Erica Galvin

A studio visit with one of America’s foremost political artists on her remarkable journey and breakthrough career-survey in Chicago. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3D8xe6M via IFTTT

The donation from a trustee, Oscar L. Tang, and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, reinvigorates the long-delayed project and is the largest capital gift in the Met’s history. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/31glEtB via IFTTT

Long underrecognized for her innovations, a trailblazer of the Light and Space Movement is suddenly juggling three tribute shows to her six-decade career. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3DcEz5f via IFTTT

Imagine owning Caligula’s coffee table — or, better yet, a coffee table made from the mosaic flooring that once covered the infamously cruel Roman Emperor’s party boats. Art dealer and Manhattanite Helen Fioratti owned such a table for 45 years, but she had no idea what it was until she happened to go to a 2013 book signing by author and Italian stone expert Dario Del Bufalo . There, a friend noticed her table in Del Bufalo’s coffee table book, Porphyry, “about the reddish-purple rock much used by Roman emperors,” notes Gloria Oladipo at The Guardian . Fioratti’s husband bought the piece from an aristocratic Italian family in the 1960s, then affixed it to a base and made into a table. “It was an innocent purchase,” Fioretti told The New York Times in 2017 after Italy’s Nemi museum seized the artifact and returned it to its home country. Del Bufalo agreed, and it pained him to have to take it, but the artifact, he says in an interview above with Anderson Cooper, is...

Danish photographer Søren Solkær (1969) is famous for his atmospheric and cinematic celebrity portraits. But he has recently turned his hand to nature photography – with mesmeric results. His 2020 book Black Sun captured the extraordinary phenomenon of starling murmurations, the mass collective swell and flight of thousands of birds as if they were a single, living organism. It’s a spectacle visible across Europe. Now, the artist has teamed up with famous graffiti muralist Henrik Soten to convert the side-wall of an apartment block in central Copenhagen into a huge mural, expressing love for non-human life. Solkær grew up in rural southern Denmark, where the annual migration of birds became an aesthetic and emotional ritual. The budding artist would record the phenomenon with his camera each year. After more than two decades spent touring the world as a photographer, culminating in a major retrospective, he was drawn back to the marshland of his childhood, near the Wadden Sea. There ...

In its nearly eight-hour runtime Peter Jackson’s new documentary series The Beatles: Get Back offers numerous minor revelations about the world’s favorite band. Among the filmmaker’s avowed aims was to show that, even on the verge of acrimonious dissolution, John, Paul, George, and Ringo enjoyed stretches of productiveness and conviviality. Much else comes out besides, including that the catering at Apple Corps headquarters was miserable (amounting most days to toast and digestive biscuits) and that, even amid the excesses of the late 1960s, the Beatles dressed more or less respectably (apart, that is, from George’s occasionally outlandish choices of outer- and footwear). But it also lays bare exactly how they created a song. The Beatles went into these sessions with little material prepared. All they knew for sure was that they had to come up with a set of songs to be recorded live, without overdubs, in order to “get back” to the simplicity that had characterized their proce...

Now ramping up to a wide release is a film that will draw in no few fans of Haruki Murakami around the world: Drive My Car, adapted by filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi from Murakami’s short story of the same name. That name itself comes, of course, from the Beatles song, their knockout opener to Rubber Soul. It wasn’t the first time Murakami had borrowed a title from the Fab Four. The novel that made him a household name, in his homeland of Japan and subsequently the rest of the world, was called  Norwegian Wood . The Beatles’ albums have also provided him with inspiration, as evidenced by his story “With the Beatles,”  published in translation last year by The New Yorker. It takes place in 1965, when the Beatles had become hugely popular in not just the West but Japan as well. “Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs,” says the narrator. “I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits,” but “truth be told, I was never a fervent Beatles fan. I ...

There is so much happening right now. It feels like everything is moving at a cataclysmic speed. This issue of Aesthetica is dedicated to perseverance, resilience and determination. Through these artworks, we are reminded that in the face of anything, we do have the power to change. In this issue, we interview David Benjamin Sherry, whose large-format images of the American west examine endangered monuments in aftermath of the Trump administration. The images were taken as a form of photographic activism, with saturated colour palettes alerting viewers to a sense of danger. In photography, we are thrilled to present further series from Kate Theo, who places characters in their own surreal worlds. William Mullan and Andrea A. Trabucco-Campos offer highly stylised portraits of apples: the fruit that has long symbolised knowledge and power. Elsewhere in the issue, we examine a new exhibition at The High Museum of Art, Atlanta: Picturing the South. The American South has diverse a...

“I am drawn to the unsettling, and try to inject it into my work where possible, seeking out connections between humour and tragedy. At first glance, these emotions might not seem to go together, but their relationship is complicated and, ultimately, one cannot survive without the other. It is in combining the two that true magic begins.” Harriet Moutsopoulos (aka Lexicon Love) produces digital collages that renegotiate and manipulate the origins of images – provoking, teasing and confusing the viewer. Comedic, yet distinctly satirical, these pieces challenge traditional notions of beauty, whilst tapping into the intimacy, security, and at times, revulsion, that food and eve- ryday objects conjure. Despite broad cultural references, the compositions are based upon subtle visual suggestion. She notes: “I employ a self-imposed ban on using any more than two, and on the rare occasion three, elements.” lexiconlove.com Image Credits: 1. Harriet Moutsopoulos, I Came Here On M...

Apples, as visual iconographies, are deeply embedded into western culture, from the Bible and Magritte to the logos on the backs of our smartphones. Green apples, in particular, have had weighted cultural significance, starting with the Italian Annurca specimen, first mentioned by Pliny, author of the world’s first encyclopaedia, before 79 AD. Today, it is estimated that there are 7,500 varieties of apple, a fact that has captivated photog- rapher William Mullan and designer Andrea A. Trabucco-Campos. The Odd Apples series contains 90 still lifes, representing four years and three seasons of researching, read- ing, finding, tasting and photographing. In these surreal, and sometimes farcical images, Mullan and Trabucco-Campos offer hyper-stylised aesthetics, focusing on the fruit that has symbolised knowledge and power – both literally and metaphorically – for centuries. Odd Apples is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. hatjecantz.de | oddapples.photo Image Credits: 1. Ka...

Colour-blocking has been a huge source of inspiration for artists and designers since the early 20th century, pairing complementary shades and producing strong visual contrasts. Bold palettes can be found everywhere, and they continue to influence culture at large, from Mondrian’s rectangles and Warhol’s silkscreens to Pantone’s colours of the year charts. Kate Theo (b. 1979) is a graphic designer based in Puglia, Italy, whose images are defined by block backgrounds, each frame created around the ethos of “essentials and simplicity.” The characters are placed in surreal worlds, subject to their own laws of gravity. Whilst concentric circles hover like ellipses, butterfly cages, golden frames and curtains shroud figures from our view. In each vignette, the backgrounds draw the eye as they consume and juxtapose against their characters. Theo reflects upon the role that colour plays, both internally and externally, as it is embedded in visual culture. instagram.com/katetheo79 ...