Ocula Report 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life 15 Feb 2019 : Natalie King for Ocula 'Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off.' Marlene Dumas' poetic and sensual refrain accompanies her figurative watercolours on view in Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in the southern state of Kerala, India (12 December 2018–29 March 2019).Dumas' new series...
Ocula Conversation Ellen Altfest The paintings of Ellen Altfest are ethereal in their detail. Fields of minutiae come together as pulsating images; small brushstrokes of oil paint accumulate over a series of months to single out seemingly innocuous subjects, such as a hand resting atop patterned fabric (The Hand, 2011) or a deep green cactus reaching upwards from beneath a bed of...
Ocula Report Colomboscope 2019: Cross Currents and Dissonance 8 Feb 2019 : Nada Raza for Ocula On the rooftop of the former Rio Hotel complex in Colombo, it was hard to ignore the high-rise buildings, still under construction, blocking all but a sliver of what used to be an open view over Slave Island, once an island on Beira Lake that housed slaves in the 19th century, and now a downtown suburb. The hotel was set alight during the...
Texan artist Robert Yarber is renowned for his dizzying large-scale paintings of figures flying in the night sky above glittering megacities. His extraordinary hallucinatory style has been credited as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and hes earned him global acclaim. Combining the influence of ancient pre-Columbian cultures and Mexican art with modern-day schlock horror and comic-strip grotesque, Yarber's work, at once disturbing and comedic, trashy and mythical, embodies an eternal contemporaneity.
Robert Yarber has exhibited internationally since the early 1980's, having achieved recoginition through his inclusion in the 1984 Venice Biennale, and the 1985 Whitney Biennial. In 1989 Yarber's work was included in the Horn on Plenty exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He has had exhibitions at Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
Robert YarberThe Collapse of the Now Could not Have Come at a Better Time, 2010 coloured pencil on paper
