Davide Vanacore

During August 2005, a small dim gallery in a Melbourne arts space housed Stelarc’s collaborative installation  Blender . Four pressurized gas tanks surrounded a stainless steel column that held a clear, round, sealed container harboring liquids and solids of various colors. The materials in the container were a mixture of biomaterials, such as subcutaneous fat and peripheral nerves, extracted from the bodies of Stelarc and Nina Sellars, the creators of  Blender . Accompanied by an audio track mimicking a pulse, blades inside the vessel were programmed to blend the mixture every few minutes and then stop again, to let the contents settle.  By removing internal parts of their bodies that are unnecessary for continued existence, Stelarc and Sellars created a spectacle of innards, a visualization and modification of what is normally not thought of or seen.  In the 1970s, Stelarc began his suspension pieces, which were then categorized as endurance art. In thes...

The Cremaster Cycle  is a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books, created by American visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney . The Cremaster Cycle  was made over a period of eight years (1994–2002) and culminated in a major museum exhibition organized by Nancy Spector of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum  in New York City, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig  in Cologne and the Musee d'art   Moderne in Paris from 2002-03. Barney's longtime collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the soundtracks for the films. Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector  has described the  Cremaster  cycle (1994–2002) as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system." The cycle includes the films as well as photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle , the p...

Franz West began making drawings around 1970 before moving on to painted collages incorporating magazine images that showed the influence of Pop Art .  His art practice started as a reaction to the Viennese Actionism  movement has been exhibited in museums and galleries for more than three decades. Over the last 20 years he had a regular presence in big expositions like Documenta  and the Venice Biennale . West's artwork is typically made out of plaster , papier-mache , wire , polyester , aluminium  and other, ordinary materials. He started to produce paintings, but then turned to collages, sculptures, portable sculptures called "Adaptives" or "Fitting Pieces", environments  and furniture – "welded metal chairs and divans, some minimally padded and upholstered in raw linen."  For his early sculptures, West often covered ordinary objects—bottles, machine parts, pieces of furniture and other, unidentifiable things—with gauze and plaster, producing ...

Annihilation  is a 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer . It is the first in a series of three books called the Southern Reach Trilogy . The book describes a team of four women (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor) who set out into an area known as Area X. The area is abandoned and cut off from the rest of civilization.  They are the 12th expedition. The other expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma. The inspiration for Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy was a 14-mile(23 km) hike through   St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge  in northwestern Florida. Many of the animals and vegetation that VanderMeer has seen on this hike over the past 17 years appear in the novel. He has said that someday he hopes to do a "Weird Nature" anthology as well. A team of four women cross the border into an uninhabited area known as Area X. The group consists of a biologist , an anthro...

Hayv Kahraman’s paintings are a refined confluence of cultures, an “otherworld” where different pictorial traditions meet, and every picture tells a story. Intensely personal, her paintings are concerned with understanding the politics of tradition and gender. Born in Baghdad in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), Kahraman spent her formative years in exile. Her journey as a refugee began aged eleven when she, her mother and sister travelled from Iraq on false passports through Ethiopia, Yemen, and Germany, finally settling in the far north of Sweden (where her father joined them a year later). She began to paint at the age of twelve and went on to study art and design in Florence, after which she returned to Sweden to take a degree in web design. Without doubt her aesthetic has been shaped as much by her émigré status in Europe, and now America, as it has by her natural gift for graphics. Bab el Sheikh, 2013 Kahraman’s early works range in their references from Japanese...

Rooted in the history and traditions of painting, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s practice contains ideas of hybridity in both form and content. Formally, her canvases are striking combinations of painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage, comprising acrylic mixed with colored pencil, pastel, charcoal, Xerox transfer, and marble dust. Likewise, her imagery brings together her diverse experiences living in Nigeria and on the east and west coasts of the United States, merging recollections of a range of experiences, both real and imagined. The results are complex, multi-layered canvases that weave together references to personal events, popular culture, and art history. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles, where she finds similarities to her home town of Enugu, Nigeria, in terms of the weather, light, color palette (in particular the hot yellows and warm chartreuse greens), and temporary architectural structures—such as the use of lightweight, translucent scrims to demarcate...

Camille Bombois  (February 3, 1883 – June 6, 1970) was a French naive painter  especially noted for paintings of circus  scenes. Bombois was born in Venarey-les-Laumes  in the Cote-d'Or , under humble circumstances. His childhood was spent living on a barge and attending a local school until the age of twelve, when he became a farm worker. During his free time he drew and competed in wrestling competitions at local fairs. He became a champion local wrestler  before joining a traveling circus as a strongman and wrestler. In 1907, Bombois fulfilled his dream of moving to Paris, where he married and worked as a railway laborer, eventually finding a night job at a newspaper printing plant handling heavy newsprint  rolls. Despite the exhausting nature of his job he painted from dawn to dusk, sleeping little. He showed his paintings in sidewalk exhibitions, but his earliest paintings, revealing the influence of the old masters  in their subdued use of ...

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau  (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910)  was a French post-impressionist   painter in the Naive  or Primitive  manner.  He was also known as  Le Douanier  (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax  collector.   He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time. Ridiculed during his lifetime by critics, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.   Rousseau's work exerted an extensive influence on several generations of avant-garde  artists. Rousseau claimed he had "no teacher other than nature",   although he admitted he had received "some advice" from two established Acadademic painters, Auguste Clement  and Jean-Leon Gerome .  Essentially, he was self-taught and is considered to be a naïve or primitive painter. A Carnival Evni...