Johns, Jasper

Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art.

Jasper Johns’s groundbreaking 1958 installation at the Leo Castelli Gallery of his famous target and flag works changed the current of New York painting and had an extraordinary impact on contemporary art. In the paintings, Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. The targets and flags, in the words of critic Leo Steinberg, were “co-extensive” with their canvases, existing somewhere between a symbol and a thing in the world. Not only did these paintings begin Johns’s successful dismantling of modern art through his ironic analysis of structures and rituals, but they also became the innovative new ground on which a generation of painters and sculptors made their work. Johns’s own career spans from the flags, through the device motif in the early 1960s, into the crosshatch paintings of the 1970s, and to his complex, densely layered recent works.

“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” Johns has said of this work, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” Those materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint—a mixture of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears. The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars lend this icon historical specificity. The American flag is something “the mind already knows,” Johns has said, but its execution complicates the representation and invites close inspection. A critic of the time encapsulated this painting’s ambivalence, asking, “Is this a flag or a painting?”

As Johns explained it, encaustic allowed him to be more efficient and, at the same time, more deliberate in his gestures. In other words, because pigmented wax sets quickly, Johns could add another mark or strip of saturated paper or cloth with the assurance that any previously laid marks would remain unaffected. In this way, each discrete trace was preserved, effectively embalmed.

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Roberts, Verity

Verity paints primarily in encaustic. Originally self-taught in encaustic, over the last decade Verity has attended and participated in numerous workshops, exhibitions and encaustic conferences in the US. Her earlier career was as a film set decorator.

Verity has further adapted the encaustic process, adding media such as wax pencils, digital print transfers and inks. This extraordinarily versatile medium enables the artist to exploit both the opaque and transparent qualities of the wax by layering it – this being a particular feature of the encaustic process. Whether smooth and translucent or thickly textural, the wax forms an emotionally charged surface.

Her inspiration derives from her travels – her travelscapes – recollections both vivid and allusive are built over time. Each painting with its complex layered surface aims to elicit a response: reshaping its own new history.

She spends time in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where she is represented by Calderoni Studio in Fábrica La Aurora. She exhibits in Sydney at Art2Muse Gallery and is collected both in Australia and intenationally.

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Dyck, Aganetha

Aganetha Dyck is a Canadian artist who is interested in environmental issues, specifically the power of the small. She is interested in inter species communication. Her research asks questions about the ramifications all living beings would experience should honeybees disappear from earth.

Dyck is using apiary feeder boards and hive blankets to develop her new body of work.

Aganetha Dyck was born in Marquette, Manitoba in 1937 and was raised in a Mennonite community. She moved with her husband and children to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in 1972, where she began to take courses at local art centres. From 1974 to 1976 she continued to raise her family while attending Prince Albert Community College in Saskatchewan. Moving her family back to Winnipeg in 1976, she worked on her art and later furthered her study of art history at the University of Winnipeg from 1980 to 1982.

Dyck’s early work is described as transforming domestic processes into fine art, thereby validating activities that are traditionally considered feminine. In her early work, Dyck used household materials such as buttons, wool fabrics, and cigarettes. A Winnipeg Art Gallery exhibition of Dyck’s work featured several hundred jars of buttons prepared and cooked using different culinary techniques.

Dyck is best known for her work with live honeybees, who she collaborated with between 1991 to 2010. Dyck placed interesting objects into beehives, or beehives into objects, and allowed the bees to build honeycomb on the objects, sometimes over the course of years. Her interest is in the inter-communication between species and would direct the bees to make their honeycomb marks on the objects by painting with perfumes and pheromones.

Dyck is well known for her transformation of commonplace objects such as shoes, buttons and figurines into things which are simultaneously metaphysical, delicate and sometime humorous. She shows us that the “exotic” can be found in the most mundane and everyday of things, if one examines them with an open mind. In one sense, she doesn’t transform an object as much as she liberates objects from familiar contexts, thus imbuing them with greater meaning. Her work is about ideas and thoughts, yet it always remains accessible and alluring to the viewer.

Dyck won the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council Arts Award of Distinction in 2007.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada and in England, France and the Netherlands. Her work can be found in the collections of such prestigious museums as the National Gallery of Canada, the Glenbow Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Britain.

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Ri, Ren

Ren Ri was born in 1984 in Harbin, China, he studied Fine Art at Tsinghua University and then received his Masters at Saint-Petersburg Herzen State University, Russia. He has a PhD in Fine Art from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Ren Ri has won and been nominated for several international awards and contests in the arts.

Ren Ri’s art is signified by the very special medium he uses: beeswax. Considered an unusual and difficult material to work with Ren Ri’s understanding of bees psychology and nature assist him in his creative process. He works in collaboration with insects to create his mesmerizing sculptures. To manipulate natural processes the artist must find a balance cooperating with nature to accomplish his artistic goals.

The artist’s most famous series – Yuansu I, II and III – are all related to his intimate experiences with bees. Ren Ri started to learn the craft of beekeeping in 2006 and after several years he felt knowledgeable enough to begin using beeswax as his primary medium.

His first series, Yuansu I: The Origin of Geometric Series (2007) incorporates a number of beeswax maps. In his second series he moves from investigating movement to psychology through collaboration between his bees and Ren Ri himself. The artist placed the queen in the middle of the box and let other bees build around her. Every few days he changed the position of the box. Resulting in Yuansu II, a series of stunning geometrical sculptures. Yuansu III is a performance showing the relationships between humans and bees – Ren Ri offers himself as a surface, pushes bees into his face and subsequently gets stung numerous times.

This young artist has been exhibited internationally, exhibitions he has been featured in include: Carve & New Media, 798 Art District, Beijing, China (2007), Fame Di Terra, Milan, Italy, 6th Art Laguna Exhibition, Venice, Italy (both in 2012), Fusion Convergence at T Museum in Hangzhou, China (2014) and Kaiserring Stipendiat 2015: Ren Ri at Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar, Germany in 2015 after he received his Kaiserring Award.

Libertiny, Tomas Gabzdil

TOMÁŠ GABZDIL LIBERTÍNY (1979)

Currently living and working in Rotterdam, through his art, Tomáš Libertíny continually explores the beauty and intelligence of nature as well as probing into the existential questions of the human mind.

Born in Slovakia, son of an architect and a historian, he studied at the Technical University Košice in Slovakia focusing on engineering and design. He was awarded George Soros’s Open Society Institute Scholarship to study at The University of Washington in Seattle, where he focused on painting and sculpture. He continued his study at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava in painting and conceptual design. After receiving the prestigious Huygens Scholarship, he enrolled in the Masters program at the Design Academy Eindhoven where he received his MFA in 2006.

WORK

Libertiny’s fascination with the beauty and intelligence of nature fuels his work with timeless yet relatable emotions. The relationship between Man & Nature, both psychological and physical, serves as a constant source of inspiration.

While embracing today’s advanced methods of design and latest technology to explore and realise his art the works are still marked by the hand of the artist. His use of industrial precision is merely “a means to an end” which enables him to set-up conditions for controlled randomness. His awareness of patterns and repetitions that surround us as well as mesmerising imperfections in nature are at the formal core of his drawings, paintings and sculptural work. Between the lines, he seeks to offer a hint of an answer to the probing existencial questions.

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