Back when royal courts were major art purchasers, painters like Francois Boucher, Rubens and many others got to exercise their sexy muscle on behalf of their royal employers, painting titillating works based on mythology. Many of these erotic paintings (some specifically for the boudoir) now sit in major art museums around the world, a reminder that the erotic in art once had great appeal for patrons who liked a little (or a lot of) sensory pleasure in their paintings and sculpture. As Jonathan Jones said recently about old master paintings in Britain’s National Gallery: “A great painting can be shockingly carnal. It can be pornographic. Oil painting is the greatest come-on ever devised…”
Rubens, Peter Paul The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus c. 1618 Oil on canvas 88 x 82 7/8 in (224 x 210.5 cm) Alte Pinakothek, Munich
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Posted in tags a-z | Tagged andy warhol, ang lee, chris golas, christopher davison, erotic art, gabriel martinez, louise bourgeois, marcel duchamp, marilyn minter, movies, pete checcia, r. crumb, rubens, tony ward |
By libby | February 6, 2010
Ken Johnson wrote a Philagrafika review in yesterday’s New York Times. Thought you’d enjoy, if you haven’t yet read it, although Johnson does focus only on the five major shows of the Graphic Unconsciousness. But Philagrafika is offering way more than that to keep you happy and busy for days (90 venues all in all). The Times also has a slide show here.
By libby | February 6, 2010
In the annals of self-promotion of a good kind, this info came in from a reader named Jason Nelson, who’s a digital art professor in Australia. He is the author of a number of internet games–at which I am rather inept, it taking me about seven tries to figure out how to get out of a hole and then a similar number of tries to figure out that I can use a similar maneuver to get on an elevator–that are also art. The one I tried has a Mark Lombardi conspiracy theory quality, with spidery lines and crazy text, all related to following the money.
i made this. you play this. we are enemies, a game by Jason Nelson. The still image doesn't begin to capture the animation and noise!
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As luck would have it I went to see the work of a young French artist named Alba Pistolesi.
Alba is , in her words, obsessed with cancelling the usefulness of objects as well as with table legs and their standard 72cm length. A week earlier she had shown me a large wooden die and a faggot of table legs that were meant to be screwed into the die on each face. The number of legs per face were to correspond to the number on the face of the die.
This results in an object that evokes either a virus or a creature from the Burgess shale.
" I-de" pronounced ee-day which is a play on words between 'ee-day" which is french for idea and "day" which is french for die.
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We wandered over to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania last week while Duke Riley was installing his show about Ralston Laird and Petty’s Island, his chosen subject for his Philagrafika project. The artist, 38, had the society’s large glass cases full of artifacts and photos from his excursions to Petty’s Island, and he’d made a large family history drawing based on research he did about the Laird clan. Over the mantle was a photo taken in a helicopter flyover of Riley’s piece de resistance for the project, a mural painted on top of a Citgo oil holding tank that sits on the island. Petty’s Island is/was owned by Citgo which is owned by Venezuela, but that seems to be shifting as there’s talk of turning the island into a wildlife sanctuary. (See the wonderful cover story about Riley and this project by Holly Otterbein in last week’s City Paper — and here’s Riley’s open letter to Hugo Chavez about reclaiming Petty’s Island for the Laird Kingdom.)
Duke Riley, last week, installing his show at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
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By libby | February 4, 2010
We’ve been making some of the rounds, talking to a variety of Philagrafika artists in The Graphic Unconscious and Out of Print exhibits. Here are some tidbits, mostly recollected, but I noted when the conversation is based on notes.
The Philagrafika artist and curators pose amidst Regina Silveira's bug invasion at Moore College.
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Posted in tags a-z | Tagged betsabee romero, carl pope, duke riley, galleries at moore, gunilla klingberg, marc voge, orit hofshi, pafa, philagrafika, regina silveiro, temple gallery, young-hae chang heavy industries |
For more than thirty years Ida Applebroog’s work has given us an unblinking view through the windows of America at home. Rejecting the bawdlerized domesticity of television, she has taken us behind the stage sets to reveal the disturbing unease, mis-communication, power struggles and violence of our private lives and their inevitable connections to events in the larger world.
Ida Applebroog ‘Monalisa’s house’(2009) Gampi, mylar, ink, pigment, oil, watercolor and wood, 110 x 144 x 146 1/2 in.
With Monalisa at (Hauser and Wirth, New York through March 6) Applebroog offers us a view of her own interior space; we’re not allowed in, but we can look through the windows and cracks. She has taken a series of drawings made forty years ago and put aside, and in translating them through her current practice has built her own glass house, clad in their translucency. Read More »
I received two missives from two artists today, both of whom are now fundraising on Kickstarter for art projects that will be in Philadelphia. I love that there’s a trend in fundraising. For artists! Looking back in my emails I found several more Kickstarter projects as well. While it’s never easy to raise money this site seems to offer a simple easy solution — if you have a project they like.
Karl Cronin, Somatic Natural History project, where he enacts the characteristics of endangered species.
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The quick death of artist Judith Taylor from a sudden illness struck her friends in the art community for its untimeliness. Taylor had missed her yoga class, and they hadn’t known why. The day of the Philagrafika press and VIP opening, they were reeling and could talk of little else. Taylor, a photographer, was professor and program coordinator of photography in Arcadia University’s art department.
Here’s what artist Nancy Lewis had to say: Read More »
