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Books

Richard Tuttle’s Incredible One-of-a-Kind Bindings for Classic Books

By Emily Temple on

Put away that e-reader and take a peek at the incredible book cover art of Richard Tuttle. Tuttle, whose work was recently featured at Book Patrol, creates one-of-a-kind bindings for classic novels, interpreting the stories as beautiful, often cheeky sculptures. Tuttle explains: “I make literary artifacts. They are designed to pull books down off the shelf and display them in the salon, gallery or home as if they were works of art, which, of course, they are. Whether binding books with leather, paper, paint, wood, and found artifacts or building sculptures to encase the volumes, I seek to find a perspective that shouts out a piece of the essence of the literary work. I try to put myself in the author’s or character’s mind to say something about the time it was written in; the attitude that is explored and expressed; the magic that makes it a work of art.” Most of these unique editions are available (for a pretty penny) at Franklin Books. Even if you don’t have the cash, you can ogle them to your heart’s content after the jump. … Read More

Art

Kim Il-Sung Transformed Into Comic Supervillains on Defaced North Korean Banknotes

By Tom Hawking on

North Korean banknotes aren’t much use for buying anything, but if you’re German artist Aslan Malik, they make for hilarious and surprisingly compelling art. Malik has gotten hold of a bunch of money from the dark side of the Korean peninsula and defaced the images of Kim Il-Sung thereon, reimagining the Great Leader as a series of comic-book villains. The resultant art, spotted via Laughing Squid, forms a series called The Injustice League of North Korea — a doff of the hat to The Justice League and also to a similar project with US banknotes. One can only imagine what Kim would have made of it. … Read More

San Francisco

Breathtaking Photographs of Alonzo King LINES Ballet Dancers

By Bonnie Chan on

As of this year, Alonzo King has spent three decades changing the face of ballet, sculpting a traditional classical dance form into a modern template for fluidity and cross-pollination. In his choreography for San Francisco’s own Alonzo King LINES Ballet, King has collaborated with numerous artists and musicians representing traditions from all over the world, including Baka artists from the Central African Republic (People of the Forest, 2001), Shaolin monks from China (Long River High Sky, 2007), tabla master Zakir Hussain (Scheherazade, 2009), and actor Danny Glover (Before the Blues, 2004). … Read More

Books

Ros Rixon’s Bottled Love Poems and Beautiful Book Sculptures

By Emily Temple on

Can you bottle a love poem? Well, technically — yes. That’s what artist Ros Rixon has done in her Love Lines series, in which delicate cutouts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 are captured in bottles and boxes for art and ease of gifting. Rixon’s work, spotted via Book Patrol, also encompasses other forms of book sculpture, taking different texts and forms as inspiration. Check out some of Rixon’s great sculptures after the jump, and then be sure to head on over to her website for more.

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Art

Amazing Sculptures of Animals Made Out of Discarded Material

By Alison Herman on

In less skillful hands, Sayaka Ganz’s sculptures could read like a hackneyed environmentalist statement. But the artist’s creations, which combine hundreds of disparate plastic or metal parts into lifelike depictions of animals in motion, instead transfix the viewer with their creation of coherent shapes from objects Ganz collects in thrift stores. According to her … Read More

Photography

‘Chaos to Couture’: Preview the Met’s Punk Fashion Exhibition

By Emily Temple on

Punk has always been inextricably (sometimes physically) bound up with fashion, art, and the ordered disorder of each. Enter PUNK: Chaos to Couture, a big, gorgeous book published in conjunction with a show of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that’s filled with photographs and essays that consider the punk aesthetic as it was interpreted by high fashion. The exhibit runs from May 9 through August 14 and is sure to be an absolute knockout; preview some of its most striking images below. … Read More

Art

Surreal, Sculptural Movie Couple Collages

By Alison Nastasi on

Idaho-based artist Eli Craven was paging through a photo book about iconic movie couples. “As I looked through them, I really wanted to see them come together, touch lips, make love, whatever comes next, so I started folding them into one another,” he told iGNANT. His sculptural collage series Screen Lovers was born. Cineastes will recognize fragments of famous film stars, like Rita Hayworth. Craven’s manipulation of the publicity stills unites the cinematic pairings in surreal and subtly humorous ways. See more of Craven’s work in our gallery, and feel free to nerd out in the comments by naming the couples you recognize. … Read More

Art

Incredible Drawings of Hitchcock Film Stills

By Alison Nastasi on

Hitchcock was a master visualist who approached every project with meticulous storyboards, every frame constructed to manipulate his audience’s emotions down to the final minute. The auteur’s style attracted artist Martín Sichetti, who we learned about on Parallax View. When he was musing on the scene in To Catch a Thief, in which Jessie Royce Landis stubbed out her cigarette in a soft-boiled egg, he was inspired to create a series of drawings based on close-up frames from Hitchcock films. “This is what I like the most from Hitch: the humor,” the artist told us. Gloves, suitcases, keys, and other objects — often fetishized by the director — are captured in soft-focus with hands, limbs, and necks the only identifiers of the faceless characters. Sichetti’s background in theater and costume design is an innate connection to Hitch’s expressive, symbolic visuals. Take a closer look in our gallery. … Read More

Art

Disorienting Black-and-White GIFs of Dramatic Mexican Landscapes

By Tom Hawking on

The resurgence of the animated GIF over the last couple of years has given rise to any number of artistic possibilities, but few usages of the artform can be more impressive than these remarkable pieces from Mexican photographer Nydia Lilian. Her black-and-white photos of landscapes around the Mexican provinces of Chiapas and Oaxaca are striking enough, but they’re made even more so by these animations, which flash repeatedly between negative and positive images, subtly shifting perspective in the process. The results are dramatic and possibly seizure-inducing (and also a bit reminiscent of this.) We first came across them at Faith is Torment, and you can see more of Lilian’s work at her website. … Read More

Art

Thought-Provoking Paintings of People Looking at Art

By Chloe Pantazi on

Ever looked at a painting and wondered what exactly you’re looking at? Hold that question up to Encaudre, a series of paintings by artist Pablo Guzman – which we came across on Faith is Torment – and the answer is quite clear: what we’re dealing with here is ourselves. Guzman’s paintings dismantle the performance of art, perhaps even suggest that art is a kind of deceit. He does this, namely, by incorporating the viewer into his art; the subjects of his portraits are either simply observing a canvas or doing something with it – putting it up or taking it down – and are usually faceless (the point being that they could be anyone: you, for example). Sometimes Guzman even puts the viewer inside the canvas – which is, in turn, inside its larger frame. Endless meta layers aside, Guzman’s art reiterates the question we started with: What, when we look at a painting, are we looking at? … Read More