hopes and humiliations of African Americans at mid-twentieth century, the hero of Ralph Ellison's celebrated 1952 novel Invisible Man retreats to a secret basement room on the edge of Harlem. There he patiently composes and reflects upon the story we are about to read. "I am invisible,” he explains, "simply because people refuse to see me.” Making pictures out of stores was once the main business of the visual arts. The rising modernist tradition consigned the practice to the margins of advanced art; for most of the past century, "illustration" has been a term of contempt. In this large, richly detailed and thoroughly absorbing photograph, Wall has all but single-handedly reinvented the challenge. The novel's eloquent prologue is short on specifics, except one: the 1,369 lightbulbs that cover the ceiling of the underground lair. Starting with this fantastic detail, Wall scrupulously imagined in his Vancouver studio the concrete form of Ellison's metaphorical space. Ambitiously reviving a forgotten art, he made visible the Invisible Man.
My comments- Jeff Wall is a very famous photography from Vancouver, Canada. He makes very large works and puts them on huge light boxes (a quotation of the advertisements in subways), which creates a glowing effect. Wall’s photographs are always staged but meant to look as if they were chance. His works always addresses the awkwardness of people in their space. He likes to photograph marginalized people in typical situations.




Shepard Fairey- http://obeygiant.com/
Gallery- John LeVine Gallery
New York (Chelsea), New York
http://JonathanLeVineGallery.com/

Artist Statement- couldn’t find one, probably because he is too famous.
Some info from press releases- In some circles, Shepard Fairey is known as one of the most prolific and notorious street artists of his generation, creating memorable graphics that have spread through urban centers all over the world.When Fairey was a member of the 13-to-18 demographic, he lived in Charleston, S.C., where his obsessions were skateboarding and punk. He chose to go to the Rhode Island School of Design because he had a vague idea that he could make a living in a visual field. He got interested in screen printing. "What happened at RISD was that immediately people were talking about 'What's your major gonna be?' And people that were going into painting thought they were superior to people that were going into illustration, because"--he adopts a fey art-snob voice-- "'Illustration is commercial. I'm not compromising for anyone.'" Fairey majored in illustration. He believed, he says, that his fellow students who had chosen to be painters were already compromising their work and were likely to do so even more as they moved into the world of fine-art galleries. He also admits that he was "scared" of the fine-art world. "I did blow it off. Because...," he pauses for a long moment, "honestly, I didn't think that I had the talent to make it in that world." One night in 1989, when Fairey was still at RISD, he had a friend over who wanted to learn how to make stencils. Fairey flipped through a newspaper and picked out a picture of Andre Roussimoff--or Andre the Giant, the (now deceased) professional wrestler best known for his role in The Princess Bride. The friend balked because the image was too "stupid." Fairey was intrigued. No, he countered, it's cool. It's cutting edge. "Andre the Giant," he told his friend, "has a posse." They proceeded. Next to the smeary image of the wrestler's face, Fairey scrawled "Andre the Giant Has a Posse." He took the results to Kinko's and made stickers and slapped them on stop signs and in clubs. Then--randomly, in places like his local grocery store--he started hearing people talk about the stickers, asking each other what it might mean. So he put up more of the images, in New York City and Boston. He encouraged others to join in, with stickers, spray-paint stencils, and wheat-pasted posters. Later he shifted away from the longer tag line to the concise "Obey Giant," and started making visual variations, reworking the face in Russian constructivist styles and working it into different graphic contexts. Strictly speaking, what Fairey was doing and encouraging was illegal. Yet it was subversive to no obvious end. It was a kind of self-reflexive enterprise: The point of putting up a lot of Obey images was to see how many Obey images could be put up. Meanwhile, Fairey had started making T-shirts, and in the summer after his junior year, he started a printing business. He wrote off the fine-art world altogether. "I looked at it like this: I can be seen as cool and creative and somebody that's bringing great stuff into the realm of, you know, pop culture and skateboarding and punk music, in just whatever Dada goof-off stickering. Or I can be seen as not that talented in the fine-art world." He laughs. "So naturally I'm gonna gravitate to where I think I can succeed." Can you call someone a maverick if he works for multinational corporations? Can you call him a sellout if he's willing to risk arrest for the sake of self-expression? Can you call him a self-promoter if his most famous images are unsigned? Just as the "meaning" of Fairey's street visuals depends on who's looking, the answers to those questions vary according to who's asking. But wherever you come down, the underlying issue is one that resonates: Many entrepreneurs wrestle with the problem of integrity--the tension between what you want to do and what the market is willing to pay you to do. As hard as it is to craft a vision, it can be even harder to stick to it, to avoid letting pragmatism descend into compromise, to keep alive the idealism that inspired you in the first place.
My comments- Shepard Fairey’s move from street artist to commercial artist is epic. Also, I hope no one takes offense to this, but he is obsessed with Obama. I mean I am a liberal, but wow. Shepard Fairey is a graffiti and graphic artist. He does screen prints, buttons, and illegal wall art. He is most well known for his Andre the Giant and Barack Obama images. He has worked for many musicians including the Black Eyed Peas and Ozzy, making posters and album art. Fairey makes politically charged art using bold colors with an intensely graphic aesthetic.




Roland Fischer-
Gallery- G Fine Art
Washington, DC
http://www.gfineartdc.com/

Artist Statement-

none
Some info from press releases- A principal figure in the contemporary German photography movement, Roland Fischer's imagistic aesthetic evolved from his foundation as a conceptual portrait artist. Earlier bodies of work include a tonal series of monks and nuns and his LA portraits of women immersed to bust level in monochrome pools. He uses the same formal approach and illuminating insight in his recent large-format photographs of skyscraper façades. In these, he merges the detached psychology of direct portraiture with the abstract possibilities of painting, creating a unifying conceptual underpinning. Rooted in the formalism of new German photography, Fischer's façades reveal a preoccupation with the visual hallmarks of early modernist abstract painting, such as structure, color, rhythm, reductive shapes, geometry and surface effect. He translates these painterly concerns through the language of photography by shooting his subjects frontally and cropping them tightly into architectural fragments. Fischer strips the buildings from any urban context and denies them their mass, ultimately rendering them into decorative visual fields. Fischer controls any distortions through digital means and prints in large format, deliberately alluding to large abstract paintings, but keeps the slick photographic surface. And yet we recognize that these are building facades, structural membranes that function like skin, keeping interior private realms separate from the outer public world. On the one hand, these facades are frontal portraits of nameless buildings, each a member of a vast corporate culture. Pursuing this path of anonymous portraiture, Fischer leaves his photographs untitled, adding only the city name as documentary residue. On the other hand the facades are lush visual fragments that, like a theoretical hologram, contain a greater aesthetic whole. In our accelerated culture that glorifies quick and compressed communication such as soundbytes, logos, and synopses the fragment may ultimately prove the most revealing.
My comments- Roland Fischer is a German photographer. His early works in tonal portraiture is arresting in it’s frontality and large scale. His work is crisp, clean and bright. His new works, photographs of office building facades may seem to be a break with his previous photos but in fact it is just a new mutation. He still exhibits his photographs in a large scale with bright color and frontality. In keeping the titles the city names he does lend a interesting glimpse of the portrait of the city. The dynamic between abstraction and biography is an interesting new tension to his work.




Ran Ortner- http://www.ranortner.com/
Gallery- Ch’I Contemporary Fine Art
Brooklyn, New York
http://www.chicontemporaryfineart.com/dynamic/artist.asp?artistid=72#control

Artist Statement-

none
Some info from press releases- none
My comments- Ran Ortner is both a painter an an installation artist. In both mediums his works are huge and create a sense of a threatening sublime. Ortner’s paintings are of super-realistic waves, they are almost mannered in style. His instillation has an interest in sand and how sand can look like waves and water. His work is arresting in size and is a powerful reference of nature’s sublime. Please visit his website to see the installation work, its all in flash and I couldn’t find still jpgs to copy and paste.