Inspired by everything from Cecil Beaton’s portraits of Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin’s short film The Count, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, and 1950′s/1960′s Cadillac advertisements, Anna Battista’s cinematic, pop art creations are like a wearable gallery of art and culture’s finest. The Italian writer and film lecturer — who runs one of our favorite blogs, Irenebrination — creates these works mainly for fun, recycling and reusing different materials that have a quirky and usually very personal narrative behind them. Her surreal eyeball necklace was born in part from the memory banks of her brother slicing open the blue eyes of her childhood dolls. “I don’t think you can get the same reaction by wearing a diamond necklace … ” she recently told us. Click through the gallery below (and the links within to learn more about the inspiration behind each piece) to see the transformation of toy cars, 8mm filmstrips, and an “asylum of spoons.”
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Have you been wondering what to do with that growing pile of bills/magazines/cards on your counter? Look no further than Sandhi Schimmel Gold, a self-made artist who creates Pop Art-inspired paper waste portraits. “My work reflects our society’s obsession with beauty through advertising — and the endless images that bombard us daily,” Gold told My Modern Met. “Assembled like a mosaic; the paper tiles create an entirely new image — an eclectic and tactile portrait reworked in my imagination, utilizing materials that would otherwise go to waste.” Click through to check out a few of her stunning junk mail ladies.
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History is written by the winners. As Meghan O’Rourke’s recent Slate essay points out, in the literary and cultural worlds, those winners still are — more often than not — men. That’s not because of any native advantage in intelligence or ability, but because of what O’Rourke calls “unconscious gender bias” and our unwillingness to accord “accomplishment and authority” to women as freely as we recognize these qualities in men.
Nevertheless, unequal status notwithstanding, there is more room at the cultural table today than there was in the chauvanist world of 50 years ago. Indeed, blatant sexism is why so many of the artists in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, up through January 31 at the Brooklyn Museum (and originally organized by Sid Sachs at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts), received little attention when they were actively making work. But O’Rourke’s “unconscious gender bias” is why so few institutions, academic or otherwise, have paid them any mind in the decades since. We spoke to Catherine Morris, the Curator of the museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, about ten fantastic women Pop Artists from the show that you’ve probably never heard of.
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A pop art pioneer whose works are equally minimal and surreal, Los Angeles-born, idiosyncratic painter John Wesley is back on view in his 34th solo show in New York since 1963. Rather than presenting new pieces this time around, however, Wesley’s show at Fredericks & Freiser offers a fresh look at seminal paintings from the early 1970s, a playful period in the artist’s quirky body of work. His “superflat” pictures— created long before Takashi Murakami coined the term — portray vampires, soldiers, perverts, vamps, and slaves. With a succinct style and limited palette, Wesley’s psychologically charged images capture whimsical moments that are ultimately timeless.
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Boys and their toys: in this case, it’s artist Jeff Koons playing with a BMW sports car. This morning the car company unveiled a Koons prototype for its 17th art car after an 11 year absence from the Le Mans endurance race. The painted car, a M3 GT2 coupe with silver interior, will debut at the Centre Pompidou on June 1; in the meantime, click through for a preview of Koons’s graphics for the car, which he describes as “inspired by the speed and power of race cars in motion, evocative of power, motion and light.”
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In New York, street art is tagged on the sides of buildings and pasted on empty storefronts. In Los Angeles, a city of automatic transmissions and three-hour traffic, public art may best be presented, well, on a billboard. The MAK Center for Art & Architecture is doing just that: it has selected 21 contemporary artists to make their marks on decommissioned billboards all over West Hollywood, from Sunset Boulevard to the Santa Monica Freeway. How Many Billboards? — up through the end of March — is intended as a reflective tool in the middle of quotidian life; as the director for the project notes, “Channels are opened for experimentation, innovation, and cultural exchange.” Replacing media noise with smart art in an urban space? We like. Peep a few of the billboards after the jump and let us know your favorites.
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Banksy filmed him, Berlusconi has collected his work, and Shepard Fairey called him “awesome, infuriating, almost impossible to define.” Mr. Brainwash — aka Thierry Guetta — is the exuberant, French, chain-smoking, paint-splattered chatterbox whose street-meets-Pop art is, like any good hyperbole, larger than life. We visited with MBW in the 15,000 square-foot Meatpacking District warehouse where his first New York solo show will open this weekend; check out the highlights (including a photo set) after the jump.
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The AP reports an amusing anecdote on Andy Warhol’s forgotten archives, 610 boxes of junk and treasure currently being sorted by the Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh. So far, the findings have bordered on the pedestrian (taxi cabs receipts), the revolting (old Campbell’s soup, a piece of crusty wedding cake), and the thrilling (a nude Jackie O photo, $17,000 in cash). After the jump, we take bets on what else the mother lode will reveal. Read More »
