Favorites list: contemporary artists
67
Takashi Murakami (Japan)
Takashi Murakami is often billed as the next Andy Warhol. Like the American pop art icon, he fuses high and low, pulling imagery from consumer culture to produce visually arresting, highly original work. He is vigorously, ingeniously self-promotional.
It may be old hat to draw ideas and imagery from the mass market, but it’s something else to hawk your wares in the candy aisle. In this as in other things, Japan may be leading us into the future. Murakami, who grew up in Tokyo, sees his heritage as key to his art: “The Japanese don’t really have a difference or hierarchy between high and low .” His “art merchandise” is dominated by a cast of creepily cute characters inspired by manga comics and anime cartoons – the twin pillars of Japanese pop culture.
Cartoon characters have figured in high art since Roy Lichtenstein first transferred a Sunday comic to canvas in the early ‘60s. But the art establishment – steeped in old-world prejudices against mass merchandising – took Lichtenstein and Warhol’s art as a critique. Murakami’s work celebrates commerce!.
Murakami explains that his art process is “more about creating goods and selling them than about exhibitions.”!...
"When I consider what Japanese culture is like, the answer is that it all is subculture. Therefore, art is unnecessary"
Murakami curated a recent exhibit in New York City titled “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture.” “Little Boy” is the name given to both the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Murakami’s view of the relationship between Japan and the United States in the years since.
Chiho Aoshima (Japan)
For the past several years Aoshima has worked as an artist and in-house computer technician for Takashi Murakami, the progenitor of Superflat
The doe-eyed ingénues in Chiho Aoshima’s digital drawings seem to emerge from beyond nature itself. It’s as if they were born whole within a garden of unreality populated by themes milled from centuries of Japanese culture, ranging from Edo scrolls to Sailor Moon…
She combines print-outs from a giant canon printer, leathers, and plastic mediums to construct her two-dimensional works, creating a unique style that is neither art nor the product of a defined subculture.
Sandy Skoglund (USA)
Skoglund’s specialty is an unnerving mix of dream and nightmare. She creates bizarre, highly-staged scenarios in which the mundane (the office, the one-room apartment, the bedroom, the backyard) is turned upside-down by the proliferation of a single element (a goldfish, a cat, a leaf, a baby).
She takes months to set up a room size installations. The final step is photographing the installation with people in it. The difference between the installation and the photograph, which is the real end result of her work, is that the photographs contain people.
Skoglund says her work is based on a Frankensteinian model where the human beings have created a world that is out of control and turns on them.
Maurizio Cattelan (Italy)
Pranks!...
Ron Mueck (England)
An Australian hyper-realist sculptor working in Great Britain.
At first, it’s the sheer technical brilliance of the figures that astounds. From the stubble on the chin of the small Man In A Boat to the mole on the neck of the 8ft-tall Pregnant Woman, the attention to detail is awe inspiring. But the real power is in the way Mueck plays with scale. His work is lifelike but not lifesize, brilliantly undermining your perception of the everyday.
Mark Ryden (USA)
Pop-kitsch-surrealism!
Ryden’s work mingles perfect oil painting technique with outre images to create a kitsch world of strange and disturbing beauty.Ryden’s works are amalgams of many sources and influences as wide-ranging as Renaissance masters, psychedelic, cartoons, poster/propaganda art, to classical French formalists Ingres and David.
OK, it’s a little bit “easy” and “dodgy” but I like it.
Marian Bantjes (Canadian llustrator)
Not “officially” contemporary art, but I love it. Typography, vector art; reminds me of Mandalas, Arabic calligraphy and medieval illuminated manuscripts.
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This is a HUBPAGES test; a copy of my backpackit page:
http://ecastro.backpackit.com/pub/535875
... the HUBPAGE capsule system is ~nice, but it's difficult to rearrange capsules + the wysiwyg editing system is nice for newbies but very tedious (lots of mouse moves and clicks) compared to a wiki syntax system!... copying my page was quite difficult!...
Jim says:
3 years ago
Ron Mueck's stuff is super freaky! I'd love to see"Untitled (Boy)" in person.
Is that a woman standing in the background?