Although most of the work by Travis Steams revolves around eye-catching, experimental and very unique digital design (he’s a LA-based graphic designer), I also found a liking to this little series of collages snuggled between all the more overwhelming visuals on his flickr-stream.
Eerie faces and skulls reveal themselves in Adolfo Bimer’s abstract chemical mixtures, creating fascinating ghostly portraits.
Berlin-based sculptor and artist Clemens Behr uses cheap materials like cardboard and wood to create complex and sometimes gigantic artworks. These works were created for his solo exhibition at the Karena Schüssler gallery and are based on functional ideas like shelves, lights or a wardrobe.
“It is very important to me to just keep working and moving. To think through working and not to think about the work too much. So most of the time, I run around the space hectically and keep forgetting things I planned to do. I never measure materials, I like to have all my stuff ready and work on my 3D collage without paying too much attention.”
I have this weird obsession with masks, and it seems Cari Vander Yacht does to. Although she also has a weird obsession with a lot of other great things too.
Bold and abstract illustrations by Saskia Pomeroy for MTV Magazine, with INT Works.
“I guess it’s more and more about fashion whereas in the beginning it was illustration and not so much art. But then from that illustration it kind of became more art because illustration, I think, is really commercial and I find it quite difficult to fit my style into what other people want it to be. Or into a way that’s really able to be sold.
Because commercial art is really about selling, and you have to have a really strong image in order to sell. And it’s taken up until now for me to get there, to kind of come back and do more fine art and kind of create an image that then I can sell to people.”
via ᔥ New Abstract
Although Jean-Paul Bourdier’s completely surreal and fantastically realized photographs are more of the eye-catching kind, his conceptual paintings illustrate simple and beautiful ideas.
One thing that interest me primarily is to realize, in my own life, is that whatever I consider to be inside is not necessarily different from what is outside. And in that sense, the painting work, the performance work, is always about showing that infinity that is always present in my own life. Perhaps there is another element that I think is of importance too, it’s to show that the material that we engage with is not necessarily as tangible as we think it is.”
Digging through my bookmarks I was glad to come across Kirra Jamison’s work as this point, because it recalls similar shapes from Eva Vermeiren’s work (see previous post) but takes on a very different approach in scale, process and medium.
“Jamison began foraging for colour on her studio floor. The vinyl offcuts, the negative spaces left from previous, more representational works, were found fresh and arranged into abstract working collages. These became templates, fixed to the paper ground or held temporarily with tape to permit reassembly. Jamison printed using a layering of stencils, rather than exposing one image to the screen: minor errors and shiftings were allowed to take place between the multiples, and their uniqueness seems harder won when it is barely apparent.
The large-scale paintings bloomed from the screen-print series, keeping and breaking its rules. The painter mimics the silkscreen’s layering process, its heavy pigment deposits and its moveable cut-out, pochoir effect – but is freed from the one-directional, one-chance pull of ink across screen. The paintings also make use of vinyl; as Jamison explains: ‘the vinyl pieces act as readymade abstracts … and also as misshapen paint swatch cards.’ The shapes and colours gather energy – both locomotor and light – as they change scale from hand-size to much larger than the painter.”
