Art Sponge

20 Highlights from 2013

Every one of the 257 posts I published this past year is my favorite. I never post about an artist I only feel ok about. My aim has always been to focus on quality and certainly not quantity. That said, I felt the need to go back into the 2013 archives and pull out the works which, in my mind, revealed pathways to entirely new possibilities in visual art — as well as highlighting artists who take nothing for granted and question some very fundamental notions in our existence. They serve as reminders that we should never stay idle and certainly always question what seems taken for granted.

Thank you so much for reading and following Art Sponge this year, and happy new year!

The work of Thierry Fontaine photographically questions the notions of body, identity and the intersection of photo and sculpture.

Taisuke Koyama’s captures such bright and colorful beauty in the purposeful decay of his previous works. A true lesson in re-defining how one’s finished artwork are really never finished.

James Nizam brings the definition of photography back to its essential: light. In doing so, he also demonstrates an impeccable skill in controlling this frustratingly uncontrollable element.

Distorted images of women in advertising pervade our everyday environment. Some have gone as far as calling it poison. Vermibus takes this idea literally and uses toxic waste to extremely distort these images, to the point of creating striking artworks.

The extremely sharp, textured and abundantly colourful aesthetic of Mark Lovejoy’s photography makes it impossible to look away.

Justine Kurland frames nature and human nature in a wonderfully real and simultaneously mystical way.

I love the atmosphere found in Brian Vu’s collages, it’s dark and feels slightly occult — and very simply executed.

Yago Hortal hits the most explosive point in color I’ve observed this year, and does so unexplainably without over-doing it.

Orble’s work is also of the explosive kind, but with a fine touch of humour and a seemingly endless creativity to it.

0×17 perfectly bridges chaos and control, coherence and discordance, all the while finding a very careful compositional balance.

Hector Hernandez’s Hyperbeast series captures beauty in movement, while giving life to surreal creatures.

Max Snow’s photography depicts a dark and unabashed world and frames it beautifully.

Adolfer Bimer shows us the ghosts we all see in chemical abstractions.

Spiros Halaris’ work sits between many forms of art and design, where he’s built his own multidisciplinary aesthetic.

There’s an enigma behind Saiman Chow’s work and my eyes immediately feel obliged to try and peel off every layer of meaning in his symbolism.

Karborn’s work requires one to take a real look into the detail, the texture and the composition to see how brilliant the intention and beauty in it is.

Inka & Niklas’ photography is one of subtlety and the endeavour which lies behind it.

Kjell Varvin plays marvellously well with notions of impermanence throughout the endlessly different ways he constructs his temporary installations.

Alex Trochut truly knows what it means to play with type, and shows a fantastic imagination with each individual letter.

Whether black and white are truly colors is a matter of debate, but Elle Muliarchyk captures such richness in her contrast it’s hard to doubt it.

Erin O’Keefe shows beautiful depth in her depiction and interrogation concerning the flatness of photography.

RAW is a typography project by for

The color treatment is like choosing a typeface, it comunicates and transforms the information you’re sending. It’s important considering what attitude and message it’s giving. The bad thing is that you don’t have a catalogue of color treatments that you can go to and choose one, you can only rely on your own technique, and thats why I think it’s so important to never stop trying things, so your “tool box” gets bigger and you have more solutions to choose

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Dalston Anatomy is a series of photography by

“Even if I consider myself a photographer, as someone who writes with light, in my own practice I am much holistic in my approach to the process leading up to the final image. Playing with the combination of illusion and reality, mixing together different mediums such as photography, sculpture painting and collage I build temporary sets made of all kinds of materials to investigate the effect of passing time on the physical capturing its transformation and decay. The central subject of my research is the ephemerality and transience of l

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After this long it’s been a pleasure revisiting portfolio and encountering her new project Rodarte: Fly.

“When a man photographs a women he projects an idea of his perfect woman onto his subject, but that fantasy doesn’t exist, so the work looks lifeless and predictable. They create and recreate an Icon, but all they manage to get is a Mona Lisa sans the smile – and with great tits. But female photographers usually surprise me – there is always something unsettling about the images. A woman knows how fucked up she really is and is not afraid to channel it into her work. A woman’s photograph is her self-portrait. A man’s photograph is Dow Jones of the society’s demands and expectations. It’s a generalization of course, some men photographers whose work I love – like Terry Richardson and Araki – also manage to show what’s INSIDE them rather than just pleasing the mob. And if doesn’t matter is that thing is

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pic of the day:

The Flatness is a photography project by :

“The title of this series of photographs refers to both the material flatness of the photograph itself, as well as the perceptual flattening of the still life space. The images in this series explore the tendency of the camera to flatten pictorial space, and as a result, foster ambiguous spatial readings. The still life arrangements are comprised of painted plywood boards, physical prints of Photoshop gradient patterns, and photographs. There is a fertile tension between the compressed space of the image and the visual clues that allude to the dimensionality of the still life. The camera is the agent of uncertainty that invites seeing as both an intimate and critical exercise.”

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is a conceptual fashion photography project by , in collaboration with :

“Fashion transforms the body. It stretches, clinches or broadens the body and works as a functional shell also as a consciously inserted design tool. The project is based on the analysis about fashion in the context of space and art. The possibilities to form the shape of the body was pushed to their limits. Layer to layer get the body covered and transformed, until he acts only as the plinth of the clothing. The project presents clothing as a heavy, burdensome shell of the body and degrades the body to the base for the artwork fashion. Afterwards, patterns were generated from the photos, which reflect the superficial and decorative function of fashion. Thus, clothing, was into the third dimension (sculpture) and then again in the second dimension (photography, pattern) transformed.”

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Foxbird (Engineered For Mysticism Not Food)

Space Trash (What Remains)

is primarily a fine art photographer but also creates mixed media artworks such as these. These pieces are in large part made of acrylic paint, newspaper, gel medium, permanent marker, and ink aid. They explore contemporary American unsustainability.

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