A seminar with Francis Bacon …

Well – he has never taught art to others officially, and has never been taught art by others in such a manner …
And while not being entirely sure, if just because or despite of that  – Francis Bacon excels as an art (painting) tutor. I found him so lucidly articulated, so continuously and deeply [...]

Contemporary Art (9) Nathalie Djurberg

Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978 BirthLysekil, Sweden) – young multimedia artist, lives and works in Berlin. She has won the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist at this year’s 53rd Venice Biennale. She was awarded for her multimedia installation “Experiment” (above – first photo shows the work [...]

Raffi Lavie: ‘In the Name of the Father’

Raffi Lavie (1937-2007) Late Israeli artist representing Israel at the 53rd International Biennale in Venice.
A painter, educator, art critic, music connoisseur, and curator. The most central, charismatic figure in the art scene in Israel for the past four decades until his death in 2007.
Influenced by Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well [...]

New toys of a dirty boy – Eric Fischl

A gifted boy with dirty imagination is back.
Eric Fischl (b. 1948, NY) has apparently abandoned his flamboyant yuppies and bad boys lost in their hedonistic activities on daddies’ yachts and in flashy apartments. Or rather – he grew up with them, since the new characters of his painted stories are middle- aged couples, lost again, [...]

“Floating Culture” and the Thickness of things…

Check out these two last posts on Henri Art Magazine:
In Hyperaesthetics – 19 sixty he describes our culture – POMO (Postmodernism) of an unacceptable lightness:
We are somnambulists and voyeurs, lost in the hallucinatory world of light-speed and lenses. We are no longer grounded. We float in the digital subjective, our voices not quite our [...]

Studying Art (17) – Why do you paint?

I’ve been challenged with this innocent question recently, and though I came up with an immediate answer at that moment ‘of truth’, I still keep pondering over it now, as if looking for a deeper, fuller view…

Why do you paint? Why do I paint?
My photographs say most of what I want to convey, my writing [...]

Contemporary Art (6) – Jakub Julian Ziolkowski

Untitled , 2007,  oil on canvas,  15.75″ x 12.5″

The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006
Oil on canvas
190 x 165 cm / 74 3/4 x 65 in

The Garden, 2008
Oil on canvas
105 x 82 cm / 41 3/8 x 32 1/4 in
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Jakub Julian Ziolkowski (b. 1980) – Polish painter, lives and works in Krakow, Poland.
Well, there [...]

Liminal Theatre – Antonin Artaud

~ The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything — gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness — rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate [...]

Troubled Art – Chaim Soutine

He was that kind of a difficult snotty kid, who appeared from nowhere as if fully formed, then, like a meteor glowing with dark, perpetual fire he flashed through life fulfilled with struggles, suffering, torment and passions. He left one of the most compelling collections of paintings in the Modern Art; despite of the quite [...]

Contemporary Art (5) – Peter Doig

A friend has challenged me to pick out one artist, whose work will still ‘matter’ in 40 years time. Well, imagine we’ve got 2050; the number alone looks pretty surreal; doesn’t it? The same can surely be said about the quantity of the imagery out there – buzzing, flashing, tempting, repulsive, genius and rubbish… But [...]