Contemporary Artists - Case Study Example

Contemporary Artists Introduction Contemporary artists have emerged and have amazed the world with their innovations. These innovations have transformed our views on our daily lives. These artists engage in various works including painting, photography, and installation, film making and sculpturing among others. Below is a survey of five selected modern artists namely Tom Friedman, Jenny Saville, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Doig and Rita Ackermann. It explains their innovations, the uniqueness in their collections and the materials that they use. Tom Friedman Tom Friedman was born in 1965. He makes humorous and clever statues that are passive-aggressive. Looking at these statues is like looking very strongly in the mirror and seeing fields of blemishes on your otherwise lovely and photogenic nose. At the same time however, Friedman makes things simpler in his work. In his work, there is humor that is very reserved and evenly distributed. He makes the theme of his work very relaxing. In addition, he takes plain and sometimes minor ideas to the farthest of reliability. His pieces are expressive but lacking content, and others spatially blank while occupied by history. He gets his art supplies from candy stores, drugstores, the supermarket and the human body. Friedman insistently creates complex objects out of a variety of household materials, such as pencils, Styrofoam, masking tape, spaghetti, toilet paper, bubble gum and toothpicks. His work is crafted plainly and is both beautiful and teasing. Friedman’s dedication to material precision, his ability to change common objects into something new and the way he conceptualizes the act of the artisan allows him to promote the common to the status of art (Designboom.com, 3). Friedman’s art it is linked to early conceptualism, but his idea and working technique goes beyond these past precedents creating its own exclusive visual language of the miniature and microscopic. This is because his explorations focus on the compactness of things. All of these works by Friedman are updated by a centered inner logic, that discloses the implicit systems at work in our every day lives through which we channel our mental and physical realities (Designboom.com, 4). Friedman makes sculptures balancing in a shaky equilibrium. These sculptures may seem paradoxical because of the strange materials that make them. Mostly, they are made from a ring of plastic cups and a thick mass of pencil parts. The sculpture is also obtained by fixing in place several toothpicks in order to generate an extraordinary geometric construction that recalls the structure of a starburst. His work is centered on an approach based on atoms and minute microscopic fragments. Everyone knows, rather closely, what a bar of soap is, or in any case, we think we do, until Friedman emerges with his sculpture that transforms the whole idea of soap into an object with a-sticky-when-wet-surface that clutches spiraling pubic hairs perfectly in place. This is made of ultra-slender, round lines expanding concentrically outwards from the center. This innovation makes his work very unique in modern art. Many people think that Friedman must have labored over this modest mysterious thing for hours. Friedman indicates that at first, he concerned himself with materials concerning personal hygiene; cleaning materials. In light of this, he drew a link between ordinary rituals for keeping ourselves clean and rituals for spiritual cleansing (Designboom.com, 6). Jenny Saville Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970. She is a painter, whose work is a dim reflection of modern fashion, portraying bodies that live outside the average boundaries of gorgeousness. She offers a precious difference to the mass media’s presentation of the perfectibility of the human appearance through her feminist outlook of the female body shapes. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, where she won the Craig prize and the Newberry award. Her interest with the workings of the human body began to influence her work when she was awarded a scholarship to attend Cincinnati University for six months. While she was there, she became concerned with the malls, where she saw numerous big women in shorts. Saville’s technique of working from pictures rather than sculpts, lends her work frankness typically linked with photographs. She has a sentiment for the scale of public images in modern life and frequently appears less an easel painter than a maker of decorative billboards. She challenges customary realism when she frequently employs diverse viewpoints in the same picture or calls heightened concentration to solely formal concerns. To further her work, Jenny Saville lives and works in London, where she is an instructor of outline painting at the Slade School of Art in London (Artbank.com, 2). Her paintings regularly portray faceless women whose huge bodies look like mottled pink relief maps or hugely rendered editions of early fertility charms. Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning really influenced her work. Her more fresh exhibitions include a solo show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, which attributed six new paintings that maintain Saville’s series of large-scale nudes, but using a lighter, slacker and more overdramatic approach of brushwork. One of her paintings, Hybrid, is a double representation of Saville and her sister based on a childhood photograph. The image is a close-up of the two heads, which seem to be connected like the heads of Siamese twins. Saville’s festivity of paint and her devotion to oil painting as a medium accords her a lot of credit. In a society of regular technological progression, Saville has opposed the temptations of using media such as video in her work and has dabbled only temporarily with photography. These modern fillers are not for her though she finds striking motivation in such media, and frequently watch several films per week. Instead, she has accepted the physicality of paint and therefore has preferred a medium that dates back hundreds of years (Artbank.com, 5). Olafur Eliasson Eliasson, who was born in 1967 in Denmark, creates immaterialist magic through bare-bones means: factually, in some instances, mist and mirrors. In style, his work is not firmly packaged and not cash-and-carry. He makes wall paintings from scented clods of Iceland moss such that they look like a cross between an aerial background and deep-pile aubussons. In New York, he ran a pricked hose along a gallery ceiling, and then turned on a sparkling strobe to alter a sheet of falling drops into a field of stop-action stars. Later he removed the gallery’s casement and added a frieze of mirrors to bring the sights, sounds and chilly air of the outdoors inside. This synthesis of nature and culture was nothing compared to the impressive setting sun he generated from lights and vapor at the Tate Modern in 2003. Very many people came to soak in its blaze, as if they were at the beach. Eliasson made another installation called “Beauty” in which a rainbow appears from a drape of mist and then disappears (Cotter, 3). Cotter continues to argue that, Eliasson’s work is an art of variant rather than destination like certain types of jazz, or ragas, or new age ambient sound. It lays out an image subject, and then asks you to wait, watch, wait a little more and find out things happening. In his art, a fixed object turns out to be moving moreover, a window outlook of the street through prismatic statue turn realism upside down, but not totally. He is one of the artists who ventured in to new amazing innovations. For instance, a new undertaking, made for the show, consists of a vast, angled, disc-shaped mirror hanged horizontally from a gallery ceiling. The omniscient, bird’s-eye mirror image of the room underneath, with someone standing in the center of it, is what strikes the person initially. Then one observes that the mirror is revolving very slowly, and with a faintly undulating movement that causes the room itself to feel distorted and uneven. One experiences this as much with his sense of balance as with his eyes. Many people have termed his work not real since it brings out a magical feeling to them (4). Peter Doig Peter Doig, who was born in 1959, is another significant artist. In his work, he painted an amazing landscape scene in his studio in London. All through his travelling life, he has generated, many images based on an image found in a magazine sourced in London. This was due to a yearning to portray, capture and symbolize his thoughts, experiences, recollections and feelings linking to his upbringing in Canada. After studying art in London during the 1980s, he went back to Canada for an interval, living in Montreal. in spite of being impressed and motivated by some of his artistic forerunners there, it was only through absence that he started to find out that, despite his chosen theme, his home was attacking his pictures (Wilkinson, 4). With all significant paintings, he manages to balance the intelligence of his intellectual sequence of painting in the late twentieth century, with his sensitive relationship with custom and most predominantly idealism. He invented a comprehensively Romantic image in the vein of the great German Romantic painters of the 19th Century, such as Caspar David Friedrich. In this painting called the ‘night fishing,’ Doig has incarcerated a sense of his own incidents of Canada. More generally, he has captured a superior environment of mans place in a huge world in a great expanse. Is this image he reveals a man alone in nature battling with the constituents, attempting to tame them for his own benefit and pleasure. Presenting this scene without the tale, gloss and framework of the original fishing ad, Doig has initiated an existential dimension, quickening the viewer to ask questions concerning the picture itself, the world it symbolizes, and our own place within our own environments. In his painting, one starts to realize that what at first emerges to be a very simple beautiful landscape is in fact a painting about painting. This is exhibited in its theme and execution, the marriage of metaphorical dreams, memories and visions with painterly procedures and concepts. Night Fishing attains a noteworthy and highly inspiring upsurge in Peter Doigs artistic inventions (Wilkinson, 6). Rita Ackermann She was born 1968 in Budapest, Hungary and lives in New York. Rita Ackermann has pressed the limits of a painting-based practice that embraces a surplus of social functions and an evenly catholic range of artistic media, from tarnished glass to the red ballpoint pen she’s used to runway models’ faces in form of makeup. She has appreciated multiform shadow marionette theaters like The Deer Slayer in 1997, performed as a band affiliate of the art joint Angel blood, and curated displays including The Perfect Man in2007 and The Kate Moss Show in 2006. She gained great recognition for her appealing, complex renderings of teenage girls idling in different states of undress. This all-female alternate realism of syringes and telephones reflected the granular self-image of 1990s downtown New York City through a ghostly surface, foreshadowing the density of post-self politics and cyberpunk practical worlds such as Second Life. Ackermann has constantly questioned traditional ideas of painting and support, creating oneiric mixed media wall paintings and large-scale unconnected collages that alight on parallel themes of seduction and aggression (Hudson, 2). In both her drawings and collections, Ackermann contrasts characters and narratives, which draws on the semiotics of fertility fascinations and pornography to generate an anthropomorphic woman man- child. The overlaid images composing this life-size unconnected collection on Plexiglas come from the artist’s own outlines and other sources, for instance an image of the Madonna and Child placed over the figure’s heart. Ackermann’s concern in creations of gender and the fantasies has endured her change of scale and material. The obvious cover of their images reflects the aggregation in her collections. Ackermann does not reverse tropes of womanhood but fazes them as acts and procedures of becoming to be set into fainting and conflicting relief with and within one another. Regardless of her operations of fairy-tale themes, and irrespective of the ingratiatingly attractive characters who occupy them, few clear plots emerge (Hudson, 3). Conclusion All the five artists discussed above have actually shaped contemporary field of art with their unique collections and approaches. Their work reflects modern fashions and ideas. Though their approaches seem different, they have some similarities in their work. It appears that all use simple materials to come up with complex works. They also embrace what the society has often ignored. Work Cited Artbank.com. Jenny Saville’s Biography. 2005. Web. Cotter, Holland. Art Review of Olafur Eliasson. 2008. Web. Designboom.com. Tom Friedman: the largest and most complete retrospective of the artists work. 2002. Web. Hudson, Suzanne. About Rita Ackermann. 2008. Web. Sherman galleries.com. Artist profile. 2004. Web. Wilkinson, Anthony. Peter Doig Night Fishing. 1999. Web. Read More